S
Sackville-West, Vita (1892-1962)
British
novelist, poet, biographer, and travel writer. The granddaughter of a Spanish
dancer, and daughter of the imperious Lady Victoria Sackville, Vita
Sackville-West was brought up on the family's palatial estate at Knole. In 1913
she married the homosexual diplomat Harold Nicolson. The partners agreed that
the institution of marriage was "unnatural," but with care,
frankness, and deep mutual affection theirs lasted forty-nine years.
In 1918 Sackville-West "rediscovered" Violet Keppel whom she had
known as a child. Both were immediately smitten and embarked on a tempestuous
affair, which Vita presented in fictionalized form in her novel Challenge, published in 1924 in the
United States but not in England. She wrote a franker account for the drawer
(which was not published until it was included in her son's memoir of 1973). In
1919 Violet contracted a marriage - which was not intended to be consummated
- with Denys Trefusis, but she and Vita continued to escape for love trysts at
various locales in Britain. Harold, for his part, was preoccupied with the
peace negotiations at Versailles.
At the end of 1922 Vita met Virginia Woolf, ten years her senior, who enchanted
her. Prompted by caution on both sides, their affair was slow to ripen, but it
proceeded intermittently through much of the 1920s. Woolf wrote Orlando (1928), her novel of
androgyny, as an act of homage to Vita; Sackville-West's Letters to Virginia Woolf was published in 1984.
Although Vita Sackville-West's books achieved considerable popularity in her
day (as did those of Violet Trefusis), it cannot be said that she ranks as a
major writer. Her life showed, however, the varieties of experience open to a
privileged woman in an era in which social controls were gradually lifting.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Victoria Glendenning, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West, New York: Knopf, 1983;
Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, New York: Atheneum, 1973.
Evelyn Gettone
Sade, Donatien Alphonse Francois, comte de, known as Marquis de (1740-1814)
French
writer and thinker. A playboy in his youth, Sade was imprisoned in Vincennes
and in the Bastille for twelve years while a cabal of relatives prevented his
release. Here he did most of his writing. Liberated by the outbreak of the
French Revolution in 1789, he served for a time in Paris as a minor official.
Having fallen afoul of the Napoleonic regime, he spent the last years of his
life in the insane asylum at Charenton.
In the popular mind Sade is simply a scribbler of pornography who lent his
name to the paraphilia known as sadism. Closer study of his writings reveals
not only their elegant style and inventive plotting, but an astute, bitingly
corrosive analysis of society and human motivation, which was forged by his
solitary meditation and reading during his long years of confinement. The
philosophy he evolved stems in large measure from the ancient Epicurean stress
on the maximization of personal pleasure and the minimizing of pain. He adds
the corollary that to the extent that one's own pleasure can be increased by the
pain of others so much the better for the beneficiary. Cruel as they may seem,
such views accord with a recurring trend in human thought to find the ultimate
motor of human action in self-interest. Applied to sexual conduct they link up
with the ancient contrast between the active (enjoying) vs. the passive
(suffering) partner. Denying the existence of God, he sees no barrier to the
pursuit of self-interest as the goal of human life. A century before Friedrich
Nietzsche, Sade anticipated most of his key insights about power and
motivation. He also provided a striking example of the "transvaluation of
values." As Lester Crocker has shown, Sade is the most radical and
disturbing of all the Enlightenment thinkers. Yet because his books were hard
to obtain until the 1960s, awareness of their importance has come late.
It is not generally realized that Sade was personally bisexual. In actual life
- the murderous scenes in his books are not to be taken as records of real experience
- one of his favorite sexual positions was to be penetrated by his valet as he
penetrated a woman. He commended anal intercourse both for contraception and
for (male) pleasure. Not surprisingly, in view of his prison years, he was also
a connoisseur of masturbation.
Sade is sometimes taken to be misogynistic. Yet several of his books feature
strong-willed women who are just as adept as the most ruthless man, if not more
so, in obtaining their way. The didactic dialogue Philosophy in the Bedroom, which is perhaps the best
introduction to his work, has a character (Dolmance) who defends male
homosexuality. His masterpieces are the novels fuhette and Justine, the one showing the manifold
satisfactions of those who follow his precepts of self-interest, the other the
endless sufferings that are the lot of one who obstinately clings to virtue.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, New York: Random House,
1978; Lester G. Crocker, Nature and Culture, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963; Gilbert
Lely, The
Marquis de Sade: A Biography, New York: Grove, 1970; Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Sade vivant: une innocence sauvage,
1740-1777, Paris: Robert Laffont, 1986.
Wayne R. Dynes
Sa'di (ca. 1213-1292)
One of
the most famous Persian poets and writers. Sa'di ("f elicity") was
his poetical name. He was born in Shiraz and attended the University in Bagdad.
Thereafter he studied the mysticism of the Sufis and educated himself by
traveling for years through almost the whole Islamic empire. In or about 1255
he settled in Shiraz where he earned himself a great reputation as a writer.
His most famous works are the Guhstan
(Rose
Garden) and the Bustan
(Orchard),
both consisting of stories and poems which are moralistic, didactic, mystical,
and amusing.
An important theme in the works of Sa'di is the love for beautiful young boys,
which he describes in all its facets, ranging from purely platonic and
spiritual in the mystical love poems to obscene and lustful in what can be
called his "pornographic" works. In his mystical love poems Sa'di
invokes chaste love for boys as a way to transcend the self and ultimately
achieve union with God. Beautiful boys can serve as mediators because they are
considered as witnesses [shahid]
of God's
beauty on earth. In his more worldly poems and stories he is more cynical and
down to earth about the problems and joys of loving boys. Love ended, of
course, when the boy's facial hair besmirched him: "Sa'di admires the
fresh down of youth and not hairs rigid like a packing needle."
In general, Sa'di shared the attitude of his contemporaries toward homosexuality
and consequently showed a strong aversion to passive homosexual behavior of
older boys and men. Typically, he had a low opinion of women and marriage. His
own wife and children are neglected in his writings. As friends and companions
men were important, and for love there were boys. In a poem he says of himself:
"Sa'di's fame has spread everywhere for his love of boys [shahid bazi). In this there is no blame
among us, but rather praise."
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Minoo S. Southgate, "Men, Women and Boys: Love and Sex in the Works of
Sa'di," Iranian Studies, 17 (1984), 413-52.
Maaiten Schild
Sadomasochism (S/M)
This term
is conventionally defined as the giving or receiving of pain for erotic
gratification. However, nonphysical elements, such as verbal abuse and
humiliation, often play a large role. Bondage (restraint) is also common. A
more comprehensive definition situates physical and nonphysical aspects in a
larger framework of dominance and submission that engages the fantasy life of
the participants. S/M differs from mere cruelty in that it is - expressly or
implicitly - consensual: the partners define limits that must not be
transgressed. The activities found in S/M are not radically different from the
"horseplay" that sometimes occurs in ordinary lovemaking: teasing,
biting, pinching, and wrestling. But in the S/M scene there is, superimposed on
these ordinary behaviors, a range of specific S/M activities in a continuum ranging
from harmless play to the most elaborate ritual "torture."
Clinical Theories. The first element of the
compound sadomasochism
derives
from the Marquis D. A. F. de Sade (1740-1814), whose works depict the inflicting of pain for the erotic enjoyment of the
active partner. The term masochism stems from writings of the German Leopold Ritter von
Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), which concentrate on the element of humiliation
experienced by the passive partner, notably the novel Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs), in which
Wanda and Gregor are the active and passive participants in flagellation. From
clinical evidence nineteenth-century psychiatrists - above all Richard von
Kraf ft-Ebing, author of Psychopathia
Sexualis (1886) - created an analysis of sadism and masochism as pathology.
Modern S/M practitioners hold that what they do has very little in common with
the compulsive patterns analyzed by psychiatrists. Instead, they employ their
techniques as symbolic interpersonal play that deals in intensities that
approach the actual pain threshold and may surpass it, but generally avoid
crossing the level of tolerance.
In modem street parlance the two complementary aspects are described as
"top" and "bottom" or "S" and "M." In
keeping with the dichotomy cherished by abnormal psychology, sadism and masochism
are often regarded as diametrically opposed capacities, yet this dichotomy is
belied in practice by the fact that individuals can exchange roles. Many S's
actually began their involvement as M's, for this is often the best way for a
novice to learn.
Homosexual Aspects of S/M. Culturally, the practice
of S/M is a commentary on the dominance - submission pattern inculcated by the
gender roles of advanced industrial society. Hence it is not surprising that
women willing to take the role of dominatrix should be in demand, for reversal
of the "normal" roles of dominance and submission offers not only a
temporary relief from expectations imposed by patriarchal social traditions,
but constitutes a kind of symbolic restitution. In like fashion, gay and
lesbian S/M practices incorporate culturally defined ideas of active and
passive. Here, however, there is a paradox, for S/M adepts will often insist
that the M, who in theory is completely subservient, actually controls the
pace, direction, and intensity of the experience by communicating his or her
needs and limits. In such a dynamic, the S is often "on trial" to
demonstrate true competence and sensitivity. From this crisscross effect many
participants derive stimulation and, they believe, insights into human
relationships in general.
In most gay and lesbian S/M circles today, the wearing of leather garments,
together with chains and other accoutrements, is common. Such apparel is often
the focus of fetishistic attachments. It also emphasizes the element of
theatre and performance, so that the S&M scene - and more broadly one's
presentation of self as a "leather person" in social contexts -
becomes a matter of enactment.
Entering the S/M subculture is not a matter of a simple one-time conversion.
Some individuals flirt with the idea for years before taking the plunge. Once
the novice has decided to enter the subculture, he may progress through
several stages of increasing depth of involvement as experience grows and
inhibitions about particular acts wane. This stagelike progression has led
sociologists to speak of S/ M "careers" - the individual trajectories
of those who sustain their commitment. Some observers have noted increasing
"tolerance levels" on the part of adepts who find that previous
levels of involvement no longer deliver the intensity they once did, requiring
progression to deeper levels.
In addition to flagellation, bondage, verbal abuse, role playing, genitorture, use of hot wax, and
abrasion, S/M scenes may include "watersports," urinating on the M
or causing him to swallow urine. Depending on the relationship, this may be
regarded either as a gift, a humiliation, or a degradation. Much less common
is the similar use of faeces ("scat"). Handballing or fisting, in
which the hand or even the lower arm is inserted in the anal passage, formerly
enjoyed some popularity, but with the spread of safer sex techniques it has
become less common. Handballing is not necessarily an S/M activity any more
than fellatio or masturbation; it depends entirely on the attitudes and
intentions of those engaging in it. Although S/M practices have the reputation
of being "far out," many of them are less risky in terms of disease
transmission than the penetrative practices that are the central feature of the
mainstream male gay world. In S/M scenes, sexual toys of various kinds - whips,
straps, handcuffs, tit clamps, etc. - are freely used. Those who are seriously
involved may have their nipples or genitals pierced and adorned with small
rings; although quite popular, this practice is not universal. In ordinary
S&.M practice, however, there is almost invariably an avoidance of any
activity that would lead to permanent marking or bodily harm.
As with any other subculture, S/ M people tend to socialize with others who share their
tastes. Most big cities in North America and northern Europe have at least one
"leather bar," usually for gay men only. Prominent among the icons
displayed in such establishments are trophies and photographs relating to
motorcycle clubs, to which many serious S/M enthusiasts belong. There are also
artists who have created imagery that is clearly S/ M in its appeal; among the
best known of these are Cavello, Etienne, Rex, Sean, and Tom of Finland (though some of the latter's
work is not relevant).
Sociological studies have shown that in North America most S/M participants
are of northern European ancestry, rather than from Mediterranean or African
stock. Contrary to the stereotype that associates them with conservative or
even quasi-Nazi views, surveys in the United States have shown that a majority
are politically liberal. On the whole, they are well educated and hold upscale
professional jobs. Few S/M people share the obsessive preoccupation with youth
that is found in other sectors of the gay world; with a very few exceptions,
boy lovers are not found among them. In fact, older individuals are notably
visible at S/M gatherings, which are relatively free of ageism. The premium
placed on technical expertise seems to cancel out ageism with its attendant
privileging of youth.
While some S/M practitioners seek new partners constantly, others may wish to
form a more-or-less permanent relationship. In this case the M becomes the
"slave" of his S, who will symbolize the ownership in various ways,
such as the shaving of body hair, or the slave's wearing of a prominent dog
collar, or being required to perform various services for the master and the
master's friends. The appeal of the slave relationship is ostensibly the
freedom from the crushing burden of responsibilities and decisions that modem
urban life imposes. In some instances, however, the slave role is much less
demanding and may even be carried out in an almost humorous fashion. There is a
large range of activity between these two extremes of total slave-master bonding
and playfulness, whereby the two participants limit the enactment to specific
occasions, in the bedroom or elsewhere, when they perform their tasks with the
utmost seriousness.
Seemingly objective presentations of the nature of S/M almost invariably
slight the less tangible elements that are of supreme importance to those who
are seriously committed. In the view of some who are experienced in the scene
the real appeal of S/M is that it promotes a state of consciousness that
transcends ego. Such "egoless" states are inherently blissful.
Moreover, participants have the sense that they are involved in a form of magic
or alchemy. In a state of perfect trust, their "vibrations" become
perfectly attuned to one another, and blows that would normally be unwelcome
are transmuted into a choreography of pleasure.
Literary Manifestations. The pioneering novels of
the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch have been noted above.
William Carney's The
Real Thing (New York: Putnam, 1968) presents a historically accurate
picture of the now-vanished scene in the United States in the late 1950s and
1960s. It is cast in the form of a series of letters from an experienced S to
his nephew, a novice whom he is instructing in the traditions of the subculture
he wishes to enter. Although Carney's view of S/M is ultimately negative, it
offers theorizing that is still of interest. Terry Andrews' The Story of Harold (New York: Holt Rinehart
and Winston, 1974), of unusual literary quality, is revealing because S/M is
integrated with other themes. The novels of "A. N. Roquelaire" (a
pseudonym of Anne Rice) are ostensibly heterosexual, but include considerable
relevant psychological speculation. Story collections by Phil Andros {Stud, Boston: Alyson, 1982;
repr. of 1966 issue; and Below
the Belt, San Francisco: Perineum) and Jack Fritscher [Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain
O'Malley, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1984; and Stand by Your Man, San Francisco: Ley land
Publications, 1984) offer material of varied interest.
Parallels. Analogies for the physical
side of the S/M relationship have been found in some tribal societies, where
warriors must undergo trials of pain before being admitted to the military
elite. (Fraternity hazings are a faded modern version of these customs.) In
ancient Thessaly the all-women rites of Aphrodite Anosia included erotic
flagellation. The Romans delighted in gladiatorial shows and in watching
condemned criminals devoured by lions in the arena. Yet these were not
voluntary submissions to pain, and they seem - despite assertions to the
contrary - to have no direct connection with eros.
The beautiful frescoes of the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, which have
never been completely interpreted, show women's flagellation in the context of
a religious and erotic initiation. Paintings of the martyrdom of the Christian
saints - Catherine tormented by her wheel, Agatha suffering the assault on her
breasts - are more explicit in their depiction of pain. In one instance, that
of the handsome St. Sebastian pierced by arrows, a Christian image has acquired
(since at least the end of the nineteenth century) a secondary status as the focus of contemplation by gay men. Of course it was
not the aim of Christian hagiography and art to stimulate S/M thoughts. It may
be, however, that these legends of fortitude under suffering were one of the
elements that helped, however unintentionally, to prepare for the modern S/M
sensibility.
The adage "spare the rod and spoil the child" attests to the use of
flogging by parents and schoolmasters. In the English public school this practice became a
veritable cult, with masters and pupils alike developing erotic feelings in
conducting it. Through this imprinting some members of the upper classes
developed a lifelong flagellomania,- hence the expression "English
vice" for erotically stimulating caning.
There may even be phylogenetic sources for the connection between corporal
pain and sexual performance, as with cats where the male cat bites the neck of
the female during intercourse. Some students of the question hold that the
human experience of erotic release of pain is governed by a distinctive physiological
process, characterized by the release of certain endorphins; this physiological
dynamic is, however, still imperfectly understood.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Ian A. Gibson, The English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England
and After, London: Duckworth, 1978; Michael Grumley and Ed Gallucci, Hard Corps: Studies in
Leather a) Sadomasochism, New York: Dutton, 1977; John A. Lee, "The Social
Organization of Sexual Risk," Alternative Lifestyles, 2 (1979), 69-100; Geoff
Mains, Urban Originals: A Celebration of Leather Sexuahty, San Francisco: Gay
Sunshine Press, 1984; Michael Rosen, Sexual Magic: The S/M Photographs, San Francisco: Shaynew
Press, 1986; Samois Collective, Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, 3d ed., Boston: Alyson,
1987; Andreas Spengler, Sadomasochisten und ihre Subculturen, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verfag, 1979; Larry Townsend, The
Leatherman's
Handbook 11, New York:
Modernismo
Publications,
1983; Thomas Weinberg and G. W. Levi Kamel, eds., S and M: Studies in Sadomasochism,
Buffalo:
Prometheus Books, 1983.
Wayne R. Dynes
Safe Sex
Safe sex
refers to activities with no risk, or very small risk, of undesirable
consequences. Safe sex need not be conservative or monogamous sex, and it certainly
does not mean less sex. Sex can indeed be "safe," not just
"safer."
Disease. Partners who are free of sexually transmitted diseases can engage in any sexual
activities they wish. Since there are diseases which can be transmitted
sexually although the carrier is symptom-free and is even unaware he or she
has been exposed - hepatitis and AIDS are by far the most serious - such a
disease-free state can be known only through medical examination. In the case
of ADDS, since it takes months before tests can detect antibodies to the HTV
virus, testing indicates the subject's infectious state as of several months
previously. For a result valid at the time of the test, the test must follow a
period of no potential exposure. As a practical matter, activities which can
transmit disease can only be safe within a relationship monogamous so far as
those activities are concerned.
There are, however, many ways of having enjoyable sex, even kinky and
adventurous sex, with little if any risk of disease and without need for
examinations and tests. Masturbation
in pairs
and groups is totally without risk. Among consenting partners, dirty talk,
exhibitionism, and photography are safe. No one has gotten a disease from an
odor, from fantasy,
role-playing,
erotic clothing,
or
bondage. One can safely be promiscuous with such activities, if desired, and
those who are HIV-positive can fully participate.
Kissing and licking of unbroken skin cannot transmit AIDS. Intercourse with a
barrier, such as a strong condom (extra-strength condoms are available and
recommended for anal
sex), is
safe as long as the barrier remains unbroken. Ample use of a water-based
lubricant reduces the risk of breakage.
The activities which can transmit disease are those in which one receives
orally, anally, vaginally, or through broken skin a substance from inside
someone else's body: semen, seminal fluid (pre-cum), vaginal secretions, blood,
urine, feces. Sexual toys can harbor microorganisms, and if they cannot be
cleaned thoroughly or covered with a condom they should not be shared. A finger
or penis can transfer disease organisms from one orifice to another, or one
partner to another; washing before changing to a different orifice or partner
is sensible. If fingers are inserted into the anus, a rubber glove is recommended;
it also prevents dangerous internal scratches from fingernails. While the HTV
virus is absorbed through the colon or breaks in the skin, and there are few
known cases of its transmission via oral-genital sex, the hepatitis viruses,
gonococcus, and other microorganisms are hardier and are readily transmitted
orally. A condom or (for women) a dental dam makes oral sex safe.
Injury. Sexual play, like other
recreations, has various additional hazards; pornography tends to ignore
these. The colon is easily injured, and such injuries require immediate
medical attention. Sharp or breakable objects should never be inserted into
the anus, and any anal play should be slow and careful, with lots of lubricant.
While restraint (bondage) can be very erotic, for safety it should be limited
to partners one knows and trusts. Ropes can injure the skin or nerves, and
specialty stores sell safer hardware, such as padded cuffs. Abnormal weight
distribution, as in suspension, can cause injury. Restriction of breathing is
potentially fatal, and gagging or any other type of restraint requires constant
monitoring and provision for immediate release in an emergency.
Planning, negotiation, and communication are essential components of safe
erotic play. An agreed-upon "safe word" can be used to signal the
need to lessen or stop activity which is undesirable. The use of alcohol or
other drags increases risk.
Eroticism and Danger. For many people a touch of
danger enhances a sexual encounter, and there are those for whom sex without
danger is uninteresting. One may rationally decide that the enjoyment an
activity offers makes its possible negative consequences acceptable. Some behaviors
have such a high risk, however, that they must be considered self-destructive,
and may indicate the need for psychotherapy; these include unsafe sex with
partners not checked for disease, public or semi-public sex without concern for
possible legal consequences, and exposing oneself to assault from unstable
partners (e.g., rough trade). It is possible, though, to incorporate limited
and controlled danger in sexual activities. The presence of a caring and
vigilant third party reduces risks. Some semi-public sex involves only minimal
risk, and for willing partners to enact fantasies of danger - a pretended
assault and rape, for example - can be very enjoyable.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Pat Califia, ed., The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual, Denver: Lace, 1988;
Richard Locke, In the Heat of Passion: How to Have Hotter, Safer Sex, San Francisco: Leyland,
1987.
Daniel Eisenberg
Saikaku, Ihara (1642-1693)
Japanese
novelist. The novels and short stories of Ihara Saikaku rank among the
masterpieces of the literature of Japan. His work is a product of the urban townsman
class that developed in the cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo (modern Tokyo) in
the early decades of the Tokugawa period ¡1603-1868). Saikaku was known formost
of his life as a poet of comic linked verse, but in the last decade of his life
he turned to writing prose fiction. One of his favorite topics was male
homosexual love, which in his day always took the form of a relationship
between an adult man and a teenage boy. In The Great Mirror of Male Love (1687), his longest
collection of short stories, Saikaku divided his discussion of boy love into
two parts: the non-professional love exemplified in relations between samurai men and boys; and the love
of professional actor/prostitutes in the kabuki theatre. He establishes a
romantic ideal for boy love in his own townsman class based on the loyalty and
self-sacrifice of samurai man-boy relations. Saikaku takes a deliberately
misogynistic stance in the book in order to dramatize the single-minded
dedication demanded of male lovers, but the stance is full of irony and may
have had humorous appeal for his readers.
In addition to The
Great Mirror of Male Love, Saikaku treated the topic of male love in the story of
"Gengobei, The Mountain of Love," the last of five stories in Five Women Who Loved Love (1685). The heroine of the
story, Oman, manages to seduce Gengobei, a confirmed lover of boys, by dressing
as a handsome youth. By the time Gengobei realizes the error, it is too late,
for he has fallen madly in love. The humor of the discovery scene must have
appealed greatly to Saikaku's readers. In The Man Who Loved Love (1682), the hero,
Yonosuke, is a man of insatiable sexual appetites, meant obviously to be
understood as a plebeian version of the courtly lover Prince Genji in the Tale of Genji. At the end of Yonosuke's
life of love, he numbers over 3,000 women and almost 900 men and boys among his
lovers. One story tells how Yonosuke as a young boy surprised and confused a
samurai by aggressively attempting to seduce him, a reversal of the
normal" pattern. The story implies that Yonosuke was ultimately
successful.
Saikaku dealt with female homosexuality only once in his writing, and only
briefly, in a scene in Life
of an Amorous Woman. The book is a parody of Buddhist confessional literature
from the fourteenth century, and records the tale of the heroine's progress
through respectable married life, high-class courtesanship, low-class harlotry,
further degradation, and ultimately spiritual enlightenment. At one point in
her checkered career, she took work as a housemaid. The mistress of the house
was impressed with her beauty and summoned her to her bed. The heroine is
shocked to discover that the woman wants to make love to her, but cannot
protest. After a night of love-making, the scene concludes with the woman's
comment, "When I am rebom in the next world, I will be a man. Then I shall
be free to do what really gives me pleasure!"
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Robert Lyons Danly, In the Shade of Spring Leaves, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1981; Howard Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction, London: Oxford University
Press, 1959.
Paul Gordon Schalow
Sailors
See Seafaring.
Saint-Pavin, Denis Sanguin de (1595-1670)
French
poet and libertine writer. The son of a counselor in the Parlement, he studied with the
Jesuits and thought of becoming a priest, but soon renounced this career and
lived without a profession as writer, poet, and freethinker. In his lifetime he
enjoyed the title of "The King of Sodom" and made no bones about his
sexual interests in his poetry. Unlike such contemporaries as Théophile de Viau, he was more a
sensualist than a philosopher - and therefore less of a threat to the Church
and its orthodoxy. Too indecent for the press, his poems circulated only in
manuscript, and it was not until 1911 that a French scholar named Frédéric Lachèvre ventured to publish some
of the least offensive,- others still await their editor. Lachèvre had the naïveté to deny Saint-Pavin's
homosexuality, claiming that it was a literary pose, a mere imitation of
Martial, an expression of displeasure at the frivolity of the opposite sex
which he inwardly loved, or simply a wish to scandalize the conventionally
minded. The poet seems in fact to have preferred the active role in anal
intercourse, and - when he had sexual relations with women at all - to have
practiced this only, so that he indignantly rejected the imputation that he
had fathered the child of a woman of whom he had carnal knowledge. His interest
in women was Umited to those whose androgyny awakened the genuine attraction
which he felt for the male sex.
His poems express a fondness for pages and their costumes, and in particular
for a youth who is named "Tiréis" - who later entered a monastery, inspiring the poet to
allude to the pederastic practices of the monks by claiming that "in the
same place he can find both his salvation and his pleasures!" Saint-Pavin
evidently had contact with contemporary lesbian circles, as he wrote verses
likening women's fondness for their own sex to his male-male attachments. In
his imitations of Martial he defended homosexual love against the accusation of
being "unnatural. " Intimate with the homosexual cliques of his day,
he revealed his inner thoughts in verses addressed to their members with a
frankness that anticipated no censure or incomprehension. With the great Conde he was on such familiar
ground that he could send him a poem declaring that "Caesar was as a great
a bougie as you, but not so great a
general." He was in modern terms a self-proclaimed homosexual who made no
secret of his identity, even in an age when death at the stake was not a wholly
remote possibility for one of that persuasion. The publication of his complete
corpus will shed much light on the homosexual subculture of France in the
mid-seventeenth century and on the antecedents of the Enlightenment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Maurice Lever, Les büchers de Sodome, Paris: Fayard, 1985; Numa Praetorius (pseudonym of Eugen
Wilhelm), "Ein homosexueller Dichter des 17. Jahrhunderts: Saint-Pavin, der
'König von Sodom,'" Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, 5 (1918) 261-71.
Waiien Johansson
Samurai
The
samurai class developed in Japan from what were originally soldiers who served
courtiers and great aristocratic families in defending and managing their
country estates, which in some cases were far from the capital in Kyoto, during
the Heian period (794-1185). By the end of the Heian period, the soldiers had
in many cases usurped their employer's landholdings and carved out large
territories where they ruled by the sword. During military campaigns, soldiers
were accompanied by boy attendants who saw that their physical needs were met.
From this probably followed the tradition of man-boy bonding that seems to
have been a feature of samurai Ufe almost form its inception.
The Ashikaga shoguns, who ruled Japan's heartland from the fourteenth to
sixteenth centuries, seem to have brought the homosexual ethos of the samurai
to the seat power in Kyoto from which they ruled, for there was a marked
"homosexualization" of court culture during this period, particularly
in the aesthetics of the Noh theatre. When Francis Xavier and the Jesuits came to
Japan in the sixteenth century to proselytize, they were horrified by the
openness with which homosexuality was practiced among the ruling samurai
class and condemned it furiously, apparently with Uttle effect.
Homosexual love was a major component of samurai sexuality right up until the
samurai class was abolished in the early years of the Meiji period (1868-1912),
after which it was deliberately suppressed by the Meiji government as part of
its effort to modernize Japan. The novelist Mishima (1925-1970) sought to
revive samurai traditions in order to revitalize Japan spiritually, and
respect for the homosexual bond was apparently part of the revitalization he
envisioned.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Caryl Ann Callahan, trans., Tales of Samurai Honor, Tokyo: Monumenta
Nipponica, 1981; Edward Carpenter, "The Samurai of Japan and their
Ideal," in Intermediate Types Among Primitive Polk, reprint, New York: Amo Press, 1975, pp. 137-60;
E. Powys Mathers, trans., Comrade Loves of the Samurai, Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1972.
Paul Gordon Schalow
San Francisco
It may
seem surprising that for the first hundred years after its incorporation in
1850 as a city of the new State of California, San Francisco (population ca.
700,000) was not particularly noted as a homosexual center. Certainly, as in
the case of other cosmopolitan port cities such as Boston and New Orleans, gayness
was not absent. With the rise of the modern homosexual rights movement in the
1960s, however, San Francisco assumed a paramount status, highlighting the
triumphs as well as the setbacks of homosexual affirmation in the United States
Early History. San Francisco began as a
Spanish settlement in 1776 as Yerba Buena, passed into Mexican hands in 1821, and was conquered by the
United States and renamed in 1846. The Gold Rush days of 1848-49 brought
prosperity to the city - and a typically Western disproportion of numbers of
men and women. The red-light district was the Barbary Coast, but thus far
little information has come to light on specifically homosexual activities
there (the catastrophic 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed many records from
earlier days). The more genteel atmosphere of the century's later decades, with
the presence of gay people in the arts, is subtly evoked in Charles Warren
Stoddard's novel For
the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City (1903).
After the turn of the century, travelers reported the availability of servicemen
for sexual purposes (the Presidio was a major army center). Harry Hay, who
later was to start the American homosexual movement, enrolled in Stanford
University in 1930. He recalls being helped to come out by his visits to
friendly speakeasies in the city. Joe Finocchio's establishment featured drag
entertainment; after the repeal of prohibition it moved to new quarters at 506
Broadway, becoming the city's premiere nightspot and gathering place for
homosexuals. Such female entertainers as Rae Bourbon, Walter Hart, and
Lucian Phelps played an important role as focal points of the gay identity at
that time. Finocchio's location in the North Beach area, a Bohemian redoubt,
was also important, and the neighborhood later became noted for its beat
population.
World War II and After. During the war San
Francisco was the chief port of embarkation for the Pacific Theatre of War.
While awaiting their orders or returning from battle many American servicemen
and -women from less sophisticated regions had their first taste of some sexual
freedom. After being mustered out, a certain number of gay men and lesbians decided
to settle in the Bay City, where they often became involved in a coupled situation,
rather than return to their home towns.
Understandably, then, shortly after the American homosexual rights movement
began in Los Angeles it spread to San Francisco. In January 1955, the Mattachine Review began to appear, patiently
watched over by Hal Call, the guiding spirit of the San Francisco chapter of
the Mattachine Society. At the end of the year, eight Bay Area women formed the
Daughters of Bilitis, which became the national organization with its own
monthly, The
Ladder. Two of the founders, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, remained
significant figures in San Francisco into the eighties.
Gay-baiting charges lodged by an unscrupulous candidate in the 1959 mayoral
election introduced a phase of unprecedented public discussion of homosexuality.
Public talk about a hitherto taboo subject, including revelation of police
payoffs, in turn engendered a backlash in which the police arrested large
numbers of gay men and lesbians in sweeps in the bars. Gay organizations,
including the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) and the Tavern Guild, found
an unexpected source of support in sympathetic members of the clergy, who
formed the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in 1964. The gay leaders and
church people combined to monitor and eventually stem the homophobic backlash.
Maturity. Although San Francisco's
gay community was well advanced in many respects by the late sixties, New
York's Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, coming in the wake of the Civil Rights
movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, represented a national watershed
which can also be used to divide historical periods in San Francisco. Attention
in the mainstream media was reinforced by the brash input of new
"underground" Counterculture publications such as the Berkeley Barb, as well by a series of
newspapers written by and for homosexuals. In the late 1970s San Francisco
alone boasted four gay newspapers. Under the direction of Winston Leyland the
journal Gay
Sunshine turned into a major gay press, issuing books of all kinds.
In the scholarly realm Professor John De Ceceo established a center for the study of sexuality at San
Francisco State University, where he edited a research tool of great prestige,
the Journal of
Homosexuality.
Three
neighborhoods emerged as gay zones. Polk Street gulch was the oldest and most
traditional of these. Eventually it was surpassed by the Castro, with its
stereotypical clone type. Finally, Folsom Street became the center for those
committed to, or dabbling in, the leather and S/M subculture. Backrooms and glory
hole establishments for impersonal sex proliferated, and the income generated
by tourists soared. Yet old-line politicians continued to deplore San
Francisco's reputation as "Sodom by the Bay."
For their part gay men and lesbians had not neglected politics, but this realm
was galvanized and transformed by the energies of an outsider from New York,
Harvey Milk (1930-1978), who owned a shop on Castro Street. Tó the dismay of the city's
established gay leaders, Milk forged an improbable but solid alliance with the
city's blue-collar unions. His methods were often amateurish, sometimes even
unethical, but they worked, and he was elected Supervisor on his third try in
1977.
Triumph turned to tragedy when Milk was murdered a year later, together with
Mayor George Moscone, by a resentful former colleague and police officer, Dan
White. When a jury acquitted White of the most serious charges after an inept
prosecution, widespread riots erupted in the vicinity of City Hall, and some
gay activists were seen setting fire to police cars. Milk was replaced by Harry
Britt, another gay officeholder, and the lesson dawned on the city's straight
establishment that gay power had come to stay.
After 1981 the AIDS crisis hit San Francisco particularly hard, but new organizations
and coalitions arose to cope with the medical emergency. A prolonged
controversy led to the closing of San Francisco's gay bathhouses. Even without
these events, some dimming of the exuberance and sheer craziness of the 1970s
was probably inevitable. Despite bickering, however, San Francisco's gay infrastructure
held firm and seemed destined to remain a major part of the city's life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John D'Emilio, "Gay Politics, Gay Community: San Francisco's
Experience," Socialist Review, 55 (1981), 77-104.
Ward Houser
Santayana, George (1863-1952)
American
poet and philosopher. Born in Madrid, he came to the United States at the age
of nine. He graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude in the class of 1886. From
1889 he taught philosophy at Harvard, and in 1907 was appointed professor
there. In 1912 he retired and spent the remainder of his life abroad, mainly
in France and Italy.
Having had to leam English at the age of nine, Santayana had a firm command of
the literary language, but not the spontaneity in diction that marks the true
poet in his mother tongue. His verse diction was a pastiche of Shakespeare,
Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, together with Victorian translations of the
classics. The poetic outcome was sentimental, insincere, and abstract. As a
philosopher Santayana was unoriginal in logic, taking his ideas from Plato and
Leibniz. He rebelled against the tradition of American philosophy with its
Calvinist background, which made the philosopher the moral guide of the
community, a clergyman without a church. Santayana created no school of
philosophy, though he was appreciated by his pupils at Harvard; he was an
excellent lecturer, his voice even and melodious, his diction perfect, his
whole manner aristocratic.
The content of his philosophy was that reality has different levels that cannot
be forced into a comprehensive, universally valid scheme. For the purpose of
giving his thought a realistic basis, he located that particular form of
reality at the material level, but claimed that vital, spiritual, and ideal
entities have qualitative traits of their own and cannot be reduced to
material elements. The material realm of facts is wholly independent of the
ideal realm of essences, as well as of their specific modes of apprehension.
Beauty is a pure essence, whose contemplation cancels out the struggle for
existence and forms the noblest and happiest human experience. Human reason is
unable to penetrate intuitively into the regions of exister e beyond the
senses, but from this skeptical position Santayana developed a pragmatic
attitude which he judged one of "common sense," one that accepts the
possibilities and limits that its material origin imposes upon the human mind.
Human institutions are tokens of the progress of the human spirit that is
realized thanks to the growth of consciousness, from the primitive forms of
human experience to its highest stages, a growth that is based in human nature
itself.
In a genteel society where all sexuality was suspect, Santayana frankly
preferred homosexuality to heterosexuality. He referred scornfully to the
outcome of heterosexuality as "breeding," while studiously
maintaining a facade of coldness and detachment that hid his true feelings
from a scornful world. His first love was a Harvard undergraduate named Ward
Thoron, seventeen, and three years younger than himself. All his love poems,
beginning with a sonnet to Thoron, betray an origin in genuine homosexual
emotion usually veiled in Christian imagery and allusion, or by the convenient
fiction that the love object belonged to the opposite sex. He later admitted
that he must have been homosexual in his Harvard days, like A. E. Housman,
although he was "unconscious of it at the time." This may simply
mean that the new concept of homosexuality, which reached the general public
only after 1886, did not become part of his self-definition until later.
Certainly no one of his urbanity and familiarity with the Greek and Roman
classics could have been ignorant of the pederastic moods of the ancient world.
Writing of this at the age of twenty-four, he asserted that paiderasteia
"has been often preferred by impartial judges, like the ancients and
orientals, yet our prejudices against are so strong that it hardly comes under
the possibilities for us." Later he could speak of the profound
irrationality of love in terms that reflect his homosexual experience.
Outsiders like Charles W. Eliot, the President of Harvard, suspected the
abnormality of Santayana's character, though they veiled their criticisms in
disapproval of his "unworldliness." His gradual withdrawal and then
departure from a still puritanic America was an immersion in a warm humanity
and Old World wisdom that American culture and simple prudence both forbade.
His novel The
Last Puritan (1935) has a character who is washed out of midshipmen's
training school in the Royal Navy for being implicated in a homosexual scandal
aboard ship. Today Santayana's reputation has considerably faded, yet he
retains interest as a homosexual academic philosopher who after inner struggle
against the intolerance of the American society in which he lived, then sought
a more congenial atmosphere in the urbanity of the Old World.
BIBLIOGRAPHY^
John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography, New York: Paragon House,
1988.
Warren Johansson
Sappho (ca. 612-ca. 560 b.c.)
Classical
Greek poet. Celebrated in antiquity as the "tenth Muse," Psappha, as
she styled herself in the Aeolic dialect, was born at Eresus on the island of
Lesbos, or according to others, in Mytilene. The daughter of Scamandronymus,
she had three brothers, one of whom, Larichus, was appointed cupbearer in the
prytaneum of Mytilene because of his remarkable beauty. Political struggles on
Lesbos forced Sappho into exile in Sicily, but in time she returned to her
homeland and there became mistress of a school for daughters of the aristocracy
that achieved such fame as to attract pupils from distant parts of the Hellenic
world of the early sixth century b.c.
To
understand Sappho's life and creative personality is especially difficult for
the modern reader because of the enormous cultural distance that separates the
milieu in which she loved and immortalized her love in poetry from that of the
lesbian of today. In antiquity, and perhaps in all of historic time, she ranks
as the outstanding singer of woman's love for her own sex, but this was
expressed as an age-asymmetrical relationship that exactly paralleled the paidon eros, the love of a man for an
adolescent boy. It was not an unconventional, bohemian passion, but was
inspired by the eros
paidagogikos, the attachment of the teacher for the protege. And so far
from being reproved by religion, the affection was consecrated to Aphrodite,
the goddess of love.
Sappho's poetry, edited by the Alexandrian scholars in nine books, has survived
only in fragments, some preserved in quotations in later authors, some recovered
on papyri buried for two thousand years in the Egyptian sands. It is an intensely
personal lyric poetry, saturated with the unutterable happiness of love and
also the unbearable pain of rejection. Of all her girls the dearest was Atthis,
and even from the imperfect remains of her poetry the love of the woman for the
girl emerges with crystal splendor. Out of the anguish of her heart the poet
invokes Aphrodite to float down from heaven and relieve her sorrow. Sappho was
drawn to her pupils when they were barely emerging from girlhood, when the hour
of their betrothal and marriage was still far distant. When they had outgrown
this stage in their lives and were on the threshold of womanhood, Sappho
composed epithalamia. Assembled in the ninth and last book of her poems, they
symbolize her acquiescence in their passage to a new life as mistresses of aristocratic
households. A whole set of poems is devoted to the theme of her resignation to
the loss of her beloved pupil, her eromene.
Lesbian
love played the same role in Sappho's circle as did Dorian paiderasteia in Sparta. It was the
younger partner's first experience with love, and a step in her initiation to
womanhood through intimacy with an older member of her own sex, but also a
stage that she would leave behind when she passed on to her adult role as wife
and mother. The circle of girls with their headmistress and lover formed a ihiasos, a cultic union that
recited the myths which had already received concrete form in the Homeric poems
and performed rites in
honor of their divine patroness. The mythical is the collective, the shared element
of Sappho's poetry and the counterpoise to her individual outpourings of
emotion.
Even if Sappho's poetry comes at a comparatively early stage of Greek literary
history, it stems ultimately from a long tradition in the Aegean and Near
Eastern worlds. The artistic perfection of her writing was made possible by
thousands of years of poetic composition in Akkadian, Egyptian, and other
languages in which men had sung the beauty of women. In the annals of
civilization Sappho stands almost midway between the absolute beginning and
the modern era, and the legacy of the past brought her craft to its peak of
greatness.
Posterity has dealt ambiguously with Sappho's life and work. Leaving aside the
dishonesty and hypocrisy of later critics under the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
comic authors of antiquity,
who in a manner incomprehensible to moderns equated the woman attracted to her
own sex with one who takes the aggressive role in relations with men, had
Sappho marry Cercylas (from cercos,
"penis") of Andros
("the city of men"), and invented the story that she committed
suicide when rejected by Phaon, the man whose love she craved, by leaping into
the sea, a literal interpretation of the metaphor "to spring from the
Leucadian rock into the sea, " meaning to purify the soul of passions.
Generations of classical scholars abused these bits of ancient wit to construct
the preposterous image of a heterosexual Sappho whose unconventional love was
a legend fabricated by slander or even by misogyny, and their falsehoods continue
to be parroted in standard reference works.
For the more discerning, Sappho's poetry has been a perennial inspiration to
literary creation. The Latin poets, who could read the entire corpus of her
work, often imitated it. The frankly homoerotic component of her poems
ultimately, in the nineteenth century, made "lesbian" the designation
for a woman enamored of her own sex, and Magnus Hirschfeld appropriately
entitled his first pamphlet (1896) on the homosexual question Sappho and Socrates.
The significance of Sappho's
legacy for the modern lesbian movement is another issue. To identify the
Lesbian writer's korophilic affection for her schoolgirls with the love of two
adult women for each other is as misleading as to equate Greek pederasty with
modern androphile homosexuality. The one and the other throve in a cultural
context that belonged to their time and place - not that of the resurgent
homophile movement of
the twentieth century. But to disavow the heritage of ancient Greece is impossible, because it is one of the
wellsprings of Western civilization, and every one of its values is a latent
value capable of being revived and reinstituted, even if in a different form.
A creative figure of Hellenic and Mediterranean civilization, Sappho gave
lesbian love its classic literary expression, and her work is an enduring part
of the poetic treasure of humanity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Bruno Gentili, "La veneranda Saffo," Quaderni Urbinati, 2 (1966), 37-62; Giannes Kordatos, He Sappho kai hoi koinonikoi
agones ste Lesbo [Sappho and the Social Struggles on Lesbos], second ed.,
Athens: Epikaroteta, 1974; Hans Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1932; Reinhold Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis," Philologus, 101 (1957), 1-29.
Evelyn Gettone
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-1980)
French philosopher,
novelist, playwright, essayist, and political activist. Sartre, who enjoyed a
life-long partnership with Simone de Beauvoir (herself a major contributor to
modern feminism), never had a homosexual experience, as far as is known. Yet as
the dominant figure in French intellectual life in the third quarter of the
century, his thoughtful attitude toward the phenomenon, in combination with his
sympathy for other marginalized groups, helped to prepare the way for the
flourishing of France's gay community after 1968.
Sartre's understanding of homosexuality, like his perception of the situation
of women, evolved slowly. His early story "Childhoood of a Leader"
(1938) portrays a spoiled upper-class boy who is seduced in preparatory school
by an older student, and then joins a parafascist organization by way of
compensation. Although not directly homophobic, this presentation did tend to
lend some support to the theory (reflected also in Alberto Moravia's The Conformist) that there is a link
between early homosexual experience and right-wing commitment: the fascist
perversion. Included in the play No
Exit (1944)
is an articulate lesbian, Inès Serrano. In Sartre's novel sequence Les chemins de la liberté ( 1945-49), the homosexual
character Daniel shows a fascination with militarism and fascism: he welcomes
the German occupation.
His one major nonfiction study of a minority, Anti-Semite and few (1946), offers a number of
interesting perspectives; in fact, inasmuch as it views the Jews as
fundamentally defined by the environing hostility of society, his analysis may
be (mutatis mutandis) better applicable to homosexuals than to its ostensible
subject. However, Sartre's major involvement with homosexual questions arose
from his association with Jean Genet, to whom he had been introduced by Jean Cocteau. Sartre's project of
writing a preface to one of his friend's works grew into a sprawling 600-page
book [Saint-Genet: comédien et martyr, 1952), in which the
philosopher discusses issues of freedom and self-understanding from an existentialist
standpoint. Genet's atypical experience, as foundling, thief, and worshipper
at the shrine of the dominant male, may have skewed Sartre's view of an identity
in which he had no immediate personal stake.
In 1971 Sartre assumed, at some risk to himself, responsibility for publishing
the manifesto of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire, a radical gay-liberation
group. Nine years later he gave an interview to two French gay journalists. In
the colloquy he acknowledged that some key characters in his work, such as Mathieu in Chemins delà hberté and Roquentin in Nausée, were uncertain of their
masculinity, an uncertainty that corresponded to the writer's own sense of
self. He likened becoming homosexual to becoming a writer as two creative
responses to otherwise intolerable pressure. As regards the status of
homosexuals in France in 1980 ("this prudish society"), he held that
they should renounce the hope of blending in and remain aloof, seeking "a
kind of free space, where they can come together among themselves, as in the
United States, for example."
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, New York: Pantheon, 1987; Jean Le Bitoux and Gilles Barbedette, "Jean-Paul Sartre:
The Final Interview," The Christopher Street Reader, New York: Coward-McCann,
1983, pp. 238-44.
Ward Houser
Satiation Theory
The
traditional critique of luxury holds that indulgence in one vice, even a
relatively mild one, sets the tyro on a path toward ever more serious
involvement. In the modern language of addiction, one develops a tolerance to
the intake of the entry-level stage, causing one to increase the dose, to which
one then develops a new tolerance, and so on. For writers of nineteenth-century
popular medical tracts, masturbation was the first step toward ruin; the
practiced pervert, in this view, always began by laying "violent
hands" on himself.
In the Old Testament, Ezekiel 16:49 links the sodomites with other forms of
luxurious indulgence. This notion has a current folk version which maintains
that older men and women turn to same-sex relations when they can no longer
experience the pleasures of "normal" love or have supposedly become
impotent with the opposite sex. Such a view was sustained in the otherwise
remarkably tolerant remarks of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The common
belief, which has little foundation, that prostitutes are often lesbian in
their own preferences is ascribed to the fact that they have had too many men.
Oddly enough, this notion of homosexual orientation as the outcome of surfeit
and repletion is the mirror opposite of the psychoanalytic claim that homosexuality
is a type of arrested development. For critics, the appetite governing
same-sex love is always too Utile or too much, but never "just
right."
There seems to be Uttle empirical support for this folk view. Some people do
change their sexual orientation, but usually for other reasons than satiation
with their previous mode of erotic fulfillment. They may be responding more
fuliy to feelings that they have always had, but have been suppressing; or they
may wish to explore a side of their nature that has been neglected through lack
of opportunity. But such a shift is rarely undertaken out of a mere sense of
"jadedness." It is possible that for some individuals sadomasochistic
practices have the function of restoring interest in sexual pleasures that have
become too anodyne.
Wayne R. Dynes
Saunas
See Bathhouses.
Scandinavia, Medieval
In this
article Scandinavia has the extended sense that includes not only the three
European countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, but also Iceland. The extant
sources for the history of homosexuality in the Scandinavia of the Middle
Ages, which is to say the period just before the introduction of Latin
Christianity (about the year 1000) and the three centuries following, record
no positive attitudes toward the phenomenon. There are no accounts of comradely
love, of fidelity and heroism on the battlefield, of institutionalized
pederasty such as have been transmitted by the literature of other peoples at
a similar stage of cultural development. The textual material that has come
down to us - undoubtedly reflecting a process of selection and editing -
stigmatizes the passive-effeminate homosexual as slothful, cowardly, and
unmanly - as the object of other males' sexual aggression and humiliation.
Folk Attitudes and Customs. There is no word in Old
Norse or in other Germanic languages for what came to be called sodomy in
Medieval Latin, so that the criminal offense owes its inception to Christian
teaching. Yet there was a term aigt
which was
broader in its meaning: the Roman writer Tacitus in the twelfth chapter of the
Germania had to paraphrase it in
Latin as ignavos
et imbelles et corpore infames, "slothful and
unwarlike and sexually infamous," specifying that such individuals were
punished by drowning in a swamp. And in later vernacular sources the word argr (with the variant ragi)
is
mentioned alongside strocbnn/sordinn
and sannsoiSinn as one of three fullrettisord, "words whose
utterance amounts to a capital offense." The man who is the object of
such insults has the right to bring whoever uttered them to court or even to
assault and kill him so as to avenge his honor. The three latter terms are past
participles applied to One who has been used sexually by another male. In the
same category of heinousness were insults likening a man to a female animal (beiendi). The argr carried the further stigma of practicing sorcery [seiSi), which was in principle a
female art, as the Ynglinga
saga says,
"such eigi
[aigr conduct]
accompanies this sorcery that it was deemed shameful for men to busy
themselves with it; therefore this art was taught to the priestesses. "
The disgraceful component of both the sexual and the ritual aspect of ergi was the taking of a female role by a male,- it constituted
the behavioral expression of a character type that was held in contempt by a
warrior society. Such was the moral judgment of the people of the age of the
sagas and even of later times. Conversely, when applied to a woman the feminine
of aigi meant manngjqin, that is to say,
"man-crazy," aggressive in pursuing men, a quality as much despised
in a woman as passivity and unmanliness in a man. It should also be mentioned
that these customs applied only to free men, just as the laws against rape
protected only free women: slaves were the property and responsibility of the
master, and while sexual intercourse between two free men in which one had to
take the passive role was considered shameful, no such feeling seems to have
prevailed toward a slave's playing that part. In this respect the attitude of
the pagan Scandinavians did not differ significantly from that of the ancient
Greeks and Romans.
A further concept that bears upon this complex of beliefs is nict, a form of ridicule or insult that exposes the object to the
contempt of the whole community. The laws distinguished between tungunid" (tongue nid] and tienid
(carving nict). The former was the spoken
insult; the latter a carving or statue that represented the injured party in a
humiliating position, that of the passive party in anal intercourse. The
erection of such a statue was a reproach that called for vengeance - hence the
proverb "Only a slave retaliates at once, an aigr never" \Grettis
saga, chapter
15). By implication the free man defends his honor, but not impetuously, rather
in accordance with an Arab proverb that says "He who waits but forty years
for revenge is a man of little patience." The feminine behavior of a free
man, whether in a sexual or in a magical function, is an act of baseness; and
if he is not guilty, he must behave in a manner that will restore his honor.
In another saga the carved nid
takes the
form of a pole with a man's head carved at one end and a runic inscription on
the shaft which is then thrust into the body of a dead mare - the symbol of the
feminine, implying that the abused party has taken the female role in an
obscene act. In all these instances the sexual need not be the exclusive object
of the reproach, as in Finnish and Estonian the loan word from aigi is a complete inventory of the traits ascribed to the
passive-effeminate homosexual, while in Modem German the word aig means simply "bad." A semantic parallel is
Medieval Latin felo/fello,
"evildoer,
criminal," stemming from Classical Latin fellare, "to perform
fellation."
Legal Aspects. The only written law
against homosexual behavior from medieval Scandinavia is Chapter 32 of the
Norwegian Gulathinglog,
a part of
the new legislation introduced by King Magnus Erlingsson and Archbishop
Eysteinn in 1164: "And if two men enjoy the pleasures of the flesh and
are accused and convicted thereof, they shall both suffer perpetual outlawry.
But if they deny the charge while common report affirms it, let them deny it
with the hot iron. And if they are convicted of the charge, the king shall have
one-half of their goods and the bishop one-half." This law was the outcome
of collusion between the archbishop and Erlingr skakki, the father and guardian
of the King. The provision against male homosexual acts was a convenient tool
to rid the Church and the state of their enemies and dispossess them of their
property, and was probably modeled on a similar provision in the Code of Justinian
which prescribed banishment with confiscation of half of their property for
those guilty of an "abominable crime with persons of the male sex."
In conclusion, the material of the sagas and law codes from medieval Scandinavia
shows that pre-Christian custom and belief severely stigmatized the free man
who took the passive role in a homosexual relationship - a role that was
equated with cowardliness and want of manhood.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Kari Ellen Gade, "Homosexuality and Rape of Males in Old Norse Law and
Literature," Scandinavian Studies, 58 (1986), 12/M1, Joaquín Martinez Pizarro, "On
Nict against Bishops," Mediaeval Scandinavia, 11 (1978-79), 149-53;
Preben Meulengracht S0rensen, The Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early
Northern Society, Odense: Odense University Press, 1983; Folke Strom, Nict, Ergi and Old Norse
Moral Attitudes, London: Published for University College by the Viking
Society for Northern Research, 1973.
Warren
Johansson
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)
German
philosopher. Through a large inheritance from his father the celebrated
misanthrope enjoyed financial independence so that he could devote his life
completely to philosophy. Even today Schopenhauer's ethic of compassion possesses
great philosophical significance. In the third edition of his magnum opus The World as Will and
Idea, Schopenhauer
analyzed the the phenomenon of "pederasty" in an addendum to
Paragraph 44 on the metaphysics of sexual love. At that time (1859), the
technical term homosexuality had not yet entered scientific discourse.
Nonetheless one must proceed from the assumption that in this addendum
Schopenhauer was seeking to find the cause of homosexuality from the
philosophical standpoint. In a historical survey he showed that homosexuality
has occurred at all times and among all the peoples of the globe. From this
finding Schopenhauer concluded that homosexuality could not be unnatural, as
his great model Immanuel Kant had held. Schopenhauer's teleologically oriented
conception of nature therefore had to assume in male homosexual behavior - the
only form he discussed - a "stratagem of nature" (in the words of
Oskar Eichler).
Referring to Aristotle he hypothesized that young men [supposedly boys just
past puberty) and likewise men who are too old (the magic boundary is here the
age of 54) are not capable of begetting healthy and strong offspring, because
their semen is too inferior. As nature is interested in perfecting every
species, in men older than 54 "a pédérastie tendency gradually and imperceptibly makes its
appearance." When he formulated this argument Schopenhauer himself was 71
years old, so that he could have harbored a homosexual tendency for some
years. His ethical evaluation of homosexuality is consistent: What is in the
interest of nature cannot be bad. Schopenhauer considered only the seduction of
minors as problematic, "since the unlawfulness consists in the seduction
of the younger and inexperienced partner, who is thereby physically and
morally corrupted." Therefore homosexuality as such is not reprehensible,
solely the alleged seduction of minors.
Schopenhauer was himself the father of at least two illegitimate children and
had many unhappy affairs with women. He passionately admired Lord Byron and
like him came to the conclusion that women could be considered beautiful only
by "the male intellect clouded by the sexual instinct." In intellectual
and aesthetic respects Schopenhauer had homosexual preferences. In a letter to
his admirer Julius Frauenstadt he stressed that "even their [women's]
faces are nothing alongside those of handsome boys. " Bryan Magee
hypothesizes that the philosopher systematically suppressed his gay
tendencies, a view shared by Oskar Eichler and others. Thirty years after the
publication of the third edition of The
World as Will and Idea Oswald Oskar Hartmann adopted Schopenhauer's teleological explanation of homosexuality,
suggesting that the first champions of homosexual rights voluntarily followed
Schopenhauer's arguments.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Oskar Eichler, Die
Wurzeln des
Prauenhasses
bei Arthur Schopenhauer: eine psychanalytische Studie, Bonn: Marcus &. Weber, 1926;
Oswald Oskar Hartmann, Das Problem der Homosexualität in Lichte der
Schopenhauer'schen Philosophie, Leipzig: Max Spohr, 1897; Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983;
Udo Schüklenk, "Arthur Schopenhauer und die Schwulen," Widerspruch: Münchener Zeitschrift für
Philosophie, 16-17(1989),
100-16.
Udo Schüklenk
Schubert, Franz (1797-1828)
Austrian
composer. Franz Schubert was the only great Viennese composer native to the
city. While he did not enrich every department of music with a masterpiece, he
did create supreme works in orchestral, piano, and chamber music, but above all
in song, where he is preeminent because his rich vein of melody and expressive
harmony reached the heart of the text as no one before him had done.
Schubert was the son of a Catholic schoolmaster descended from Moravian
peasant stock. From an early age he displayed oustanding musical gifts, effortlessly
outstripping his father, his elder brother, and his teacher, the organist at the
parish church of Liechtental. Toward the end of 1808 he was accepted as a
choirboy in the imperial court chapel, and simultaneously as a scholar in the
Imperial and Royal City College. Here he impressed everyone with his musical
gifts, and he was accorded the privilege of leaving the building for his
lessons with Antonio Salieri, the friend of Haydn and rival of Mozart.
From 1810 onward Schubert began to compose music, and in 1811 he attended his
first opera. His first settings of Schiller date from this period. Too short
for the army, and with poor vision, he was rejected by the military
authorities, and by the autumn ofl814hewas teaching at his father's school, but
he felt the irksome duties of the classroom as an insuperable barrier between
him and the freedom to compose. But 1815 was one of his most productive years
in sheer volume: in one year he composed 145 songs with a tremendous range. He
also became acquainted with Franz von Schober, a wealthy and cultured young law
student who urged him to abandon teaching and devote himself to composition.
This he did only at the end of the following year, after his first commissioned
work had been performed. In time, after another depressing stint as
schoolmaster, Schubert was appointed music master to the children of Count
Tohann Esterhazy at Zseliz in Hungary, but there he was bored and
unappreciated, and longed only for the stimulus of life in the capital, to
which he returned in November 1818.
Here he encountered new friends and new patrons, and there is circumstantial
evidence that he gravitated to the Viennese bohème of the Metternich era,
where he became the central figure in a coterie of homosexual and bisexual
lovers of the arts. Despite continued and enthusiastically received
performances of his songs and vocal quartets, he still found publishers
reluctant to issue his work. In the autumn of 1822 he composed his eighth,
"Unfinished" symphony in B minor, which dwarfed virtually all his
compositions until that time. The reason why he did not finish the work is that
he had contracted syphilis, and by the spring of 1823 he was dangerously ill.
Despite this handicap and a pressing need for money that forced him into a bad
deal with his publishers, he continued to compose. He was never able to fulfill
his ambition to write a successful opera, but in other musical genres his fame
and reputation were growing. He had a circle of friends at whose social
gatherings his pieces were performed, and the press outside of Vienna gave him
ever more notice. But by 1828 his health had been fatally undermined by the
syphilitic infection and by the feverish pace with which he composed in the
last eleven months of his life. His death - in the Romantic tradition - at an
early age was followed by decades of negleet and oblivion, and only much later was he recognized
as one of the great Austrian composers.
What is known of Schubert's lifestyle, his bachelorhood, his intense and
loving relationships with other men, and manifold accounts of his disorderly
sexual conduct - all this points to a homosexual orientation. His biographers
have interpreted unflattering references to the sensual side of his nature in
contemporary sources as meaning that he frequented prostitutes, but hedonism of
this kind was perfectly acceptable in the "Old Vienna" of his day,
and the veiled allusions are probably to a far more unconventional form of
sexuality. Schubert never achieved a fulfilled love relationship with a woman;
his rejection of marriage was deeply rooted, and Schober recalled his friend's
desperate and pathological reaction to the suggestion that he take a wife.
Contemporaries ascribed this attitude to misogyny, which was the most that the
heterosexual society of the nineteenth century could make of some individuals'
failure to be magnetized by the opposite sex.
A modern psychoanalytic biographer of Schubert has concluded, from the study
of a brief tale written By Schubert in 1822 entitled "My Dream," that
the composer's creativity was fully unleashed by his mother's death on May 28,
1812, when he was in mid-adolescence. Within a month his enormous musical
productivity began and continued almost without respite until his final
illness and death. Self-conscious both as man and as artist, Schubert knew and
treasured his distinctive sexual orientation, even if it had to be hidden from
the obscurantist Catholic society of official Vienna. A poem of August von
Platen dated January 31,1823 proves that a well-defined homosexual subculture
existed in the German-speaking world by that time, and in such a milieu
Schubert could find comradeship and acceptance, while submitting to the outward
conformity of the "quiet years" of Austrian history.
A psychoanalytic interpretation of Schubert's personality has found the clue to
his life in the dialectical irony of homosexuality itself. In this view rebellion
and submission are two sides of the same coin, as the subject oscillates between
a passive, masochistic stance vis-a-vis the father and other male rivals, and
competitive aggression against them. Schubert's creativity expresses the rebellious
side of the complex, for although the homosexual refusal to be dominated is
undermined by the need to propitiate the father and similar authority figures,
the rebellion itself is perpetual. The homosexual aestheticism of the Romantic
period defended brotherhood - with political overtones - against authority,
creativity against submission to routine, beauty against the ravages of time
and reality. In such an emotional and cultural setting Schubert lived out a
brief but intensely creative life as one of the great composers of the early
nineteenth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Maynard Solomon, "Franz Schubert's 'My Dream,'" American Imago, 38 ¡1981], 137-54.
Warren Johansson
Science
Assessing
the contribution of male homosexuals and lesbians to science is complicated by
the fact that it is no longer clear what science is. Until the middle of the
twentieth century, it was generally accepted that scientific progress occurred
through slow incremental accumulation of factual data, a process requiring
periodic revision of theories to accord with the data. Through the work of such
thinkers as Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper, however, it has become clear that,
examined as a whole, scientific change is discontinuous, even erratic and
willful, and often guided by external and contingent factors. These factors
include the overall world view (not excluding religious components), social
and economic determinants, and the whims and idiosyncracies of individual
scientists. In its more extreme versions, the new scepticism discards the ideas
of progress and rationality altogether, discerning an almost random
succession of paradigms. Thus Paul Feyerabend, the gadfly of the field, has
commended a Dada concept of science, in which "anythinggoes." It is
not necessary to subscribe to this extreme view to acknowledge that as a
result of ongoing reexamination the boundaries between science, on the one
hand, and ideology on the other, are blurred. In a recent American educational
controversy, for example, most scholars hold that the so-called "creation
science" - which seeks to reaffirm the traditional picture of the origin
of the cosmos given in the book of Genesis - is mistaken, but they seem unable
to offer a conclusive argument as to why this is so.
At the end of the nineteenth century when the homosexual rights movement began
in the optimistic climate of Wilhelmine Germany, it was confidently held that
the emancipation of homosexuals would be achieved by the spread of
"science." Increase of knowledge, erected on objective,
incontrovertible foundations, would inevitably sweep away lingering
"medieval" sources of bigotry and discrimination. The cataclysmic
political developments of the twentieth century eroded these high expectations
in every sphere. This more sober mood is fortunate, because the impact of the
natural and social sciences in the first half of the twentieth century on
homosexuality was decidedly mixed. Some fair-minded scientists helped to refute
older stereotypes, it is true, but other researchers addressed themselves to
schemes for the eradication of homosexuality through social engineering.
Antiquity. It is generally acknowledged
that the emergence of critical rationalism in ancient Greece in the sixth
century b.c. was the prerequisite for
all subsequent scientific progress. This historic breakthrough depended on
earlier advances in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, which pioneered in many
areas of technology and scientific measurement. The birth of the critical
rationalism of the pre-Socratics did not occur in a social vacuum: the absence
of a powerful priesthood and of a central despotic government created zones of
freedom in which independent thinkers could flourish. The sixth century also
saw the emergence to full historical view of the institution of pederasty, the
love of an older man for a youth. The Greeks regarded pederasty as itself a
contribution to civilization. Hence the belief that, like scientific
discoveries themselves, it had an "inventor," Orpheus and Laius
being the two leading candidates.
Unfortunately, the life records of the pre-Socratics are too scanty to permit
much conjecture about the dynamics of sexuality in their personalities.
However, the writings of Plato and Xenophon indicate that Socrates, who has
become synonymous with the very spirit of Greek inquiry, was a joyous
pederast, who reached some of his most important conclusions in colloquy with
a bevy of handsome disciples. In later Greek philosophy there is some
indication that doctrines were transmitted from one generation to the next by
being imparted by an older master to a beloved pupil. Aristotle, and after him,
the Greek medical writers, attempted to determine biological mechanisms that
might determine same-sex preference.
Greek science continued during the Hellenistic age, but declined under the
Romans. It is probably not accidental that it revived again among the Arabs,
under whose rule pederasty flourished almost as strongly as it had among the
Greeks.
The Renaissance Tradition. It was largely from the
Arabs that Western Europe of the Renaissance received its knowlege of Greek
science. In Florence (dubbed both the New Athens and the New Sodom) the
humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) championed Neoplatonism, together with
hermeticism and astrology. From the modern point of view these last two
elements might be thought of as anti-scientific. Yet recent research has established
that the boundaries between science and the occult were often fluid, and
hermetic ideas played a major role in the scientific revolution in the
seventeenth century.
By common consent the most comprehensive Renaissance genius was Leonardo da
Vinci (1452-1519), scientist, engineer, military expert, writer, painter,
sculptor, and architect. The accusation of sodomy that was lodged against him
in 1476 seems to have reinforced impressions derived from early life to make
Leonardo both reclusive and self-reflective. Apart from the quality of his
inventions - he designed a bicycle and a parachute, as well as perfecting the
use of chiaroscuro in painting - the enigma of Leonardo's personality has
continued to fascinate.
The English Renaissance found its own universal genius in the person of Sir
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the creator of the Novum Organum and inspiration of the
Royal Society. Holding that those who have wives and children give hostages to
fortune, he was known for his partiality to handsome youths. Other English
scientists who may have been homophile are Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727),
Edmund Halley (1656-1742), and Robert Boyle (1627-1691). In France, René Descartes ¡1565-1650) was
author of the Discourse
on Method, and thereby the pioneer of modem rationalism. In his last
years he was tutor to the bisexual Queen Christina of Sweden. Descartes
composed some letters to her which have been interpreted as discrete advocacy
of freedom of sexual orientation. In America the bachelor Benjamin Banneker
(1731-1806) was probably the first notable black scientist.
Modern Times. The great explorer, geologist,
and ethnographer Alexander von Humboldt ( 1769-1859) received his formation in
the Berlin of Frederick the Great. Often accompanied by handsome young men on
his travels, Humboldt left his fortune to a servant who was also his favorite.
Other notable explorers who were homosexual were the Canadian David Thompson
(1770-1857) and the Russian Nikolai Mikhailovich Przhevalsky (1839-1888). The
sexuality of Sir Richard Burton remains obscure, but he certainly used his
observations to making notable contributions to the study of same-sex behavior
in the tropics (his "Sotadic Zone").
In the twentieth century the inventors Nikola Tesla and Wilbur and Orville
Wright may have been homophile. Study of the psychobiography of scientists is
just beginning, and we may expect further breakthroughs. Two cases are of particular
interest. The Austro-English philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who
had been trained as an engineer, was given to furtive homosexual encounters
with men he met in parks. Enigmatic and ascetic in his personal life, he was
largely successful in concealing his secret, which his executors tried also to
keep, fearing that its revelation would damage his standing as a philosopher.
The obstacles placed in the effort to open the door to this aspect of the
creativity of one of the twentieth century's most influential figures
constitute a revealing and all-too-typical instance of the difficulties of this
kind of biographical inquiry. Much better documented is the case of one of the
founders of computer science, the Englishman Alan Turing (1912-1954). Apprehended
by the police, Turing was forced to be injected with hormones which resulted in
chemical castration. He died of cyanide poisoning.
It is often asked, with wonder or disdain according to taste, why so many
artists, poets, and painters, so many actors, dancers, and musicians, have
been homophile. In the face of the massive evidence, however, it tends to be
assumed that there is some nexus between creativity in the arts and same-sex
orientation. Inasmuch as the "scientific personality" counts as the
opposite of the artistic one, stereotypical thinking assumes that science is a
pursuit somehow inherently "normal." The relative paucity of famous
homosexual scientists probably stems from the fact that one does not have much
information on the affective lives of investigators of natural phenomena,
because such aspects are thought irrelevant to the "objectivity" of
science. Yet, as indicated at the outset, the older picture of science as a seamless
web of dispassionate inquiry is yielding to a more nuanced picture, in which
science draws closer to the arts. As this newer approach takes hold, one may
expect to learn more about the emotional commitments of individual scientists
and the way in which these commitments in turn interacted with their creativity
and the larger world in which they live.
Richard Dey
Science Fiction
Although
the definition of "science fiction" has eluded any real consensus
either inside or outside the field, for present purposes science fiction will
be treated as a literary (and lately, cinematic, television, and musical) genre
which either speculates on life in the future (or "alternative
universes" of the present or past) or in which the extrapolated or speculated
effects of advances (or declines) in science and technology are important elements
to the story. With this definition the article excludes the major genres of
fantasy and horror.
General Considerations. Sometimes called
"speculative fiction," "sf" (as it is commonly referred to)
is a genre of the modern age of science, though some would trace its roots back
to such "fantasy travel" writers as the second-century (a.d.) Greek Lucian, whose True History takes him to a homosexual
kingdom on the moon. A wider circle of opinion credits Mary W. Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) with being the
first sf work, showing a genuine concern for the effects of science on humanity.
Jules Verne (1828-1905) and H. G. Wells (1866-1946) are other oft-cited founders
of the genre.
As a self-conscious body of literature, sf arose in the Anglo-American world
in the 1920s and 1930s, when it found a vehicle for short stories in pulp
magazines and an audience among male adolescents. As such sf
"predictions" as the atomic bomb became reality in the 1940s, the
genre became increasingly respectable, developed an adult readership, and became
able to economically sustain book-length works by talented writers. This
expansion continued at a slow but steady pace into the 1960s, when an explosion
of interest in space travel (accompanying the moon landing program) and science
in general raised interest in sf to the point where it became a major part of
popular culture, generating films of mainstream circulation (such as 2001: A Space Odyssey), television series (such as
"Star Trek"), and scholarly scrutiny. Today it is one of the most
popular genres of fiction in the English-speakingworld, has spread to many
other languages (notably Russian), and is the subject of hundreds of academic
courses. Sf also boasts a highly organized and very vocal fandom constituting
what almost amounts to a subculture in itself.
By its nature, sf tends to posit alternatives to contemporary societies, their
assumptions, and their mores, while remaining rooted in the cultures of its
writers and readers. It should not be surprising, then, that sf has on the one
hand dealt imaginatively with issues of sexuality, sexism, and sexual
orientation, portraying contemporary assumptions about these topics as
time-and-culture-limited rather than universal, and on the other hand has had
its share both of invisibility for non-heterosexual characters and of
homophobic stereotypes. Since the 1970s, the former tendency has become dominant,
aided by a good number of acknowledged gay, lesbian, or bisexual writers; it
is not too much to say that in the 1980s, homophobia is no longer considered
"good form" in sf.
Historical Development. During the "pulp
period," sexuality in general was largely neglected, the subject not being
considered suitable for adolescent literature, and the magazine editors
serving as effective censors. As the demographics of the readership broadened,
it became possible to include characters who were more or less undisguised
homosexuals, but these, in accordance with the attitudes of the times, tended
to be villains: evil, demented, or effeminate stereotypes. The most popular
role for the homosexual was as a decadent slaveholding lordling whose corrupt
tyranny was doomed to be overthrown by the young male heterosexual hero.
Lesbians for good or bad remained nearly invisible.
It fell to Theodore Sturgeon, one of the most noted sf writers of the 1950s, to
provide the first positive portrayal of homosexuals in a 1953 story "The
World Well Lost," published in the June issue of Universe. Coming at the height of
the homophobic hysteria of the McCarthyite period, this story featured a pair
of homosexual-androgynous aliens who, exiled from their homeworld, arrive on
earth. At first their gender remains unknown and Earth's population fawns on
them, dubbing them "lovebirds," but when the truth is discovered
they are sent back where they would face execution. In the end, however, the
pair is rescued by a spaceman who is a closet homosexual. This landmark story
is typical sf in criticizing contemporary mores (here, homophobia) while
undermining the threat to the reader (and the current censors) by recasting the
protagonists as aliens.
A step backwards to homophobic attitudes was Charles Beaumont's 1955 story
"The Crooked Man," a Playboy
piece
which inaugurated a long line of stories in which homosexuality is portrayed as
the social norm for one reason or another. Sturgeon came back in 1957 with
"Affair with a Green Monkey," examining social stereotyping of
homosexuals (again with an alien as the subject).
By 1960 Pyramid was ready to publish the book-length Venus Pius X, in which Sturgeon posits a one-gender society; the
homophobic attitudes of a heterosexual male brought into this society are
unfavorably depicted.
There matters rested until 1967, when Samuel R. Delaney, a black gay writer and
winner of four Nebula Awards and one Hugo Award, started playing with alternative
sexuality in his Ace novel The
Einstein Intersection (using semi-alien, semi-human hermaphrodites) and the
Nebula-winning short story "Aye, and Gomorrah," which posits the
development of neutered human "spacers" and then depicts the
"frelks" - people who become sexually oriented toward the spacers. In
this work the concept of sexual orientation is examined with the desired
distance attained by imagining a new one.
Delaney followed this in November, 1968, with the dazzling Hugo- and
Nebula-winning short story, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious
Stones." This picaresque tour de force featured two human males, H. C. E.
and the teenage sexually masochistic singer Hawk, who are still friends after
having once been intimates.
Enter Ursula K. Le Guin, a mildly feminist writer, who in 1969 startled the sf
world with her Ace-published novel The Left
Hand of Darkness. This book, which won both major awards and quickly gained
the stature of an all-time classic of the genre, broke all previous molds in
depicting a planet whose people are sexually neuter most of the time, but who
randomly turn male or female for a few days each month.
After Le Guin's searching examination of sex roles and orientations, the field
was wide open for further exploration; the coming of the "gay
liberation" period starting with the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion led to a
relative flood of works looking at unconventional sexualities.
It remained only for Delaney to break the last barrier, depicting homosexual
lovemaking on the part of his bisexual male hero, the Kid, in his 1975 Bantam
novel, Dhalgren.
In the
cinema, where science fiction has been flourishing commercially since at least
1969, the absence of homosexuality has been nearly complete. Logan's Run (1976), depicting a future
city in which homosexuality is casually accepted, stands out as an exception.
Authors. A number of the most
prominent writers working in the field of sf have been publicly identified as
gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Two of these, William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal,
made their reputations in mainstream literature but have contributed important
novels to the genre, such as Burroughs' The
Wild Boys (1971) and Vidal's Kalki
(1978).
Writers working primarily in sf who have reached the very top of their field
include Marion Zimmer Bradley (b. 1930, prolific author of the Darkover series
of novels and also a frequent contributor to gay and lesbian periodicals),
Samuel R. Delaney (b. 1942 in Harlem, author of the Neveryon series and a
frequent writer on gay themes), and Joanna Russ (b. 1937, a radical lesbian
feminist and occasional contributor to lesbian and gay journals). Edgar
Pangborn ¡1909-1976) wrote a number of widely read works and consistently dealt
with same-sex love. Less well known are Nikos A. Diaman, the Englishman Henry
Fitzgerald Heard, Elizabeth A. Lynn, Tom Reamy, Sally M. Gearhart, and (in this
field) the Frenchwoman Monique Wittig.
There is also a body of gay male pornography with sf settings; authors in this
area include Felix Falkon, Dave Garrett, Peter Harnes, Peter Hughes, Rex
Montgomery, Charles Piatt, and the more widely known Larry Townsend.
Novels of Interest. A large number of sf
novels are of substantial gay or lesbian interest. The largest category of
these are works in which the hero(ine) or a major protagonist is either
homosexual or bisexual, usually males; books of particular interest to women
are so noted. These works include Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books The Heritage of Hastur (1975) and The Forbidden Tower (1977), which link
homosexuality to telepathy; William S. Burroughs' The Wild Boys (1971) and Blade Runner (1979); the classic sf
writer Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial
Earth (1975),
in which the hero brings back from Earth a clone of his lost lover; Joan Cox's Mindsong (1979); Delaney's
hallucinogenic Dahlgren
(see
above); Thomas M. Disch's On
Wings of Song (1979); Zoe Fairbairns' Benefits (1979), a feminist work
set in Britain; M. J. Engh's Arslan
(1976),
in which the title character, a modern Alexander the Great, is bisexual and
develops a long-lasting affair with a schoolboy; Sally M. Gearhart's The Wanderground (1978), a set of feminist
stories with a common background; David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself (1973), in which the hero
uses time travel to make copies of himself which turn out to be ideal lovers;
Leo P. Kelley's Mythmaster
¡1973),
whose bisexual protagonist opts for heterosexuality,-Elizabeth A. Lynn's A Different Light (1978), in which another
bisexual protagonist opts this time for homosexuality, and The Dancers of Arun (1979), which features
fraternal incest complicated by telepathy; a set of novels by Michael
Moorcock: The
Final Programme (1968), featuring a bisexual hermaphrodite, The English Assassin (1972), whose female
characters are lesbian or bisexual, Breakfast
in the Ruins (1972) about a gay male, and The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine
Corneliusin the Twentieth Century (1976), two bisexual lesbians; George Nader's Chrome (1978), the first sf novel
published by a major house (Putnam) specifically geared for the gay male
market; Frederick Pohl's Gateway
(1977), a
Nebula and Hugo winner about a repressed homosexual; Thomas N. Scortia's Earthwreck! (1974); popular writer
Robert Silverberg's The
Book of Skulls (1972), in which two of the four heroes are gay; the great
sf philosopher Olaf Stapledon's Odd
John (1936),
whose hero goes through a homosexual phase shortly after puberty;
best-selling sf writer John Varley's The Ophiuci Hotline (1977), whose heroine is
bisexual, and his Gaia series starting with Titan ¡1979) and continuing with Wizard (1980) and Demon (1984), featuring a pair of women, one bisexual and one
lesbian, who become closer and closer lovers as the trilogy progresses; Paul
Welles' Project
Lambda (1979), depicting concentration camps for male homosexuals
in a police-state United States; and John Wynne's The Sighting (1978), a coming-out
story.
Homosexual villains can be found in numerous books,- an interested reader might
consult Barry Malzberg's The
Sodom and Gomorrah Business and Tactics
of Conquest (both 1974), Fred M. Stewart's Star Child (1975), or Kate Wilhelm's
Hugo-winning Where
Latethe Sweet Birds Sang (1976).
Novels set in worlds which accept homosexuality as a normal and integrated
part of the environment, but without a focus on a major character, include
John Brunner's multiple award-winning (Hugo, British Science Fiction Award,
Prix Apollo) classic Stand
on Zanzibar (1968); Delaney's Babel-17
(1966)
and Triton (1976); Marta Randall's fourney (1978) and Dangerous Games (1980); and John Varley's
"Eight Worlds" series of books. The paucity of novels projecting
homosexuality as a not-very-remarkable, accepted part of the landscape, is
noteworthy; authors seem either to make homosexuality a major element of their
story or to omit it altogether.
A significant number of novels posit a world or society in which homosexuality
is the only option, there being but one gender present. The feminist vision of
a world without males has no doubt inspired several of these; in short-story
form they are represented by James Tiptree's (pseudonym of Alice Sheldon) Hugo-winner
"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1976), in which a plague has wiped
out men and three male astronauts hurled into the future have to deal with the
situation. Novels in this category include Suzy M. Charnas' Motherlines (1978), in which women have
set up societies completely outside of the men's world, the novel containing no
male characters; Charles E. Maine's Alph
(1972),
showing a future Earth in which men have been extinct for half a millennium and
civil war erupts over a plan to bring back males; Joanna Russ' The Female Man (1975), where the
all-woman world is called Whileaway; Joan Slonczewski's Door Into Ocean (1986), where an
all-female race on a water planet must deal with male invaders,- the Frenchwoman
Monique Wittig's Les
Guerilleres (1969) and The
Lesbian Body (1973), which posit all-female lesbian societies; her collaboration
with Sande Zeig, Lesbian
Peoples (1976), which does the same in the far future; and Donna J.
Young's Retreat:
As It Was! (1979), which has an entire lesbian galaxy subjected to
warfare by an unknown species: men.
All-male environments have been a staple since the pulp days of sf, but these
have usually been limited situations such as spaceships rather than entire
cultures. Novels which depict entire all-male societies include: A. Bertram
Chandler's False
Fatherland (1968), in which the arrival of a mixed-crew spaceship
precipitates a miraculous conversion to heterosexuality; Auctor Ignotus' AE: The Open Persuader (1969), in which gay men
have set up their own society; and the Italian Virgilio Martini's homophobic The World Without Women (1969), where gay men
invent a disease which kills off all the females.
Theodore Sturgeon's oft-cited Venus
Plus X (see above) sets out a single-sex world which is defined as
neither male nor female, while Philip Wylie's The Disappearance (1951) separates males and
females into two parallel worlds, each of a single gender, where homosexuality
is adopted out of necessity.
Another large category of stories involves societies in which both sexes are
present but homosexuality is either compulsory or socially favored. These
works could be written out of an author's desire to hold a satirical mirror up
to the homophobia of his culture, but in practice seem to reflect the writer's
own paranoia about homosexuality. The classic tale of this type was the short
story by Charles Beaumont, "The Crooked Man" (see above). In this
story, however, the "genuine" homosexuals are cruel and depraved.
Novels dealing with this theme include Anthony Burgess' The Wanting Seed (1962), in which
homosexuality is required for official employment in Britain and violent
warfare breaks out between the sexes, while Nature goes on strike: crops fail
and animals will not reproduce; Suzy M. Charnas' Walk to the End of the World (1974), which sets out an
Earth of sexual apartheid and the subjugation of females; the Frenchman Robert
Merle's The
Virility Factor (1974), in which men are hit by a disease which leaves a
despotic lesbian tyranny in charge and the remaining men become second-class
citizens,- Naomi Mitchinson's Solution
Three (1975),
basically an expansion of the Beaumont setting; and Eric Norden's The Ultimate Solution (1973), in which
homosexuality is the social norm in a Nazi America.
Settings in which sexuality involves more than two genders have been presented
in the venerable Isaac Asimov's The
Gods Themselves (1972), which depicts a three-sexed race, two of whom are
more or less male; Samuel R. Delaney's seminal The Einstein Intersection (1967), also trisexual;
and John Varley's Gaia series, in which the native intelligent species
undergoes extremely complex patterns in order to reproduce.
A final major category of novels does away with gender distinctions altogether,
presenting worlds of androgyny. Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (see above) is the classic
of this type. Other novels in this area include the legendary Robert
Heinlein's / Will
Fear No Evil (1970), which puts a man's brain into a woman's body
through a transplant operation; Robert Silverberg's Son of Man (1971), where the
inhabitants of a future Earth can change sex at will; Frederick Turner's A Double Shadow (1978), whose hero is a
hermaphrodite; and John Varley's "Eight Worlds" series, in which
human beings can and do change gender as easily as haircuts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Camilia Decamin, Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo, eds., Worlds Apart, Boston: Alyson Publications, 1986; Samuel R. Delaney, The Motion of Light in
Water, New York: Arbor House/ Morrow, 1988; Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo, Uranian Worlds: A Reader's
Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Boston: G. K. Hall &
Co., 1983.
Stephen Donaldson
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee
The
Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee, the world's first homosexual rights
organization, was founded in Berlin on May 14,1897, the twenty-ninth birthday
of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), a physician of Jewish origin who became the
leading authority on homosexuality in the first third of the twentieth
century. Under the
pseudonym of "Dr. Ramien," Hirschfeld had in 1896 published a book
entitled Sappho und Sokrates, oder
wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechts!
(Sappho and
Socrates, or How Is the Love of Men and Women for Persons of Their Own Sex to
Be Explained?). Moved by the suicide of a young homosexual officer on the eve
of a marriage into which his family had pressured him, Hirschfeld went on to
create an organization that would campaign for legal toleration and social
acceptance for what he called the third sex.
Writing in an era when biology and medicine uncritically accepted the notion of
"inborn traits" of all kinds, Hirschfeld maintained that homosexuals
were members of a third sex, an evolutionary intermediate (or intergrade)
between the male and the female, and he bolstered his thesis with data of all
kinds showing that the mean for the homosexual subjects whom he studied by
interview and questionnaire fell almost exactly between those for male and
female respectively. Accordingly the journal which the Scientific-humanitarian
Committee published from 1899 onward was entitled the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen mit
besonderer Berücksichtigung der Homosexualität (Annual for Sexual
Intergrades with Special Reference to Homosexuality).
Aims and Methods. The first and foremost
goal of the committee was legal reform, as following the establishment of the
North German Confederation and then of the German Empire, a new penal code was
adopted that went into force on the entire territory of the Reich on January 1,
1872. Its Paragraph 175 made criminal widernatürhche
Unzucht zwischen Männern (lewd and unnatural acts between males), with a maximum
penalty of two years. The repeal of this paragraph was the main object of the
Committee's endeavors during its 36 years of existence. For this purpose it
drafted a petition "to the Legislative Bodies of the German Empire"
that was ultimately signed by some 6000 Germans prominent in all walks of Ufe. But it also sought to
enlighten a public that as yet knew nothing of the literature that had been
appearing sporadically in the psychiatric journals since 1869, or of the
earlier apologetic writings of Heinrich Hoessli and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. By
means of pamphlets, public lectures, and later even films, the Committee sought
to convince the world that homosexuals were an unjustly persecuted sport of
nature, who could not be blamed for their innate and unmodifiable sexual orientation.
Because they lived in a society that was wholly intolerant of homosexual
expression, they had to hide their orientation and their sexual activity, and
so were peculiarly exposed to blackmail if their true nature came to the
knowledge of members of the criminal underworld. As early as January 1898
August Bebel, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party, spoke on the
floor of the Reichstag in favor of the petition, while the other parties
denounced it in horror. Among the educated elite Hirschfeld's views soon won a
large measure of support, but they were totally rejected by the churches and
by the conservative jurists of the Wilhelmstrasse engaged in drafting a new
criminal code.
The Committee was in practice the world's first center for the study of all
aspects of homosexuality. Though ignored by academic scholars, Hirschfeld
collected material from various sources on the frequency of homosexual
behavior in the population and the psychological profile of the homosexual
personality. In 1904 Hirschfeld concluded that 2.2 percent of the population
was exclusively homosexual, and that the figure was surprising only because so
many of his subjects successfully hid their inclinations from a hostile world.
The private lives of his subjects he examined from numerous aspects, in every
one of which he found evidence that supported his theory of an innate third
sex.
Difficulties and Rivals. As the years passed, the
Committee was beset with problems from within and without. Hirschfeld's
theories placed undue emphasis on the effeminate male and the viraginous
female as the homosexual types par
excellence, a standpoint that alienated the pederasts who fell into
neither category and were often bisexual as well. Benedict Friedlaender, an
independent scholar, denounced Hirschfeld's views and contrasted them with the
Hellenic ideal of man-boy love which was a virile, state-building phenomenon in
his Renaissance des Eros
Uranios (Renaissance of Eros Uranios; 1904). A rival
organization, the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Exceptional), was
founded in 1902, and adopted as its journal Der Eigene, edited by Adolf Brand,
which had been publishing literary and art work on the subject of pederasty
since 1898. The incompatibility of the two approaches shows that the umbrella
concept of "homosexuality" united biological and psychological
phenomena which had only this in common, that they both ran afoul of the
Tudeo-Christian taboo on same-sex relations; socially and politically they were
- and still are - incompatible. The Committee had even anticipated the split by
proposing in its petition an age of consent of 16 for homosexual relations -
which would in effect have excluded the boy-lover from the benefit of law
reform.
The other critical juncture in the history of the Committee was the
Harden-Eulenburg affair, which began in November 1906 with accusations by
Maximilian Harden, a sort of Walter Lippmann of the Second Reich, in his
journal Die
Zukunft, to the effect that two of the Kaiser's intimates, Prince
Philipp zu Eulenberg and Count Kuno von Moltke, were members of a homosexual
clique whose inner sanctum had been penetrated by another of their ilk, the
First Secretary of the French Legation in Berlin, Raymond Lecomte, who had then
revealed to the Quai d'Orsay that Germany was bluffing during the Morocco
crisis of January-April 1906 that ended in a diplomatic victory for his country
at Germany's expense. A series of scandalous trials ensued in which Hirschfeld
testified as an "expert witness," Harden was victorious, and
Eulenburg was disgraced and ruined, spending the last years of life in
isolation on his estate. But the whole series of events associated
homosexuality with espionage and treason in the eyes of the press and the
public, and the Committee's fortunes took a turn for the worse. Interestingly
enough, it was the newspapers' use of the term homosexual during the
Harden-Eulenburg affair that made it a household word and displaced the medical
coinages current until then in the specialized literature of the subject.
The reaction to the Committee's endeavors went so far as a proposal for
extending the sanctions of Paragraph 175 to women in Paragraph 250 of a draft
penal code published late in 1909. This elicited a statement in support of the
Committee from the Deutsche Bund für Mutterschutz (German League for the
Protection of Motherhood), an organization devoted to the welfare of the unwed
mother, whom public opinion in Germany stigmatized almost as cruelly as it did
the male homosexual. In this way the various groups advocating reform in the
sphere of sexual morality were brought closer together by the moves of the
opposition.
Scholarly Achievements. Aided by the experts in
various disciplines who had been attracted to the Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee, Hirschfeld set about writing a major work that was published in
January 1914 under the title Die
Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Male and Female
Homosexuality). This vast tome summarized everything that had been learned from
the literature of the past, and especially of the preceding decade and a half,
as well as the 10,000 case histories that Hirschfeld had taken in that time.
All its arguments were directed toward proving that homosexuality was inborn
and unmodifiable and that the reasoning (including early psychoanalytic
writings) in favor of acquired homosexuality was untenable. As a scientifically
documented, carefully argued plea for toleration, it remains along with the 23
volumes of the Jahrbuch
the
committee's principal legacy to the later movement.
Later History. World War I interrupted
the committee's work, and for a time some of its publications were suppressed
by wartime censorship. Hirschfeld took a patriotic stance on the pages of the
committee's journal, which also carried letters from homosexual servicemen in
the field. The end of the Empire and the proclamation of the Republic in November
1918 gave new hope to the committee's aspirations, but the postwar drafts of a
new penal code were no more acceptable than the previous ones.
To propagate the Committee's views, a film entitled Anders als die Andem (Different from the
Others) was made in 1919 and shown in almost the whole of Germany before it was
banned by a revived censorship. It was the first use of the cinema to promote
the cause of homosexual liberation, and a second film called Gesetze der Liebe was produced in 1927.
Under the Weimar Republic the committee carried on extensive propaganda, but by
now organizations of a primarily or purely social character far exceeded the
committee in membership. The postwar era saw an extensive gay subculture
thrive in Berlin and other large German cities.
The growing anti-Semitic movement in Germany made Hirschfeld one of its
targets. He was assaulted in Munich in 1920 and again in 1921, the second time
receiving a fractured skull and being prematurely reported dead. On the other
hand,, the Social Democrats and Communists supported the Committee's demands in
the Reichstag, and in 1929, a 15-13 vote of a committee approved the striking
of the "homosexual paragraph" from the draft penal code. However,
this victory was premature: no action was taken by the Reichstag, and the
mounting economic crisis not only made other issues more urgent, but led to the
phenomenal rise of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis), which
despite the presence of some homosexuals in its own ranks denounced the
homosexual liberation movement, in part because it was identified with such
Jewish figures as Hirschfeld and Kurt Hiller, who had participated in a
coalition of groups seeking reform of various sex laws in Germany and edited
its critique of the official draft of the new code.
After the Vienna Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform on a Scientific
Basis (1930), Hirschfeld did not return to Germany, fearing for his life at the
hands of the Nazis. His collaborators continued the work of the committee, but
the growth of the extreme right doomed its efforts. With the appointment of
Hitler as Reichschancellor on January 30, 1933 the Committee sought a modus
vivendi with the new regime, as did many others who hoped that by adopting a
nationalist line they could placate the National Socialists. However, the
accession to full power by Hitler and his supporters meant the end of the
Committee and the destruction of the Institute for Sexual Science which
Hirschfeld had founded in 1918.
Conclusion. Little known except in
homosexual circles, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was all but forgotten
by the end of World War n, but its publications survived in a few learned libraries
and private collections. The homophile movement that began in the 1950s perhaps
unjustly neglected this brave and pioneering effort to change the prejudice
and intolerance of Western society in regard to homosexuality, and future students
of the subject are well advised to consider how it conceived its mission and
set about fulfilling it. Small as it was, it was the forerunner of the vast
international gay rights movement of today.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual
Rights Movement (1864-1935), New York: Times Change Press, 1974; James D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation
Movement in Germany, New York: Amo Press, 1975.
Warren Johansson
Sculpture
See Art, Visual; Nude in Art.
Scythians
Scythia
is the general name given by ancient authors to the whole area extending from
the Danube to the frontiers of China. It was occupied by a warlike, nomadic
people who came from what is now southern Russia in the first millennium b.c. Before the ninth century b.c they formed a kingdom in the eastern Crimea, and in the
seventh century they invaded Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Balkan peninsula.
Though attacked by Darius I of Persia (512 b.c.) and then by Alexander the Great (ca. 325 b.c.), they survived but were driven back to southern Russia,
where in the following centuries they were displaced by the related
Sarmatians. Russian and Ukrainian scholars of today regard the Scythian
culture, known from extensive archeological finds that supplement the scattered
references in classical literature, as part of the prehistory of their country.
What links the Scythians with homosexuality is the long debate over the meaning
of a Greek passage in Herodotus' Histories
which, brief
as it is, seems to provide evidence for a sexual culture that was widespread in
antiquity, though unknown among the Greeks themselves. Herodotus (I, 105)
reports the dire consequences of the fact that some stragglers from the
Scythian army violated the temple of Aphrodite Urania at Ascalon, on the coast
of Palestine. "On such of the Scythians as plundered the temple at
Ascalon, and on their posterity for succeeding generations, the goddess
inflicted the iheleia
nusos ("feminine
disease"). And the Scythians say themselves it is for this cause they
suffer the sickness, and moreover that any who visit the Scythian country may
see among them what is the condition of those whom the Scythians call enarees." Elsewhere (IV, 67)
Herodotus credits the enaiees - he translates the term
as androgynoi, "men-women" -
with a special method of divination which they have from Aphrodite. The
Hippocratic work On
Airs, Waters and Places, 22, ascribes the "disease" of the anarieis, understood as a form of
impotence, to divine retribution, which struck the wealthy in particular.
Finally, Aristotle in the Nicomachean
Ethics (VTI, 7) speaks of a malakia, "effeminacy" -
also defined as to
thely, "the feminine" - that was a hereditary trait of
the Scythian kings. Such is the scanty but significant evidence that survives
from antiquity.
Julius Rosenbaum, in an omnium gatherum of texts and comments on the sexual
life of the ancients entitled Geschichte
der Lustseuche im Altertume (History of the Plague of Lust in Antiquity; 1839), argued that the "feminine
disease" meant a proclivity to pederasty. In 1882 the Russian historian Vsevolod Miller
opened a new chapter in the discussion by pointing to survivals of Scythian myth and custom
among the Ossetians. Subsequently, Georges Dumézil analyzed an Ossetian legend in which the hero Hamyc
offends the god of the sea Don Bettyr and is punished by having to endure pregnancy and
childbirth. He concluded that Herodotus had confounded two phenomena, a
genuine Scythian tradition from the northern coast of the Black Sea and a piece of folk belief associated
with the shrine at Ascalon. This city on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean remained pagan (Canaanite) even after the
interior of Palestine had been conquered by the invading Israelites, who
because they had no navy could not blockade the port and compel its surrender.
The two elements in this tangle of legends deserve closer analysis. The Scythian element is the variety of shamanism with symbolic
change of sex, including the wearing of women's clothing, a custom
associated with the practice of divination among the peoples of the far north of the Eurasian continent and
one that reputedly serves to enhance the magical powers of the shaman. In modern
times the practice of gender change was studied among the Chukchees of eastern Siberia by the
anthropologist Waldemar Bogoras, who emphasized that no physical hermaphroditism
was involved, but rather the adoption in full of the clothing, speech, manners and even marital status of a woman. These Customs are believed to be remnants of a once-vast Eurasian
cultural realm, which may well have embraced the Scythians.
Turning to the Canaanite element identified with Ascalon, this would
lie in
the
indigenous religion of the country, more specifically in the practices forbidden in Deuteronomy 22:5 and
23:18. The latter form part of the profession of the kadesh and the kelebh, who donned women's
clothing and prostituted themselves to male worshippers at the temples of
Ishtar/Astarte, of which the oldest, as Herodotus specifically mentions, was
the one at Ascalon. The rendering of the word kadesh in the Septuagint by pomeuon and teliskomenos, which are glossed in the
lexica by terms indicating that these servitors of Ishtar performed both erotic
and priestly functions for the devotees of the goddess, suggests that the
hierodules of the Canaanite-Phoenician religion were the counterpart of the
shamans in the archaic cultures of sub-Arctic Eurasia. This conclusion
reinforces what is known from other sources: the kedeshlm engaged in homosexual
activity as part of their religious calling, which provoked the rivalry and
hatred of the priests and Levites in ancient Israel. Hence the Greek observers
of Palestinian and Eurasian sacrosexual customs were struck by the similarity
between them.
Soviet commentators on the passages in Herodotus and the Hippocratic corpus
have preferred to stress the purported survival of matriarchal customs: the
male who practiced divination had to adopt the gender of a woman in order to
exercise a function that had previously belonged only to women. However, it is
more consistent with the whole body of ethnographic data on divination and
magic to see in the Scythian institution (and its Canaanite analogue) another
instance of the peculiar gift for extrasensory perception that is often linked
with inversion of gender role and sexual orientation. The religious culture of
the Scythians institutionalized this phenomenon in the guise of a shamanism
which survived among the remote Ossetians until comparatively recent times,
when the mounting influence of Islam and Christianity led to its
disappearance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
M. I. Artamonov, "Antropomorfnye bozhestva v religit skifov"
(Anthropomorphic divinities in the religion of the Scythians), Arkheologicheskiï sbomik Gosudars tvennogo
Ermitazha, 2 (1961), 85-87, S. S. Bessonova, Religioznye predstavleniia skifov (The Religious Conceptions
of the Scythians), Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1983, pp. 56-59; Georges Dumézil, Romans de Scythie et d'alentour, Paris: Payot, 1978; W. R.
Halliday, "A Note on the ihelea nousos of the Skythians," Annual of the British
School at Athens, 17 (1910-11), 95-102; Karl Meuli, "Scythica. 2. Enarees. Schamanentum verwandter
Volker," Hermes, 70 (1935), 127-37.
Warren Johansson
Seafaring
As a
closed environment usually involving only one gender, maritime life offers
objective conditions favoring situational homoerotic behavior. Nonetheless, at
the present stage of research, documentation remains incomplete. Historical
evidence, which comes mainly from western civilization, is generally of two
types: on the one hand, the official policies of the maritime authorities, and
their enforcement; on the other, folklore and oral tradition, most commonly
sailor songs or sea shanties.
In addition to shipboard sexuality, there is a long and reasonably well
attested history of sexual interaction between seafaring men in port and homosexuals
attracted by a certain "sexual mystique" attributed to sailors at
large. As a result, seamen and their images have assumed a role in the gay
subculture out of all proportion to their miniscule presence as permanent
members of that subculture.
Naval Policy and Discipline.
Although
Greco-Roman culture was suffused with same-sex relations, little has been
recorded of this activity in a maritime context, probably because it was taken
for granted. In a fourth-century text from Athens, Aeschines notes that one
Timarchus, who had ostensibly gone to the port of Piraeus to learn the
barbering trade, had actually prostituted himself to sailors there.
The introduction of Tudeo-Christian norms created the presuppositions for a new
and problematic attitude, for the taboo on homosexual relations was supposed
to apply everywhere. Nonetheless, evidence of enforcement is patchy, probably
because shipboard activities were out of sight of land-based guardians of
official ideology and pirates paid them no heed anyway. In early modern Europe,
three nations - the Venetian Republic, the United Provinces [Holland), and
England - felt themselves at risk, because their very prosperity depended on
seaborne commerce. Sermons and pamphlets warned against the vengeance an angry
god would inflict on a nation that tolerated sodomy. Nonetheless, the only
evidence of sustained persecution comes from English naval history. During the
eighteenth-century wars, heavy punishment with the lash as well as hanging
were inflicted for buggery, reaching a peak during the conflict with Napoleon.
From 1806 to 1816, 28.6 percent of all executions in the Royal Navy were for
buggery. The punishments abated, but the practice evidently did not. Sir
Winston Churchill, for a time First Lord of Admiralty, was to remark that the
three traditions of the Royal Navy were "rum, sodomy, and the lash."
Although homosexual conduct has been decriminalized in the United Kingdom for
consenting adults (1967 and after), this liberalization does not apply to the
navy or merchant marine, where it remains subject to discipline.
In the United States, a kind of witchhunt was conducted among naval personnel
in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1919-21, but this local action had no immediate
sequel. Court records of testimony, however, demonstrate the sailors' casual
attitudes. Some Navy men and women were discharged in the late stages of World
War II as part of a campaign to rid the armed services of "sex
perverts." Introduction of women aboard ship has caused some shifts in
emphasis. In the USS Norton
Sound case
in Long Beach, California (1980), women in the ranks were subjected to
investigation for both heterosexual and lesbian activity. Naval discharges for
"homosexual involvement" are still occasionally handed out today,
though courts-martial for sodomy are extremely rare. Since the mid-1970s
administrative discharges have usually been characterized as
"Honorable," especially if the "involvement" in question
was off-ship and off-base. Admitted homosexuals are not eligible for
enlistment or commissioning in the United States Navy. Naval policy toward
homosexuality has been under attack from the gay and civil liberties movements
since the 1960s, when less-than-honorable discharges were common.
Attitudes of the Sailor. The custom of speeding
work through singing - the sea shanty - probably goes back to the days of oars
when keeping an exact beat was critical. Surviving sailor songs, however, go
back to the nineteenth and sometimes eighteenth centuries, handed down from
generation to generation in uncensored form and eventually written;down by
folklorists and collectors. These songs provide a quite different viewpoint on
shipboard sexuality from that of the official establishment.
The attitude reflected in these songs is one of casual acceptance of sex among the
sailors at sea, though homosexual adventures in port are not described. Thus,
the Royal Navy sang "Backside rules the Navy,/ backside rules the sea./
If you wanna get some bum [arse],/ better get it from your chum/ 'cause you'll
get no bum from me." An American Navy enlisted man's song,
"Turalai," celebrated the navy "for buggering whatever it
can" and went on to state flatly that from this activity "comparative
safety on shipboard/ is enjoyed by the hedgehog alone." Merchant mariners
commonly characterized the cabin boys as sexual recipients.
It is interesting to note that the sailor songs frequently accompanied tales of
heterosexual adventures in port with woeful endings involving venereal disease
and vengeful husbands, but the songs describing sex at sea among themselves are
good-humored and without such warnings.
Sailor slang characterized the passive sexual partner on ship as "sea
pussy," implying he was a legitimate substitute in the female-deprived
circumstances of an ocean voyage. Thus does the proverbial seaman's expression
"any port in a storm" find direct physiological outlet.
Sailors in general have long been noted for a relatively casual attitude toward
the standards of sexual "morality" held by landlubbers; this relative
tolerance also applies to same-gender sexual activity. Most seamen are of the
working class and widely share the attitude common among working-class men
that only the passive partner's activity is "homosexual" or
"unnatural," while the active, insertive partner's role is not
stigmatized.
In the American navy (until pay was substantially raised with the end of the
draft in the early 1970s), and in less-well-paid navies to this day, male
prostitution in port was quite common among enlisted sailors, sometimes for
nominal sums as an excuse for a desired sexual contact. The active,
"male" role had to be preserved, however. Not infrequently, the
poverty-stricken sailor would first earn some money offering himself for
fellatio with a homosexual male, then take the money so earned and spend it on
a female prostitute.
While it is clear that sailors in general are more tolerant of homosexuality
than a cross-section of the land-dwelling population from which they come, the
maritime subculture is not immune from the homophobia of that population. Significant
numbers of sailors can also be found to endorse the strictly homophobic norms
established by naval (if not merchant marine) authorities. While some captains
ignore the official policy, and others enforce it only when inescapably brought
to their attention, still others have been known to conduct vigorous
witchhunting. As with many other matters of shipboard Ufe, the atmosphere with regard
to homosexuality can vary enormously from one ship to another.
It should not surprise that significant numbers of young men who prefer the
companionship of other males and feel little or no need for females have for
centuries gone to sea. Those inclined toward passive roles have often found
themselves welcomed by sexually frustrated crew-mates, while those inclined
toward active roles have found it relatively easy to camouflage themselves as
"straight" while practicing the sex they like best.
The Mystique of the Sailor. For the landlubbing
civilian, sailors have often had a romantic aura, and for homosexual males
this has been supplemented by an uncommonly strong erotic mystique. This
mystique is promoted by many sailors, who traditionally pride themselves on
their erotic prowess, their experience of sexual variations from all over the
world, their revealing skin-tight uniforms, and their abundant sexual energy
stored up over weeks or months at sea. Some seamen speculate that the constant
vibrations of the powerful engines on ship make them especially horny.
Perceived by homosexuals as hypersexual, relatively casual about homosexual
contact, and easily plied with inhibition-loosening alcohol, it is no wonder
that even apparently heterosexual sailors were sought out and highly prized as
sexual partners. The sailors, of course, were usually aware of this and often
played up to it, resulting in a curious symbiosis of maritime and homosexual
subcultures. In gay slang, sailors are called "seafood," probably
reflecting their well-known (if scientifically undocumented) fondness for oral
sex, and the men who are particularly drawn to them are called "seafood
queens." In major ports, where the interaction of the two subcultures is
strong, there are well-known places, times, and means of making contact. In
Norfolk, Virginia (headquarters of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet), for example, there
are so many available sailors that many of the "seafood queens"
become specialists, adopting one particular ship and its crew or one
occupational speciality (such as radarman or boatswain's mate) to the exclusion
of others.
Not well known is the fact that a great deal of the motivation for those
generally heterosexual sailors who become repeatedly involved with gay men as trade is not sexual or financial at all. The young common sailor,
generally at the bottom of the shipboard hierarchy and often dismissed with
contempt by civilians at large, finds himself treated like royalty, his male
ego enhanced, his gripes given sympathetic attention. Instead of taking orders
all the time, he finds himself in a position to give them. Instead of the usual
sterile environment of cramped shipboard quarters, he gets to relax in a home
environment where he can kick back, watch television, and have his every need
attended to.
Literary and Artistic
Images. The sexual fascination with sailors was often expressed,
though sometimes cryptically, in literary works. Major monuments are the sea
novels of Herman Melville;
in White-Jacket (1850) the title character
declares, "sailors, as a class, entertain the most liberal notions
concerning morality ... or rather, they take their own views of such
matters." In 1895 Adolfo Caminha published a novel, Bom-Crioulo, offeringa frank view of an
interracial affair between two Brazilian sailors. Among twentieth-century
novels, Jean Genet's Querelle of Brest (1947) is outstanding for
its transposition of the sailor image into the author's own powerful moral
universe. In its turn the book was made into a film by the German gay director
Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
The
multitalented Jean Cocteau
offered a
dual homage to sailors in poetry and drawings. Christopher Bram's novel Hold Tight (1988) portrays the
spy-catching career of a sailor in a male brothel in New York City during
World War II. The American painters Paul Cadmus and Charles Demuth showed
sailors on shore leave as the object of the attention of gay men. Depictions of
sailors, often emphasizing the characteristic contours of the bell-bottom
trousers and the jaunty set of the cap, have been a staple of pornographic
drawings, photographs, and films.
Much research remains to be done, especially as regards homosexual behavior
among Muslim, Chinese, Japanese, and other non-Western sailors. There can be
no doubt, however, that seafaring, with its characteristic appeal to escape
from the constraints of land-based civilization, has been a major focus of
male homosexual imagination.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. E. Lawrence Gibson, Get Off My Ship: Ensign Berg v. the U.S. Navy, New York: Avon, 1978;
Arthur N. Gilbert, "Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861," Journal of Social History,
10
(1977), 72-98; Lawrence R. Murphy, Perverts by Official Order: The Campaign Against
Homosexuals by the United States Navy, New York: Harrington Park Press, 1988; Jan Oosterhoff,
"Sodomy at Sea and at the Cape of Good Hope During the Eighteenth
Century," Journal of Homosexuality, 16:1/2 (1988), 229-35;
Thomas W. Sokolowski, The Sailor 1930-45: The Image of an American Demigod, Norfolk, VA: The Chrysler
Museum, 1983.
Stephen Donaldson
Self-Esteem
Self-esteem
refers to the evaluative dimension of the self-concept: the attitude that an
individual adopts and customarily maintains with regard to the self as good or
bad. It reflects the extent to which an individual believes the self to be
capable, significant, and worthy. Self-esteem thus implies an overall attitude
of self-acceptance, self-respect, and self-worth independent of context.
Rosenberg notes that "A person with high self-esteem is fundamentally
satisfied with the type of person he is" while a person with low self-esteem
"lacks respect for himself, considers himself unworthy, inadequate, or
otherwise
seriously deficient as a person." In many ways; self-esteem is the
quintessential individual characteristic for Western society.
Theories Viewing Homosexual
Persons as Deficient in Self-Esteem. Traditional psychological and sociological theories
frequently view the homosexual person as living a lonely, depressed life,
conceiving and despising the self as inferior. This state exists, it is
believed, because of longstanding developmental handicaps that the homosexual
condition imposes or because of the negative effects that a homophobic social
world has on one's sense of identity. In either case, it appears inevitable
and, to some, even justifiable that the homosexual individual will devaluate
the self, resulting in self-contempt and a negative self-image.
A plethora of theoretical and empirical work has appeared to explain the
purported deficient self-esteem level of the gay and lesbian population. Most
theories of gay and lesbian self-esteem focus on the etiological connection between
self-evaluation and sexual orientation. For example, some psychoanalytic
theorists attribute to homosexuality, by definition, a wide range of neurotic
problems that relate to how an individual evaluates himself or herself.
Because of their developmental history, which is purported to be responsible
for both the sexual orientation and the negative self-image, homosexual persons
have (in this view) serious personality disturbances, engendering feelings of
self-inadequacy, sadistic and masochistic behavior, and suicidal gestures.
Varying the theoretical perspective but not the fundamental conclusions,
sociological theorists are far less concerned with inner psychological
dynamics. Rather, this perspective emphasizes the state of the external world
and its subsequent impact on self-evaluation among homosexual persons. Low
self-esteem is the result of internalizing negative values and attitudes - the
reflected appraisals - of significant others in her or his world during the
childhood years, especially those of parents, siblings, and teachers. There is
a clear message given to the growing child: sexual minority youth often feel
bad about themselves, have a poor self-image and low self-esteem and,
especially during their teenager years, feel totally alone.
One need not necessarily experience the negative social reactions directly -
say, by being harassed by peers or fired from a job; the imagined sense or
expectation of negative sanctions can be more powerful than a direct assault on
one's self-image. The mass media frequently incorporate anti-homosexual cultural
meanings and behaviors; apprehensions of discrimination that can emanate from
this exposure may have serious repercussions for one's self-image as a gay or
lesbian person.
More Balanced Approaches. Empirical studies testing
these theoretical assumptions concerning the negative self-esteem felt by gay
men and lesbians were first stimulated by Evelyn Hooker's (1957) research with
non-pathological homosexual individuals. She concluded that homó^ sexual persons are not
necessarily maladjusted individuals filled with self-loathing and low
self-esteem who experience difficulty in functioning. In a review of subsequent
empirical studies that compared the self-esteem level of gay and lesbian subjects
with that of heterosexual men and women, Savin-Williams (1990) found that eight
of the 16 studies comparing lesbians with heterosexual women found no difference
in mean self-esteem level; six, higher scores for lesbians; and two, higher
scores for straight women. Eighteen of the 30 studies comparing males reported
no difference in self-esteem level; five, higher scores for gay men; and
seven, higher scores for straight men.
Empirical research on the self-esteem of gay men and lesbians not only fails to
substantiate the theoretical speculations of a number of writers, in the case
of lesbians the findings tend to contradict the psychological and
sociological theorists. Apparently, despite the "developmental
handicaps" of growing up alienated and alone within a heterosexual home
and an alien society, most gay men and lesbians manage to evolve a healthy and
positive self-image in the process of coming out.
Research Perspectives. It is not particularly
profitable to focus on group differences in self-esteem level between gay and
straight subjects. More important are investigations that explore the developmental
experiences of those gay and lesbian individuals who maintain a negative self-image
in contrast with those who view the self as a positive entity, thus apparently
insulating themselves against societal messages to the contrary. If this focus
becomes primary, then there is hope that the social sciences will be in a
better position to address the fundamental issues of self-esteem among gay men
and lesbians. As a result, policies and programs that attempt to assist those
gay and lesbian individuals who experience negative self-feelings and
self-images will be better informed and thus more effective.
Equally critical is the need to expand the self-esteem literature beyond the
evaluative aspect to embrace perceptual and cognitive dimensions of the self.
Especially needed are in-depth longitudinal studies that trace the evolving
sense of self as a gay or lesbian person from the first moments of cognition in
infancy and childhood to full recognition - and acceptance - during maturity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Evelyn A. Hooker, "The Adjustment of the Male Overt
Homosexual," Journal of Projective Techniques, 21 (1957), 17-31; M.
Rosenberg, Conceiving the Self, New York: Basic Books,
1979; R. C. Savin-Williams, Gay and Lesbian Youth: Expressions of Identity, Washington, DC:
Hemisphere, 1990; Martin S. Weinberg and Colin J. Williams, Male Homosexuals: Their
Problems and Adaptations, New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Ritch Savin-Williams
Semiotics, Gay
In
general usage semiotics denotes a scholarly discipline concerned with the
interpretation of signs. Although the roots of the field go back at least to
the time of John Locke (1632-1704), semiotics first drew notice from a larger
public with the spread of the structuralist vogue in the 1960s and 1970s.
The expression gay
semiotics has been proposed with the more limited sense of the
repertoire of symbols and artifacts displayed on the person to signal one's
membership in the homosexual community or some sector of it - in short, tokens
of sexual preference or allegiance. Typically, these attributes of nonverbal
communication have been chosen so that the meaning is evident to initiates but
obscure to outsiders. In this respect gay semiotics recalls the symbolism of
freemasonry, with the important difference that it is not decreed or regulated
from above by some central authority, but disseminated by piecemeal invention
from below. Absolute secrecy is not a necessity: in the case of the lambda
pendant and the pink triangle button, the wearer may seek to elicit questions
from the curious, which then give the gay person a cue to present his or her explanatory
"rap."
Among sadomasochists, or those flirting with the idea, keys are worn externally
on the right or left to indicate the S or M respectively (though in some
circles the laterality may be reversed). A similar function is served by the
red handkerchief protruding from the right or left back pocket. Urban folklore
- assisted by commercially produced cards - maintains that there is a whole
range of different hanky colors identifying different preferences, but the
suggested guidelines do not seem to be followed very closely. As the key and
handkerchief codes have spread to outsiders - a common feature of the diffusion
of mass culture - the meaning has become blurred.
In the early 1980s some gay men took to carrying a small teddy bear in their back
pocket to indicate their fondness for gentle personalized sex as distinct from
what they perceived as the mechanical, unloving, sometimes brutal encounters of
the time.
In the late 1980s the immense quilt sponsored by the Names Project and carried
out by scores of local projects, all commemorating thousands who died of AIDS,
produced a fascinating array of visual iconography. The images of the individual
panels were chosen and sewn by surviving friends and relatives. Some panels
show emblems of favorite places where the person memorialized had lived;
another shows an image - of Moscow - that the deceased had wished to visit;
still others carry the insignia of the schools from which the deceased had
received degrees. Passionate avocations, such as music and dance, are
represented by appropriate symbols, such as a clef, a piano keyboard, or the
outline of a tapdancer. The use of sequins and bright, glittering colors
reflects characteristic aspects of the gay image. Some have quotations alluding
to the interests or the character of the individual commemorated. In terms of
the world history of funerary iconography, the symbols are usually
"retrospective" - referring to joys and accomplishments during life -
rather than "prospective" - directed toward a future life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Hal Fischer, Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among
Gay Men, San Francisco: NFS Press, 1977; Cindy Ruskin, The Quilt: Stories from
The Names Project, New York: Pocket Books, 1988.
Wayne R. Dynes
Sensibility
In eighteenth-century
English, under the stimulus of the proto-Romantic trend, the word
"sensibility" acquired the meaning of "sensitive or ready
capacity for emotional response, as distinct from intellect or will; acuteness
of feeling," overlaying the earlier sense of "physical response to
stimuli." More recently, the word has served to designate dimensions of
feeling that are conceived as flourishing in certain groups, such as
"feminine sensibility," "artistic sensibility." Although
the possibility has often been canvassed, it seems unlikely that there is any
single homosexual or lesbian sensibility, or mode of expressing the group's
way of looking at the world (which is scarcely unitary among the members of
these groups). What may exist, however, are more restricted sensibilities
cultivated by certain groups or schools of homosexual writers and artists, as
in Bloomsbury or lesbian Paris in the 1920s.
This problem is related to the question of whether homosexual individuals are
endowed with a greater creative potential than other people. It might be
thought that over the centuries the very stigmatizing of homosexuals and
lesbians has fostered the development of inventive ways of dealing with the
world. Thus far, however, such a phenomenon seems to have been shown only for
certain types of wit, and then for limited periods of time (as in camp). It has
not been possible to glean any empirical data supporting the folk belief in
special homosexual creativity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980.
Separatism, Lesbian
In its
strongest form, lesbian separatism means social, cultural, and physical
separation from all who are not lesbians. As society is now constituted this
option is possible only for a very few. Many lesbians who regard themselves as
separatists seek to live and work in circumstances that are as far as possible
"women's space," without insisting on the absolute exclusion of men.
The term "lesbian separatist" is also sometimes used within the
gay/lesbian movement for those who do not wish to work with gay men.
The Amazons, figures of Greek mythology rather than historical reality, are
supposed to have lived in an all-female society, rejecting men and making war
upon them. Aristophanes' play Lysistrata
(411 b.c.) shows Athenian women seceding from their city in a
"sex strike," but only temporarily - until the men agree to make
peace. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), a pioneering American socialist
and feminist, wrote a novel, Herland
(1915;
reprinted 1979), depicting a Utopia in Africa populated only by women. In her own life Gilman's
closest bonds were with other women, and she transmitted her distillation of
the women-centered aspects of the first wave of feminism to the second.
In 1971 the New York group Radicalesbians published an essay, "The Woman
Identified Woman," coining an expression that was to have considerable
resonance. Discarding the exclusively sexual identification of the word
lesbian, the essay proposed to identify the concept with a woman who chooses to
place her energies with other women.
Outsiders tend to label lesbian separatists as "women who hate men."
In their defense, separatists often say that what they are opposed to are the
domineering, aggressive aspects of male behavior, rather than men themselves.
They wish to make a clear statement that will set them apart from the
ambivalent stance of heterosexual women, even those who profess feminism.
Separatists believe that such straight women enter too readily into complicity
with the power structure of patriarchy; by continuing to meet the sexual and
emotional needs of men, these women give aid and comfort to the enemy.
Some women choose to form communes on "women's land," setting
themselves apart from all males, including male children and animals. In so
doing they hold that they are creating liberated zones in which their natures
can grow unhampered by the dictates of patriarchy. They also affirm their
protest against the practices of the society from which they have seceded. This
solution, which never attracted large numbers of women, seemed to ebb in the
late 1980s in the United States, though it has found advocates in other
countries, notably West Germany.
Other women who identify as separatists have remained in physical proximity to
men, while making their position known. They feel that, like members of ethnic
minorities, they must be free to go anywhere, while remaining themselves. Some
gay men, who assert that they are seeking to strengthen the feminine elements
of their own personality, are drawn to seek association with lesbian
separatists, but they are usually told that they can make their best contribution
through educating other men.
Some women have entered lesbian separatism for a number of years as part of a
process of personal growth, only to emerge later with a more complex position.
This seems to have been the experience of a principal theorist of the movement,
Charlotte Bunch, who remains a radical lesbian feminist.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Charlotte Bunch, Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action, New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1987; Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Julia Penelope, eds., For Lesbians Only: A
Separatist Anthology, London: Only-women Press, 1988.
Evelyn Gettone
Settembrini, Luigi (1813-1876)
Italian
patriot and writer. Born in Naples, Settembrini took an active role in the
movement for Italian unity. In 1851 the Bourbon regime condemned him as a
conspirator, first to death, and then to prison. In 1859 he was helped to
escape by his son, who diverted to Ireland the ship that was deporting him and
others to America. He became an exile in England and then in Florence, where he
continued to write and work for the cause. After the 1860 proclamation of the
kingdom of Italy, he taught in the University of Naples. In 1876 he became a
senator of the kingdom of Italy.
Settembrini was the author of the autobiographical Ricoidanze della mia vita and many other works,
including Lezioni
di letteratura italiana and a translation of the works of Lucian of Samosata from
the Greek, which is still used.
His homosexual side was first revealed in 1977, with the unexpected publication
of a novella, Il neoplatonici,
a
homoerotic fantasy set in ancient Greece. Written inl858-59whilehewasinprison, just after he
completed the Lucian translation, he sent the manuscript to his wife in the
guise of a translation of an ancient Greek text. Remaining in his unpublished
papers at the time of his death, the text was examined by Benedetto Croce, who
counseled against publication.
1 neoplatonici is a short work, but one
that conveys the author's intimate fantasies. Devoid of any real plot, it follows
the experiences of two boys who fall in love with one another and become lovers,
concluding with a double (heterosexual) wedding. The story includes descriptions
of sexual acts (anal) which have no parallel in Italian literature of
Settembrini's time. Although the modest ambitions of the work place it outside
the canon of the author's major works, it is nonetheless a dignified and
serious text, written in a fresh, lively style, and endowed with a certain
elegance.
Also noteworthy is the wholly positive and serene picture presented of
homosexual relations. The author deliberately returned to a pre-Christian
concept of (homo)sexuality, presenting same-sex love as an element of human
life that is capable of giving joy and satisfaction. Moreover, the novella
treats the link as both emotional and erotic - a rare accomplishment for the
period.
When the book was published a hundred years after the author's death, some
hailed it as a "revelation" that Settembrini had homosexual
relations while in prison. This suggestion remains a hypothesis, which as yet
has no documentary support.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Luigi Settembrini, I neoplatonici (with introductory note by Giorgio Manganelli and preface
by Raffaele Cantarella), Milan: Rizzoli, 1977.
Giovanni Dall'Orto
Sexism
Sexism is
the assumption that the members of one sex collectively are superior to those
of the other, together with the resultant differentiation practiced against
members of the supposed inferior sex, especially by men against women. The term
is also used to designate conformity with the traditional stereotyping of social roles on the
basis of sex (social sex roles).
Conceptual Foundations. Modeled on racism and
racist, the terms sexism and sexist do not seem to have been used before the
mid 1960s. Unlike racists, some sexist males profess to cherish and admire
members of the other sex, with whom they have intimate and family relations.
However, such admiration - the "pedestal theory" - is not
incompatible with discrimination, as when it is held that women must be barred
from certain occupations "for their own protection." The purported
admiration of women by sexist men is also linked to sexual objectification - the reductive vision of
women as simply bodies which are the object of lust rather than as full human
beings. Although the matter remains controversial, some hold that overarching
biological differences require difference of treatment in a few areas between
men and women. Pregnancy leave is one example. More problematic is the question
of differences in temperament, and even in styles of thought, between women and
men. In any event, an increasing body of opinion in Western industrial society
holds that women deserve equality of respect, together with full access to
positions of economic and political strength.
In the view of many feminists, sexism is rooted in an age-old system of
patriarchy, the institution and ideology of male domination. Usually couched in
the form of a blanket condemnation, this discourse fails to allow sufficiently
for gradations, which may be all-important to the situation of the individual.
Because most positions of power are held by men in Sweden as well as Iran, we
may conclude that both are subject to patriarchy, yet few would deny that the
situation of women today in the first country is far better than in the second.
The spread of the term sexism has fostered the coinage of ageism, classism, and even looksism, alongside the well-established elitism. Despite their seeming
usefulness, all these terms have the quality of epithets. In the usage of some
they reveal a certain smugness, a confidence that "we" are superior
to "them." Another term that has had some circulation is heterosexism, defined as the assumption
that heterosexuality and its institutional forms are the only valid and
socially beneficial arrangement, and that heterosexual values must prevail,
without modification. Unfortunately, in the political practice of gay advocacy
organizations the term tends to be divisive, alienating potential allies in
the civil rights struggle who happen to be heterosexual. It ill behooves a group
seeking pluralistic tolerance of its values and lifeways to appear to defame
those of the majority.
Effects
on Lesbians and Gay Men. Be this as it may, a good case can be made for the point
that prejudice against male homosexuals and lesbians is rooted in the sense
that they are not behaving in accordance with the norm appointed for their
sex, and that they are in fact inverting this norm. Victorian society and its
twentieth-century prolongation had a strong interest in promoting gender-role
conformity and in censuring "sissies" and "tomboys."
Still, the effects of the practice of sexism are different for lesbians from
what they are for gay men. Traditionally, lesbians [who are often not
perceived as such) have suffered discrimination as women. This existence of
this pattern leads lesbians to make common cause with heterosexual women in
the feminist movement. On the other hand, insofar as there are benefits to
women from sexist discrimination these benefits may be endangered by the
recasting of existing assumptions. Until recently, it has been assumed that,
unless she is clearly unfit, the mother should receive custody of the children
in divorce cases. Yet the questioning of this piece of traditional wisdom has
been one of the legal strategies used, in many cases surely hypocritically, to
deny lesbian mothers their children. On the whole, however, lesbians are
willing to risk any complications that might ensue from dismantling
discrimination against women, which affects them more severely. This is the
case with lesbian couples, where both typically have low-paying jobs, as contrasted
with heterosexual couples, where the man at least receives the salary which in
his profession is deemed adequate for the male head of a household.
Gay men hold that they too are victims of sexism inasmuch as they are regarded
as womanish and not deserving of the same privileges as "true men."
Yet discrimination in hiring and housing usually takes the form of outright
barring of homosexuals; that is to say, a gay man might be refused a j ob or an
apartment that a woman would receive. Conversely, in an all male social club,
gay men would be admitted. In both situations gay men and women are not
equated. In promotions, however, gay men may be passed over because they are held
to be wimpish, unstable, and unfitted for executive jobs. Here their situation
approximates to that of women, whose "flightiness" and "susceptibility
to emotional moodswings" ostensibly bar them from positions in the upper
echelons of business and government. According to some feminists, such
complaints on the part of gay men are trivial, inasmuch as gay men benefit qua
men from the privileges accorded to a whole gender class. However, these benefits
are differently apportioned, as the category of race shows, for black men do
not benefit (if at all) to the same degree as white men. These are only a few
of the complexities involved, and they suggest that, as an analytical tool,
"sexism" is rather blunt.
Modern industrial society is undergoing rapid technological and social change,
and in the course of this transition it is impossible to foresee what the ultimate
arrangements will be. While the discussion of sexism has often been heated and
rhetorical, thoughtful observers of social policy must remain indebted to it
for raising essential questions of human dignity and power.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
David L. Kiip, Mark G. Yudloff, and Marlene Strong Franks, Gender Justice, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986.
Wayne R. Dynes
Sex Negative, Sex Positive
This polarity
owes its inception to Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), who sought to synthesize Freud
and Marx in a style acceptable to the leftist intelligentsia in Central Europe
of the 1920s. The basic hypothesis is that some societies accept the inherent
value of sexual expression and indeed insist on it as a prerequisite of mental
health, while other human groups despise sexuality and are ceaselessly inventive
in devising austerities and prohibitions as a means of social control.
Despite its seeming radicalism, the exaltation of "sex positivism"
perpetuated the sentimental idealism of some eighteenth-century explorers and
ethnographers who contrasted the supposed sexual paradise of the South Seas
(for example, theTamoe of the Marquis de Sade's Aline et Valcour [1791]) with the ascetic
regimes of pre-Enlightenment Europe, in which Catholic and Protestant vied in
cultivating stringent codes of sexual morality. In our own day, some
homophile writers such as Wainwright Churchill characteristically see ancient
Greece as a "sex positive" culture because it tolerated and even
fostered pederastic relationships among males of the upper classes. The
situation of Greek women these writers pass by in silence. Popular authors of
books on "the sexual history of mankind" have reveled in depicting
the joys of life in temporally and spatially remote but uninhibited societies
where the burdens of chastity are unknown and sexual bliss is the lot of one
and all. Such golden-age fantasies are part of the the discourse of utopianism.
In truth, all cultures regulate sexual behavior in one way or another. No human
society allows its members, whatever their age, sex, or social status, to
interact sexually with one another without restriction. Indeed, there are not
a few in which heterosexual intercourse, even with the full consent of the
adult participants, can be punished by ostracism, mutilation, or even death if
it involves, say, a liaison between a male of a lower caste and a female of a
higher one. Also, the concern with the legitimacy of one's offspring causes the
sexual freedom of the nubile or married female to be severely restricted in
nearly all cultures, as no society wants a horde of children with no assignable
father deposited "on its doorstep."
If the myth of complete sexual freedom, however appealing it may be to critics
of Western sexual mores, is unfounded, what factors promoted its acceptance?
One is the greater licence accorded by many cultures to the foreigner - the
tourist or anthropologist - for a variety of psychological and economic
reasons, including the undeniable appeal of the exotic partner and the
practical demand in tourist resorts for prostitutes and hustlers to serve the
guests, even though similar behavior would not be tolerated in a native village
fifteen miles away. Also, the availability of teenaged partners to the
foreigner may reflect only the circumstance that children are virtually forced
into prostitution by families for whom this form of exploitation is a
lucrative source of income. Such a situation has nothing in common with the
"sexual freedom" on which the leaders of the sexual reform movement
liked to expatiate, it is rather a survival of slavery and feudalism in the
Third World. Also, even if certain practices are tolerated, the circle of
persons who may engage in them without being repudiated by their families or
punished by the civil authority is much narrower than Westerners - furnished
with a foreign passport and a source of income from outside the country - can
ever be aware. Everywhere wealth and power do impart a degree of freedom to
gratify one's sexual desires, including even those tabooed by the larger
society, but this is not an egalitarian right, it is a privilege of the elite
in a hierarchical, class regime of the kind that the left would abolish if it
could - at least in theory. The concrete practice of the states in the
socialist bloc is another matter. Finally, many cultures have puberty rites
that entail exceedingly painful practices such as circumcision, subincision,
clitoridectomy ("female circumcision"), tattooing, mutilation, and
the like - scarcely the Western ideal of an uninhibited adolescence.
What probably forms a line of demarcation is whether asceticism ranks as an
ideal of behavior for everyone, or only as a norm for those with a religious
vocation that does not affect the rest of the community. Medieval Christianity
did profess an ascetic ideal that would forever place homosexual activity
outside the pale of morality, since it can never serve the end of procreation
within lawful marriage, and all other forms of attachment were denied the
right of sexual expression.
Other cultures have seen pleasure as a good in itself, quite apart from the
procreative aspect, but the pursuit of pleasure, as in the case of the
prostitute, could also entail becoming a social outcast with no prospects of
conventional marriage. So the freedom of one was purchased at the price of
another's degradation or servitude.
All these considerations reveal only how far modern Western civilization is
from a solution to the "sexual problem," a solution that must take
into account the risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, the
possibility of unwanted pregnancy, and similar misfortunes. Even if a future
society adopts a wholly positive attitude toward sexual pleasure, the need to
shield both the individual and the collective from the negative consequences
of unregulated sexual practice poses a problem that cannot be wished away.
Warren Johansson
Sexual Liberty and the Law
Sexual
liberty has been of particular interest in Anglo-Saxon thought. The reception
of the Enlightenment from the Continent, from Beccaria, Filangieri, the French philosophes, and the Code Napoléon mandated a reexamination
of common law traditions that long resisted the wave of criminal law reform.
The ideas of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) have been enormously influential in
this sphere. Perhaps unaware of his father James' friend Jeremy Bentham's
incisive unpublished treatises arguing for the decriminalization of sodomy,
Mill defended individual liberties and in the tradition of the philosophes urged minimal state
interference with speech and conduct of individuals. Mill's ideas have not gone
unchallenged. Champions of traditional Judeo-Christian morality, including Sir
fames Fitzjames Stephen in 1874 and Baron PatrickDevlin in the 1960s, argued
that a society that failed to control the morality of individuals would disintegrate.
Hart's
Defence of Liberty. In Law, Liberty and Morality (1963) Professor Herbert
Lionel Adolphus Hart sets forth the best analytical argument against the
suppression of victimless sexual offenses: the criminal law itself inflicts
suffering by requiring that some persons repress their "anti-social"
urges. This is of particular importance in the case of the laws enforcing a
sexual morality that may create misery of a special degree. For both the
difficulties involved in the repression of sexual impulses and the consequences
of repression are quite different from those involved in the abstention from
"ordinary crime." The imposition of sexual morality by state power
interferes with the personality of the individual far more than do laws simply
meant to curb the criminal underworld.
As to the outrage of tradition-minded and religious individuals Hart replied:
"For offence to feelings, it may be said, is given not only when immoral
activities or their commercial preliminaries are thrust upon unwilling
eyewitnesses, but also when those who strongly condemn certain sexual
practices as immoral learn that others indulge in them in private." The
law can offer no relief to those who experience moral outrage at the thought
that others may be engaging in conduct which they deem immoral. "To punish
people for causing this form of distress would be tantamount to punishing them
simply because others object to what they do; and the only liberty that could
coexist with this extension of the utilitarian principle is liberty to do things
to which no one seriously objects. Such liberty is plainly quite
nugatory." Individual liberty entails the right to engage in conduct
which others find objectionable or distasteful; this is inseparable from the
very notion - "unless, of course, there are other good grounds for
forbidding it. No social order which accords to individual liberty any
value" could also confirm the adherents of the Judeo-Christian tradition
in the right to live in a society free of behavior which that tradition
condemns. They may rightly insist on being protected from public display of
such behavior, but not from private.
Rebuttal
of Devlin. In reply to Devlin's assertion that a society requires a
shared morality, Hart claims that "(t]here seems, however, to be central
to Lord Devlin's thought something more interesting, though no more
convincing, than the conception of social morality as a seamless web. For he
appears to move from the acceptable proposition that some shared morality is
essential to the existence of any society to the unacceptable
proposition" that any change in the moral code of a society is coterminous
with its destruction.
Devlin's views evidently reflect the wish to restate the sexual morality of
medieval or Reformation Christianity in the guise of an abstract concept of morality as
tantamount to the loyalty which the citizen owes to the modern state: "It
is clear that only this tacit identification of a society with its shared
morality supports Lord Devlin's denial that there could be such a thing as
private immorality and his comparison of sexual immorality, even when it takes
place 'in private,' with treason. No doubt it is true that if deviations from
conventional sexual morality are tolerated by the law and come to be known, the
conventional morality might change in a permissive direction, though this does
not seem to be the case with homosexuality in those European countries where
it is not punishable by law." For the Christian moralist, though not the
liberal thinker, any departure from a moral code held revealed and immutable is
divine lèse-majesté,
which a
secular state must convert into the notion of "treason" to find an
equivalent.
Devlin upholds the view now totally disavowed by reputable historians that
"history shows that the loosening of moral bonds is often the first stage
of [social] disintegration." This kind of generalization about the
dangers of decadence filled the moralizing history textbooks of past
generations, and was even the standard explanation of the fall of Rome. Today
this myth lies buried under the weight of the accumulated mass of
anthropological, sociological, historical, and other scholarly evidence and is
invoked only by the half-educated when they need a generalization to support
their resistance to change - which is an inescapable characteristic of human
institutions. Devlin's wish to confer immutability upon the Tudeo-Christian
condemnation of homosexuality through claiming that morals do not change, only
the degree of society's toleration of their violation, amounts to a play on
words. The increased toleration is a proof that people's ideas about the
validity of the principle have in fact changed, even if religious conservatives
who believe in the divine origin of moral norms would like to maintain that
having once been "revealed" they cannot change throughout eternity.
Legislation and Public
Opinion. Hart next takes up the argument - a serious one when one
considers the motives of legislators who must submit their voting records to
the approval of their constituents - that the irrational aversion and disgust
caused by homosexuality justify the retention of penal sanctions: "The
conviction that such practices [homosexuality] are morally wrong is surely
inseparable in the mind of the majority from instinctive repulsion and the deep
feeling that they are 'unnatural.'" Devlin maintained that English law had
a standard of its own - the reasonable man, the right-minded man, "the man
in the Clapham omnibus" - who should not be obliged to argue why conduct
that he instinctively feels to be abominable is abominable." Such thinkers
as Kurt Hiller in his legal dissertation on The Right Over One's Self (1908) and Coenraad van
Emde Boas in his thesis on Shakespeare's
Sonnets and the Double Disguise Plays ( 1952) had earlier discussed this issue of the subjective
response to homosexual behavior ("the vital aversion") which exists
quite independent of anything in the book of Leviticus or in the canon law of
the Christian church, freely admitting that the barely educated "masses"
still shared the medieval beliefs and attitudes, and that only an enlightened
minority of intellectuals were actively promoting the new credo of sexual
freedom. In this matter Hart seems to retreat into the defense that the
minority should be allowed the right to its tolerant views, even if the
majority persists in rejecting them.
Intellectual Liberty. The freeplay of ideas in
the marketplace, Hart pointed out, has undermined traditional platitudes:
"The real solvent of social morality, as one critic of Lord Devlin has
pointed out, [Richard Wollheim, Crime,
Sin, and Mr. Justice Devlin, p. 40] is not the failure of the law to endorse its
restrictions with legal punishment, but free critical discussion. It is this -
or the self-criticism which it engenders - that forces apart mere instinctive
disgust from moral condemnation. If in our own day the 'overwhelming moral
majority' has become divided or hesitant over many issues of sexual morality,
the main catalysts have been matters to which the free discussion of sexual
morals, in the light of the discoveries of anthropology and psychology, has
drawn attention." This amounts to little more than saying that because the
sexual reform movement has called the traditional beliefs into question by
undermining the complacency with which they were accepted - since this rested
in the last analysis on their supposed divine origin - they should no longer
be enforced even if the majority still upholds them. Moreover, Hart replicates
Mill's and the eighteenth-century liberals' fear of the tyranny of the
majority: "It seems fatally easy to believe that loyalty to democratic
principles entails acceptance of what may be termed moral populism: the view
that the majority have a moral right to dictate how all should live. This is a
misunderstanding of democracy which still menaces individual liberty." In other
words, if the authoritarian state of the Middle Ages had the right to
legislate personal morality, it has not bequeathed it to the majority in a
modern democratic one, though conservatives may in this case appeal to the
tradition-minded majority against the reformers.
Hart summarized: "Whatever other arguments there may be for the enforcement
of morality, no one should think even when popular morality is supported by an
'overwhelming majority' or marked by widespread 'intolerance, indignation, and
disgust' that loyalty to democratic principles requires him to admit that its
imposition on a minority is justified."
Conclusion.
Although
National Socialist and Communist totalitarians have repressed both religion and
sexual freedom, the history of the struggle for homosexual rights within
democratic societies has been in some sense a duel between the sexual reform
movement on the one hand and the church and its heirs and allies on the other.
The latter have been able to win not a few victories at the polls and in the
legislatures by appealing to the residue of medieval "intolerance,
indignation, and disgust" in the electorate. Gay liberation is confronted
with the task of fighting an uphill battle against the defenders of traditional
sexual morality, in no small measure because in the English-speaking world
classical liberalism long shirked its task of reforming criminal laws of
sexual offenses.
On the positive side, President Reagan's nominee, Robert Bork, failed to gain
confirmation by the Senate to the Supreme Court (1987) in large part because he
was regarded as the leading exponent of attempts to legislate morality in the
Judeo-Christian tradition of Stephen and Devlin, against the pragmatic
tradition of minimizing societal control over the individual embodied in the
American Bill of Rights and later amendments, and so eloquently supported by
Bentham and Mill in the nineteenth century and Hart in the twentieth. Modifying
his views, Devlin himself was later to write in The Judge (1979): "It is
generally agreed that there was no consensus, probably not even a bare
majority,... for the reformation of the laws against homosexuality.
Nevertheless [the change was made and] has surely helped to promote a more
tolerant attitude to homosexuals." He thus conceded that legislative
reform could justifiably be enacted in advance of changes in public opinion,
and that the effect of such legislation might feed back onto that public
opinion in a salutary way.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Carl F. Cranor, "The Hart-Devlin Debate," Criminal Justice Ethics, 2:1 (1983), 59-65; Patrick
Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals, London: Oxford University
Press, 1965; Coenraad van Emde Boas, Shakespeare's sonnetten en hun verband met de
travesti-double spelen: een medisch-psychologische Studie, Amsterdam:
Wereld-Bibliothek, 1952; H. L. A. Hart, Law, Liberty, and Morality (The Harry Camp Lectures),
London: Oxford University Press, 1963; Kurt Hiller, Das Recht über sich
selbst: eine strafrechtsphilosophische Studie, Heidelberg: Carl Winter,
1908; Richard D. Mohr, Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society and Law, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988; David A. J. Richards, The Moral Criticism of
Law, Encino,
CA: Dickenson Publishing Company, 1977. William A. Percy and Arthur C. Wamer
Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Sexually
transmitted diseases (STDs), also called venereal diseases, are among the most
common infectious disorders in the world at the end of the twentieth century.
They affect men and women of all backgrounds and economic levels. However, they
are most prevalent among teenagers and young adults; nearly one-third of all
cases occur in teenaged subjects. Homosexual men suffer disproportionately
from STDs, while lesbians are scarcely affected by them, for reasons having to
do with the anatomical and physiological differences in their manner of sexual
intimacy and greater male promiscuity.
The incidence of STDs in the general population is rising; after World War IT
young people began to cross the threshold of sexual maturity earlier, becoming
sexually active at an earlier age, and having multiple sexual partners. The
tendency of homosexual men to engage in promiscuous sexual activity was reinforced
by the freedom that came in the liberal 1970s, when much of the illegality and
clandestinity attached to the search for partners of the same sex vanished. But
the new condition called Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), first
reported in the United States in 1981, struck down thousands of homosexual men
until studies of the etiology and transmission identified the specific
practices that were responsible for its spread. Since then, the greater number
of new cases has shifted to intravenous drug abusers. However, no effective
immunizing agent or therapy for the condition had been discovered as of 1989.
Lesbians, on the other hand, were no more subject to AIDS than they had been to
the classical STDs.
Gonorrhea. The classic venereal
disease is gonorrhea, attested since classical antiquity; it was, down to the
appearance of AIDS, the most common STD among homosexual men. It is caused by
the gonococcus, a bacterium that grows and multiplies rapidly in moist, warm
areas of the body such as the urinary tract or the rectum (it does not survive
long in the mouth, but can sometimes lodge in the throat), while in women the
cervix is the most common site of infection. Gonorrhea is usually localized;
however, the disease can spread to the ovaries and fallopian tubes, resulting
in pelvic inflammatory disease, which can cause infertility and other serious
conditions. The early symptoms of gonorrhea are mild, and some infected
individuals display no symptoms of the disease; this is one reason why it is
so readily transmitted. Men infected in the urinary tract usually have a
discharge from the penis and a burning sensation during urination that may be
severe. Symptoms of rectal infection include discharge, anal itching, and
sometimes painful bowel movements. The disease is treated with antibiotics such
as penicillin, though there is increasing concern about the emergence of new
strains of penicillin-resistant gonorrhea. Regardless of the drug prescribed,
the patient should take the full course of medication and then return to the
clinic for a follow-up test to determine whether the infection has been
completely eliminated. In the 1970s, because of the ease with which gonorrhea
could be treated, not a few homosexual men developed a nonchalance about the
frequency with which they contracted gonorrhea and an indifference to
prophylactic measures, so that the incidence of the disease was far higher than
among heterosexuals of the same race and social class.
Syphihs. The disease of syphilis
made its appearance in the first stage of the formation of the global
metasystem, which is to say, the network of economic and political relations
that includes all of the regional subsystems. This initial stage occurred in
the years 1480-1520, when the voyages of discovery reshaped the image of the
world and laid the foundation for the global economy that was to be created in
the following centuries. Although the matter is still disputed by medical
historians, the weight of the evidence inclines to the view that syphilis was
confined to the Caribbean until the sailors of Columbus brought it back to
Spain on their return voyage in 1493. Carried by sailors and soldiers - even
today high-risk groups for STDs - syphilis rapidly spread to the other end of
the Old World, so that by 1522, when Magellan's ships arrived at the Philippine
Islands, it was already known there as "the Frankish [= European]
disease."
Syphilis is today readily treated with antibiotics, but if left untreated, in
its tertiary stage it can cause mental disorders, blindness, and death. It is
caused by a corkscrew-shaped bacterium called Treponema pallidum. The systemic infection is
acquired by direct contact with the sores of someone who has an active infection.
Though usually transmitted through the mucous membranes of the genital area,
the mouth, or the anus, the bacterium can also pass through lesions on the skin
of other parts of the body. A pregnant woman with syphilis can give the disease
to her unborn child, who may be bom with serious damage to the central nervous
system. Also, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the practice of
bleeding was common, syphilis was occasionally transmitted by shared cupping
glasses, much as AIDS is now contracted by the shared needles of IV-drug users.
Because the early symptoms of syphilis may be quite mild, many people fail to
seek treatment when they first become infected. Such untreated carriers can
infect others during the primary and secondary stages of the disease, which may
last as much as two years. The first symptom of primary syphilis is an open sore called a
chancre, which can appear from 10 days to 3 months after exposure (usually 2-6
weeks). Ordinarily painless and sometimes even inside the body, the chancre
may go unnoticed. It is usually found on the area of the body exposed to the
bacteria, such as the penis, the vulva, or the vagina. A chancre may also
develop on the cervix, tongue, lips, or fingertips. Within a few weeks it
disappears, but the disease continues its progress, and if not treated in the
primary stage, may evolve through three further stages.
Secondary syphilis is marked by a skin rash that appears from 2 to 12 weeks
after the chancre disappears. The rash may extend to the whole body or be confined
to a few areas such as the palms of the hands or the soles of the feet. In
these sores active bacteria are present that may spread the infection through
contact with the broken skin of the infected party. The rash may be accompanied
by influenza-like symptoms such as mild fever, fatigue, headache, sore throat,
and patchy hair loss, swollen lymph glands throughout the body, and other
disorders. The rash usually heals within several weeks or months, and the other
symptoms subside as well. The signs of secondary syphilis occasionally come and
go over a period of one to two years; like those of the previous stage, the
symptoms of the secondary one may be mild enough to go unnoticed.
If untreated, syphilis lapses into a latent stage during which the patient is
no longer contagious. Many individuals who are not treated will suffer no
further consequences of the disease. However, 15 percent to 40 percent of
those infected go on to develop the complications of late, or tertiary
syphilis, in which the bacteria inflict damage on the heart, eyes, brain,
nervous system, bones, joints, or almost any other part of the body, sometimes
causing paralysis. This stage can run into years or even decades.
There are three ways of diagnosing syphilis: a physician's recognition of its
symptoms, microscopic identification of syphilitic bacteria, and blood tests,
of which the last are not always reliable, as they can result in false positive
results in people with autoimmune disorders or certain viral infections.
Syphilis is treated with penicillin, administered by injection; for patients
allergic to penicillin other antibiotics can be used. Twenty-four hours after
beginning therapy a carrier of syphilis usually can no longer transmit it. A
small number of patients fail to respond to the standard doses of penicillin,
so that it is necessary for patients to have periodic repeated blood tests to
ascertain that the infectious agent has been completely destroyed and that
there is no further trace of the disease in his organism. Proper treatment will
cure the disease at any stage, but in late syphilis the damage done to body
organs is irreversible.
AIDS. Acquired Immunodeficiency
Syndrome made its appearance in the last phase of the formation of the global
metasystem - the period after 1960. Somewhat hypothetically, scientists have
reconstructed its origins as follows. When the former African colonies were
emancipated from the tutelage of the metropolitan countries and a network of
commercial air lines was established that brought hitherto remote areas of
Central Africa within 36 hours' flying time of the major cities of the globe, a
rare condition that had been found in isolated cases in the neighborhood of
Lake Victoria began to spread to the United States, Brazil, and Western
Europe.- Others dispute this theory of African origin.
Individual cases occurred in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, but
only in 1981 was the condition recognized and named. The majority opinion was
that it was caused by a virus (Human Immunodeficiency Virus; HIV) that destroys
the body's ability to fight off infection, so that the victim becomes susceptible
to many fatal diseases, called opportunistic infections, and to certain forms
of cancer, as well as a characteristic malignant form of Kaposi's sarcoma.
At the outset, most victims of the condition in the United States were homosexual
men in their late twenties or thirties, though in Central Africa it is principally
an affliction of heterosexuals. After some floundering, researchers ascertained
that passive anal intercourse was at the highest risk in sexual transmission,
though many continued to assere that all exchange of bodily fluids must be
avoided. Health officials, the media, and gay organizations vigorously
promoted "safe sex" techniques as a means of avoiding AIDS. The gay
community voiced urgent demands for more funds for research, therapy, and
care for people with AIDS, but an effective cure eluded the best efforts of
medical science. Other victims of AIDS were intravenous (IV) drug users, hemophiliacs,
and children born to women who had contracted the condition mainly by sharing
needles with other IV-drug users. Lesbians remained essentially untouched by
the epidemic because of the different techniques which they employed to achieve
sexual gratification.
OtherSTDs.
Other
sexually transmitted diseases include chlamydial infections, genital herpes,
and genital warts. Chlamydial infections are now the commonest of all STDs,
with some three to four million new cases occurring each year. They often have
no symptoms and are diagnosed only when complications develop. Occurring in
both men and women, they are treated with an antibiotic drug such as
tetracycline. Genital herpes is a disease primarily of heterosexuals that has
remained incurable; the major symptoms are painful blisters or open sores in
the genital area. Even though the sores disappear in two or three weeks' time,
the virus remains in the body and the lesions may recur. Genital warts are
caused by a virus related to the one that causes common skin warts. They are
generally treated with a topical drug applied to the skin, or by freezing. If
the warts are very large, surgery may be needed to remove them.
Infectious hepatitis, a disorder of the liver, may be transmitted through poor
sanitation and infected food. For this reason its additional status as a
sexually transmitted disease, was for a long time ignored. Yet it was
commonly acquired by gay men, sometimes through oral-anal contact
("rimming"). In fact, until the introduction of a vaccine in the
early 1980s, the gay male rate of hepatitis was ten times the United States
national average.
Prevention.
The
danger posed to the gay male community - and to a sexually more permissive
society - by STDs has led to the adoption of "safe sex" guidelines
for intimacy with casual partners or complete strangers, and to the revival of
the condom, a sheath for the penis which was invented in England about 1705.
Originally it was made of animal intestine, but now it is usually fashioned of
very thin rubber. As a simple, cheap, and largely effective if not
aesthetically pleasing device it was used in heterosexual intercourse earlier
in this century mainly to prevent conception, but found little application in
homosexual pairing since the chance of impregnation was non-existent. In the
1980s this attitude changed, and the gay media paid much attention to condoms.
Special models appeared that are claimed to be superior for anal (as distinct
from vaginal) penetration, and fear of disease has inspired the use of the
sheath even for oral-genital contact. In any event, the sexual abandon that
characterized much homosexual life in the 1970s has become fraught with danger,
and the adage "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" has
gained renewed meaning.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
King K. Holmes and Per-Anders Mardh, et al., eds., Sexually Transmitted
Diseases, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983; M. Laurence Lieberman, The Sexual Pharmacy: The
Complete Guide to Drugs with Sexual Side Effects, New York: NAL Books, 1988;
Pearl Ma and Donald Armstrong, eds., The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and Infections of
Homosexual Men, Brooklyn, NY: Yorke Medical Books, 1984; David G. Ostrow,
ed, Sexually
Transmitted Diseases in Homosexual Men, New York: Plenum, 1983.
Warren
Johansson
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)
Playwright
and poet, often considered to be the greatest writer in the English language.
Of tenant farmer stock and the son of a glover, Shakespeare was bom in the
provincial town of Stratford-upon-Avon in England; however, the very few facts
known about his life are derived from various legal documents. In 1582, he
married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children within the next three
years; the following five years are unaccounted for, but by 1594 he was
involved in the theatre world in London as both an actor and a playwright. He
enjoyed an increasingly successful theatrical career until his retirement in
1612 and his return to Stratford.
With so few substantiated facts about his biography, one can only turn with
some reservation to his works for insight into the man. An undisputed master of
both poetry and human nature, Shakespeare is the author of some of the most
enduring classics in world literature: Richaid
III (1591),
Romeo and Juliet (1595), As You Like It (1599), Hamlet (1600), Twelfth Night (1601), Othello (1604), King Leai (1605), Macbeth (1606),
and The Tempest (1611), among his 3 7
plays. Given the almost complete range of human- experience chronicled in
these works, one can state little about the author's own character and
personality without conjecture.
Shakespeare's prolonged separation from his wife and the stipulation in his
will that she inherit his "second best bed" has, however, sparked
much debate about his sexuality.
The Plays. A search of the plays
reveals little advocacy for homosexuality, if much tolerance and compassion for
all types of benign variations of human behavior. While his plays are peopled
with many passive and introspective men (such as Hamlet and Richard II) as well
as aggressive and independent women (such as Rosalind in As You Like It and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing), no distinctly gay
characters are evident. Some critics have singled out the sensuous and seemingly
asexual Enobarbus of Antony
and Cleopatra, the effete fop who incites the aggressively masculine
Hotspur in Henry
IV, or
the doting and infatuated Sebastian of Twelfth
Night as
prototypes, but such designations are inconclusive.
Historically, however, theatrical companies of Shakespeare's time did not
employ women; instead, their roles were played by boys, apprentices to the
companies. In adherence to the laws and sympathies of the times, the plays
were, therefore, unable to display any overtly sexual behavior, but one of
Shakespeare's most frequent plot devices was to have his heroines disguise
themselves as boys, particularly in the comedies. Thus, what in reality was a
boy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a boy leads to some psychologically
acute and complex scenes with homoerotic suggestions, such as the encounters
between Rosalind (as Ganymede, a name rich in suggestiveness) and Orlando in As You Like It and Viola (as Caesario)
and Orsino in Twelfth
Night.
The Sonnets. For more substantive evidence, one must turn instead to
Shakespeare's sequence of 154 poems in the form of sonnets, published surreptitiously
in 1609 and immediately protested by their author. Probably intended as a
personal exercise for private circulation, the sonnets may be the works that
reveal something of the man himself; in them, Shakespeare names the persona
"Will," an obviously personal and intimate diminution of William,
and, as in most of the Renaissance sonnet sequences, their subject is erotic love.
Dedicated to "Mr. W. H.," who has been variously identified as the
Earl of Southampton, a boy actor named Willy Hewes, Shakespeare himself (in a
misprint of his initials), someone unknown to history, or someone invented,
the first 126 are clearly homoerotic, while most of the others concern a woman
conventionally called"theDarkLady." Historically, those scholars who
begrudgingly admit to their subject matter try to discount their message. Most
claim that the attraction the persona feels for the fair young man is either
platonic or unconsummated; others assert that the poems are only examples of
the Renaissance male friendship tradition. Still others insist on the fallacy
of equating the persona with the poet and confusing literature with autobiography.
However, a close reading reveals a genuine emotional bond quite clearly
consummated physically, one that grows and develops over a period of time, one
threatened by a rival poet as well as the Dark Lady herself, also the mistress
of the persona and also in pursuit of Mr. W. H. If not homosexual, the
sensibility behind the poems is decidedly bisexual, and if not William
Shakespeare, "Will" is a voice that speaks with convincing
experience. Those who minimize the homoeroticism of the sonnets fail to consider
why a heterosexual poet would choose homosexual love and desire as his subject
matter. They also fail to give credit to the persona, in Sonnet 121, when he
says "I am that I am."
Conclusion. Shakespeare's sexual
identity will probably always be speculative, but this in no way diminishes
the achievement of a playwright who could sensitively chart the full range of
human involvement in a compassionate portrait of human diversity. But without
question, Shakespeare is the author of some of the finest lyric poems to
describe gay love and passion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, London: Gay Men's Press,
1982; Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience, New York: Ballantine,
1981; Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1985; Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977.
Rodney Simaid
Shamanism
In the
strict sense, shamanism is a phenomenon of the magical and religious life of
Siberia and Central Asia. At its core lies a specific technique of ecstasy of
which the shaman alone is the master, specializing in a trance during which his
soul is believed to leave his body and either ascend to the heavens or descend
to the underworld. The shaman further controls his spirits in the sense that as
a human being, he is able to communicate with the dead, with demons, and with
nature spirits without becoming their instrument. He is invested with power over
fire and enjoys a unique method of healing. Shamans belong to the elect who
have access to a region of the sacred that is closed to other members of the
community.
Siberia. The connection of homosexuality
with shamanism was noted by the classic investigators of the subject. Waldemar
Bogoras mentions that, under the influence of a Siberian shaman, a Chukchi lad
at sixteen years of age will suddenly relinquish his sex and imagine himself to
be a woman. He adopts female dress, lets his hair grow, and devotes himself
entirely to female occupations. Disclaiming his sex, he takes a husband into
the hut and performs all the work usually incumbent upon the wife. This change
of gender identity is strongly encouraged by the shamans, who interpret such
cases as an injunction of their individual deity. The gender shift coincides with entry
into shamanhood, and nearly all the shamans are individuals who have left their
sex.
There are three degrees of eff emination of the male. The lowest grade consists
simply in the feminine style of the hairdo. The second is marked by the adoption
of female clothing, which can be for shamanistic or therapeutic purposes; it
need not entail a complete change of sex. That is the third stage, in which the
subject, aided by the spirits, learns all the female handicrafts, begins to
speak in a feminine mode, and even acquires the physical weakness and
helplessness of a woman. He becomes a woman with the physical appearance of a
man. He contracts a marriage with a man which is then solemnized in the usual
fashion, and the couple lives together as man and wife, with the
"wife" taking the passive role in sexual relations. The shaman also
has a special protector among the spirits who functions as a kind of
supernatural husband, regarded as the real head of the family who gives orders
through the "wife," which the husband is duty-bound to execute. The
effeminate shaman is feared by other shamans who have not undergone the change
of sex, because he alone has the spirit protector who can avenge any wrong done
to his protege.
In
speaking of the Koriaks, Stefan Krasheninnikov refers to men who occupy the
position of concubines, comparing them in turn to the "men transformed
into women" of the Kamchadale. Every one of the latter is regarded as a magician
and interpreter of dreams, wears women's clothes, does women's work, and has
the status of a concubine. The homoeroticism of the Koriaks was interpreted by
Bogoras and Waldemar Jochelson as an outgrowth of the shamanic, but in turn as
a monopoly of the profession of shaman held by the homosexual. In olden times,
according to Jochelson, shamans "transformed" into women were not
rare among the Koriaks, and were even regarded as the most powerful of their
ilk. They entered into marriages with men, or became second wives when a
female wife was already present. Professional shamans have guardian spirits
who appear to them in the guise of animals or birds, typically as wolves,
bears, seagulls, eagles, or lapwings. The future shamans are often nervous youths
who suffer from attacks of hysteria during which the spirits order them to
devote themselves to shamanism. Those in the process of becoming shamans pass
through a stage of fits of wild paroxysm alternating with states of total
exhaustion. The phenomenon was declining among the Koriaks early in the
twentieth century following their conversion to Russian Orthodoxy.
The Broader Context. Edward Carpenter understood the shaman as
the precursor of a higher stage of cultural evolution, a variation of the human
type that sprang from a variant of the sexual orientation itself, or rather of
the germ plasm that underlies that orientation. Such classes of men and women,
diverging as they do from the norm of sexuality, become repositories and foci
of new kinds of lore and new techniques of control over the world of spirits
and divinities feared and adored by the rest of their tribe. The primitive
development of the intellectual, as opposed to the purely physical, aspects of
culture was first embodied in the shamanistic type, which rejected the customary
activities of the hunter and warrior in favor of a sacral occupation. The
superstitious belief that the spirits had conferred supernatural powers upon
them reinforced their commitment to the profession of trance medium and healer
- one exercised by many homosexual men and women in different cultures, even'in
the high civilizations of later centuries. In the whole process the
homosexual-transvestite orientation is primary, the shamanic calling
secondary. Shamanism is a distinctive feature of the archaic paleoarctic
cultures that has fascinated students of primitive religion, though not all
have acknowledged the homoerotic component of the phenomenon.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Waldemar Bogoras, "The Chukchi of Northeastern Asia," American Anthropologist, 3 (1901), 80-108; Edward Carpenter, Intermediate Types Among Primitive
Polk, London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1919; Ferdinand Karsch-Haack, Das gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der
Naturvölker, Munich:
Reinhardt, 1911; Ake
Ohlmarks,
Studien
zum Problem des Schamanismus, Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1939.
Warren Johansson
Shawn, Ted (1891-1972)
American
dancer and choreographer. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, to a father who was a
successful newspaperman and a mother related to the famous Booth family of
actors, Shawn at first planned to be a Methodist minister. But while at the
University of Denver he contracted diphtheria and the experimental serum that
saved his life left him temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. As he began
to recover, he turned to therapy, to exercise, and then to dance. When he
decided upon a dance career, he appraised the potential of his own body and
found it incompatible with the demands of ballet, but he surmised that he could
infuse the decorativeness and technical polish of the ballet into a
contemporary dance style that was still rather trivial. This gave him a new
vision of dance in America whose culture was then scarcely receptive to such an
innovation, and he devoted his life to realizing it.
His first partner was a dancer named Norma Gould, but she was soon eclipsed in
Shawn's life by Ruth St. Denis, a star of the day. They met in 1914, and not
long afterwards he proposed to her, although at 22 he was some fourteen years
the younger, and despite her objections they were married on August 13. The
union was not consummated until some time in October, and then only after she
had convinced herself that contraceptive methods would shield her from
pregnancy and childbirth, which, she felt, would destroy the beauty of her
body. During much of their marriage, however, she was unfaithful to him; he did
not disapprove of her conduct on moral grounds but took it as an affront to his
vanity.
As a teacher and employer of male dancers he was paternalistic and generous.
Shawn paid his dancers higher wages than the union demanded, even during the
lean depression years. He sought never to invade the privacy of his boys, or
to impose himself on them. He required only that they maintain an unbroken
facade of masculinity and never display any sign of effeminacy. He was fighting
an uphill battle in the America of the interwar period to prove the manliness
of dance. If in his instructional readings he touched upon the Greek ideal of
male love, he never tried to convert anyone to homosexuality. He himself was
bisexual, and not a few of his male dancers were bisexual or homosexual, but he
did not make advances to them. Unlike his wife he was not promiscuous, but
sought an enduring relationship with his partners. Had she not been unfaithful
to him, he might not have chosen a life of homosexual liaisons despite his own
erotic ambivalence.
Together Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis founded the Denishawn school, an academy
of dance and the related arts with classes in as many dance techniques as they
could offer, music, drama, stage, and costume design. It created and propagated
an entirely new concept of American dance that was to circle the globe and end
America's provincial backwardness in this branch of art. Conversely, their tours
of other areas of the world, particularly the Far East, gave their art a
cosmopolitan quality. Shawn had the gift of transmuting something that had
stimulated him intellectually and spiritually into theatrical terms whose
surface sheen even untutored audiences could appreciate. After the Ted Shawn
Dance Theater, the first theatre designed especially for dance, opened in 1942,
the debuts and premieres acquired national and even international significance.
Shawn was thus an American pioneer in the choreographic art, and a major
figure in the dance culture of the twentieth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Walter Terry, Ted Shawn, Father of American Dance, New York: Dial Press,
1976.
Warren Johansson
Siberia
See Paleo-Siberian Peoples,-
Shamanism.
Sicily
Dividing
the Mediterranean into eastern and western basins, Sicily, largest of its
islands, became pivotal when the Phoenicians opened the West to maritime trade
after 1000 b.c.
Antiquity. In the eighth century Greeks began colonizing eastern
Sicily and southern Italy, to control the straits between the island and the
toe of Italy, and to establish farms to which to export their burgeoning
population. To control the western passage around the island, their Phoenician
rivals colonized Western Sicily, their greatest foundation being Palermo,
opposite Carthage, their main African site. Until the Roman conquest in the
third century these two great merchant peoples contended for Sicily. Both
early introduced pederasty; Phoenicians with temple prostitutes [kelabhim), eunuchs, and effeminate
boys, Greek warriors with young aristocratic athletes.
Greek settlements, beginning with Cumae (ca. 750 b.c), occurred before the Hellenes institutionahzed pederasty
about 650 on Crete. Shortly afterwards Zaleucus introduced pederasty for the
colony at Locri on the toe of Italy. While colonists sometimes all came from
one "metropolis" (mother-city), often founders of a single colony
came from various old cities. The need for constitutions was imperative and
many were written. Zaleucus, the earliest known colonial lawgiver and author of
a constitution, composed the laws for Locri using the even then prestigious
Cretan models. He was the student of Onomacritus or Thaletas, the Cretan
"musicians" (poets- statesmen) who first institutionalized pederasty
and may have antedated "Lycurgus," as the reformers at Sparta who
introduced the Eunomia ("good order") institutionalizing pederasty
on Cretan models styled themselves. Whether Zaleucus antedated the Spartan
reform institutionalizing pederasty or not, it soon spread to all the Greek
poleis of Sicily and Magna Grecia and to all other western outposts of Hellenism,
including Massilia (the modern Marseilles; founded ca. 600), where it did not
shock the Celts who practiced their own version of it. Too little is known
about the sexual practices of Sicels and Siculs, the aboriginal Sicilians, to
form a judgment of their attitudes toward pederasty before the arrival of
Greeks and Phoenicians.
Frequent interchange of population and travel fostered a common Hellenic
civilization with only local variations, but Sicilian Greeks, partly because of
the Carthaginian menace, retained tyrants after most were overthrown in the
homeland. Most Sicilian tyrants were pederasts. In the sixth century Phalaris
of Acragas (Agrigentum) roasted his enemies alive in a bronze bull which seemed
to bellow with their agonizing death screams. At Syracuse, Hiero (died 467/6)
competed in the Olympic Games and patronized Pindar, greatest of the pédérastie poets, and Dionysius
patronized Plato along with his mentor Socrates, the principal theoretician of
pedagogical pederasty. Hiero's older brother Gelon, who defeated the
Carthaginian attempt to take over the island in 480, had made Syracuse the
greatest western polis. First of the homosexual exiles and émigrés, Pythagoras founded at
Croton ca. 530 the pédérastie school of philosophy that flourished in Magna Grecia. At
the end of the sixth century Parmenides of Elea in southern Italy founded the pédérastie Eleatics. Both bucolic
poets, Theocritus (fl. ca. 250), who migrated to Alexandria, and Moschus (fl.
ca. 150) were bom at Syracuse.
After the Roman conquest, during which in 212 a soldier sacking Syracuse slew
the scientist Archimedes, Greeks from Southern Italy and Sicily introduced
Hellenism including pederasty to the more cultivated members of the Roman
aristocracy, and Latin writers such as Vergil and Petronius often placed their pédérastie scenes there. In addition,
latifundia
(great
estates) filled Sicily with gangs of slaves and other impoverished agricultural
workers, normally isolated from women. With inordinately high female
infanticide, lower-class males must also have often satisfied their drives
homosexually or with farm animals. Under the Romans Sicily became an
intellectual backwater and declined further in the fifth and sixth centuries of
our era with Vandalic piracy and Byzantine reconquest.
Islamic and Medieval Sicily.
Seizing Sicily from the Byzantine Empire between 827 and 902,
Arabs turned the Mediterranean into a Muslim lake, thereby isolating and
accelerating the decline of Western Europe. They reinvigorated Sicily with new
crops, often irrigated, such as sugar, cotton, and citrus fruits, and industries
such as silk and cotton textiles. The Arabs reestablished its position as an entrepot
of international trade, lost when the Roman Empire crumbled. Though the subject
has hardly been studied, polygamy, eunuchs, seclusion of women in harems, and
female infanticide must have encouraged both male and female homosexuality in
Muslim Sicily, and a high proportion of Arabic poetry is pederastic.
The Normans, who conquered Sicily between 1061 and 1090, and their descendants
and successors, the Hohenstaufen kings (1194 - 1266), were rightly regarded by
the papacy with suspicion as having imbibed too deeply of Islam, which they
tolerated. They played off one group of subjects against another: Muslim, Jew,
Greek, and Lombard (in southern Italy, which they also ruled). His Guelph
(pro-papal) enemies accused Frederick II (r. 1198-1250; so well depicted by
Ernst Kantorowicz) of keeping a harem and practicing pederasty with his black
slaves. Brother of the fanatic St. Louis, the greedy and bloodthirsty Charles
of Anjou (r. 1266-1285), who beheaded Frederick ITs 16-year-old grandson
Conradin and his coeval "friend" when they tried to regain the
Sicilian throne, finally stamped out Sicilian heterodoxy. The bloody rising
against tyranny and overtaxation known as the Sicilian Vespers (1282), plunged
the central Mediterranean into a century of wars between the islanders, who
called in the Aragonese dynasty to protect them from the Angevins, Charles'
descendants, who kept the mainland provinces of the former kingdom of Sicily.
This conflict created the "two Sicilies," albeit they were reunited
by Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragón in 1437. Sexual imbalance on the island persisted, with 136
males for 115 females and 40 percent of adult males unmarried in some areas
during the fifteenth century, indicating the persistence of female
infanticide, which other evidence likewise indicates for England, France, and
Tuscany.
Antonio Beccadelli (1394-1471), a humanist of the early Renaissance, was bom in
Palermo. In 1434 he was called to Naples, where he served king Alfonso as
ambassador, secretary, and historian. He is best known, however, for his
learnedly scurrilous Hermaphroditus,
which contains
a number of homosexual epigrams modeled on Martial and other Latin poets.
Modem Times. By the fifteenth century
Sicily had become a colonial economy owned by a few aristocrats supplying -
with the backbreaking labor of landless proletarians and slaves who made up
the bulk of the population - grain, sugar, cotton, and other commodities to
Genoa, Barcelona, and other Mediterranean ports. Aragonese Inquisitors
relentlessly suppressed dissent and non-conformity, but tried in vain during
the second half of the sixteenth century to obtain a papal bull so that they
could "relax" pederasts, a veritable "social plague," as
they stated, to secular courts. Sicilian sodomites were therefore tried and
punished in the local secular courts rather than by the Inquisition as in
Aragon. The Greek language and Arabic pederastic traditions persisted among
the lower classes, where males greatly outnumbered females.
The Spanish Bourbons ceded the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1759-1860) to their
cadet Neapolitan branch, which misgoverned the island as badly as had its
Habsburg predecessors, so that the Mafia and a general disrespect of all authority,
including clerical, flourished. One of the chief opponents of Bourbon misrule
was the bisexual patriot Luigi Settembrini (1813-1877), who was fascinated by
ancient Greek pederasty.
After Garibaldi liberated Sicily and southern Italy in 1860, but turned it over
to the House of Savoy, northern industrialists began a new form of exploitation
of the mezzogiorno (south of Italy) and Sicily. Millions escaped poverty by
emigrating to the Americas as well as to northern Italy. Americans tended to
stereotype Italians as oversexed and morally loose. Sicilians and Neapolitans
brought Mediterranean homosexuality to the United States, but adjusted their
sexual mores rapidly to the new transatlantic climate conditioned by
Protestantism. A significant contribution of the Italian underworld to the
American gay subculture was its ownership of gay bars and speakeasies during
Prohibition at a time when no respectable businessman would touch such an
ill-famed enterprise. A Sicilian-American, the fine gay novelist Robert Ferro, died of AIDS together with
his lover in 1988.
Like Capri in the bay of Naples, favorite resort of homosexual exiles and emigres, Taormina in Sicily became
in the nineteenth century and remains today a resort for gay tourists, along
with the seedier violence-prone large cities of Palermo and Naples, abounding
as they are even now with dashingly attractive scugnizzi (street urchins), often
available at a price. Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden just after 1900 published
provocative pictures of nude Sicilian boys from the region of Taormina, and
continued to reside there until his death in 1931. Since World War IT even
ordinary gay tourists have frequented these once exclusive enclaves, driving
those seeking greener pastures to Mykonos, Ibiza, and increasingly, as those
have also become overrun, to Muslim sites in North Africa.
William A. Percy
Sissy
A
diminutive of "sister," the term "sissy" originated in
mid-nineteenth-century America as an epithet for a weak, cowardly, or effeminate
boy or man. Popular works, such as the novel, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) by Frances H.
Burnett, and H. T. Webster's cartoon strip, "The Timid Soul,"
featuring Caspar Milquetoast, helped to solidify the stereotype. The sissy, it
was held, was not bom but made, through pampering or mollycoddling in childhood
by well-meaning, but overprotective female guardians. Such mistakes of
training could in many cases be corrected (it was believed) by strict
discipline and exercise in such manly pursuits as athletics, hunting, and
military life. The great exemplar of the redeemed sissy was Theodore Roosevelt
(1858-1919), the delicate youth who turned into the roughrider and flourisher
of the symbolic big stick.
Twentieth-century America continued to be preoccupied by the contrast between
the rugged frontiersman, the stalwart embodiment of the country's abiding
strength of character, as against the effete, overcultivated, sissified
European. In literature, such expatriates as Henry James and T. S. Eliot, with
their recondite allusiveness, were contrasted with such standard bearers of the
forthright native tradition as Jack London, William Carlos Williams, and Jack
Kerouac. Ernest Hemingway, both an expatriate and a he-man, was an exception -
though perhaps he protested too much.
While the word sissy may be relatively recent, the sissy concept takes up the
older tradition of attacks on luxury as a solvent of manly virtue. Like the
dandy before him, the sissy was not necessarily homosexual, but this status was
often implied - particularly in the first half of the twentieth century when
the word was a favorite stand-in or euphemism for the harsher "queer"
or "fairy." In their heyday, Hollywood films made considerable use
of the ambivalent image of the sissy, as personified by such players as
Franklin Pangborn and Clifton Webb.
Significantly, theterm "tomboy," the female counterpart, never bore a
comparable negative charge, inasmuch as imitation of the male in the young
female was considered essentially harmless and transitional.
In the 1970s the popularity of ideals of androgyny did something to soften the
negativity of the sissy stereotype. Through writings and face-to-face discussions
promoting ideas of the women's movement, men learned that it was acceptable to
show emotions and sensitivity, and even to cry. The he-man role, though
conferring status in a patriarchal society, now seemed a barrier to personal
expressiveness and creativity. Many accepted, in principle at least, the idea
that there was a range of types between the male and female poles, rather than
a stark opposition. Although these arguments made some impact on many men,
particularly those who entered sensitivity-training groups influenced by
feminist ideas, the concept of sissihood has shown a remarkable capacity to
survive; it largely retains its negative aura. In the yuppie eighties the
appropriate symbol of this survival was the updated version of the milksop, the
trendy quiche eater; Real
Men Don't Eat Quiche (1982) was the title of a goof book by Bruce Feirstein.
Recently the word "wimp" has become popular as a derisive epithet,
conveying a sense of insufficient maleness, but it lacks connotations of overt
effeminacy or homosexuality despite its origins as a slang term for a female.
See also Macho.
Wayne R. Dynes
Situational Homosexuality
This term
refers sociologically to widespread same-sex behavior in total institutions
where no partner of the opposite sex is available. In some cases, as in
prisons, jails and reformatories, the inmates are there involuntarily; in
others, as ships at sea, monasteries and nunneries, and mines in southern
Africa, participation has been freely chosen. The term is also applied to
cultures where adolescents are gender-segregated. The assumption behind the
notion of psychological situational homosexuality is that the individual's
behavior is dependent on the heterosexually deprived situation, and that those
performing homosexual acts faute
de mieux under these circumstances will revert to heterosexual behavior once they
regain access to the opposite sex, while the "true" homosexual
prefers his own sex even when the other is freely accessible.
The situation of deprivation does not affect all people equally. Even late
nineteenth-century authors realized that some individuals never engage in homosexual
activity no matter how long or how intense the deprivation from heterosexual
contact they endure. Similarly, many homosexuals fail to take up heterosexual
activity even though homosexuality may be so severely repressed as to be
practically unavailable. Nevertheless, cross-cultural evidence abundantly
documents higher incidences of homosexual activity in situations of
heterosexual deprivation, and markedly so for males in their sexual prime.
Siwa Oasis
A town in the Libyan desert
of western Egypt, Siwa is the site of an ancient civilization which retained a
form of institutionalized homosexuality into the modern era. The oasis was the
location of an oracle consulted by Alexander the Great and modern observers
have stressed how the Berber population conserved its own language, religious
rites, and sexual customs despite the later overlay of Islam and Egyptian
administration.
Sexual relations among men fell into the ancient pattern of pairing between usually
married adult men and adolescent bachelors. In the nineteenth century, families
lived within the walls of a town constructed rather like a single large adobe
"beehive" while all unmarried men lived together on the edges of town
where they made up a warrior class [zaggalah)
protecting the oasis from
desert marauders. In the twentieth century, as the military function declined
and the townspeople have moved out of the walled center, the zaggalah have
become agricultural laborers retaining their customs and clubhouses. The
anthropologist Walter Cline, writing in 1936, found "All normal Siwan men
and boys practice sodomy. . . . Among themselves the natives are not ashamed
of this; they talk about it as openly as they talk about love of women, and
many if not most of their fights arise from homosexual competition."
Among the zaggalah, man-boy relationships were formally recognized when the man
offered the boy's father a gift (or brideprice) as in heterosexual marriage.
Abd Allah notes that "Siwan customs allow a man but one boy [vs. four
wives] to whom he is bound by a stringent code of obligations." In the
zaggalah clubhouse "laborers come together on any occasion for communal
rejoicing and assemble on moonlight nights for drinking, singing, and dancing
to the merry rhythm of flute and drum" (Cline). This festive and erotic
tradition culminates in a three-day bacchanal dedicated to the medieval sheik,
Sidi Solimán,
following the Islamic fast
of Ramadan. The various accounts of Siwa agree on the openness and fluidity of
sexuality, in that divorce is casual and serial polygamy common, men having as
many as a dozen wives over time. Male and female prostitution was noted and
Cline remarked that the role in homosexual relations was variable and
voluntary.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Mahmud Mohammad 'Abd Allah, "Siwan Customs," Harvard African Studies, 1 (1917), 1-28; C.
Dalrymple Belgrave, Siwa: The Oasis of fupiter Amman, London: Lane, 1923; Walter
Cline, Notes on the People of Siwah and El Garah in the Libyan
Desert, Menasha, WI: George Banta Publishing, 1936; Robin Maugham, Journey to Siwa, London: Chapman and Hall,
1950.
Barry D.
Adam
Sixteenth-Century Legislation
This era brought to
completion the trend toward criminalization of homosexuality throughout
Christendom. The Jewish and Christian antihomosexual
tradition that goes back to
the fifth century b.c.
had
crystalized in the canon law of the Christian church, whence it passed - from
the end of the thirteenth century onward - into the criminal codes of the various
European jurisdictions. The imposition of a Christian sexual morality that saw
in homosexual acts a violation of the order of nature went hand in hand with
the church's expansion of its organizational and spiritual control over a
recalcitrant or even heretical population. The only conflict with the secular
power was over the jurisdiction of its courts as opposed to the ecclesiastical
ones.
The Reformation did not break with this trend or reverse it. By the close of
the sixteenth century the whole of Christian Europe - Protestant, Catholic,
and Orthodox - held sodomy a capital offense. The English statute of 25 Henry
VIII c. 6 (1533) imposing the penalty of death by hanging for "the
detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast"
is but a single example of the laws enacted by the Christian states and
principalities in that era.
Central Europe. A condemnation of sodomy
committed by "eyn
mensch nut
eynem vihe, mann mit mann,
weib mit weib"
(a human
being with a beast, man with man, woman with woman) appears in Article 141 of
the Constitutio criminalis Bambergensis (criminal code for the German city of
Bamberg) of 1507, in the same article of the Constitutio criminalis
Brandenburgensis (criminal code of Brandenburg) of 1516, in Article 122 of two
drafts of a penal code for the Holy Roman Empire dating from 1521 and 1529, and
finally in Article 116 of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina that was
formally adopted at the session of the Diet (Reichstag) in Regensburg on July
27, 1532. This was the end result of the work of codification that had been
begun at the Diet in Freiburg in 1498 and was completed only in the reign of
the Catholic emperor Charles V, who was one of the bitterest opponents of the
Reformation. The time span involved - starting 19 years before the division of
the Western church and ending 15 years after it - proves beyond a doubt that
the rise of Protestantism had nothing to do with the enactments in question.
The Carolina had an enormous impact on European criminal law, both substantive
and procedural, in countries as far apart as France and Russia, from the time
of its enactment to the end of the Ancien Regime; even the widernaturliche Unzucht (unnatural lewdness) of
the notorious Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code of the German Empire (1871)
merely rephrases theunkeusch,
so wider dienaturbeschicht (unchastity contrary to nature) of the German codes of the
early sixteenth century. The earlier German code had no force or influence,
however, in England, which had already gone far down the path of developing its
own distinctive legal tradition - the so-called common law.
The origin of all these statutes is probably to be sought in the writings of
the Italian jurists of the fifteenth century who are cited as sources of the
imperial law which displaced the local codes of the individual German cities.
What happened was simply that offenses which had been crimes in canon law were
now made criminal in the secular courts as well. In this whole process of
criminalization of sodomy the teaching of the Christian church is primary; the
legal enactments and social attitudes are secondary and tertiary developments,
so that the English statute of 1533 independently parallels the Continental
enactments.
England. Monks - against whom
accusations of sodomy had been voiced since the ninth century - were of course
targets of the Reformers. Henry VIII's letter of April 4,1543 to his agent in
Scotland, Ralph Sadler, envisages what one would nowadays call a "covert
action" in that country that would dispossess the monasteries of their
holdings in a more effective manner than a publicly decreed statute might have
allowed. With respect to his own realm there is no evidence that the statute of
1533 (included as it was in a group of miscellaneous statutes having nothing
remotely to do with this subject) was motivated by the Reformers' intent to
prosecute the monks for "crimes against nature" and then to dissolve
the monasteries and confiscate their property. Dissolution of monasteries and
enactments against sodomy were two different issues.
The unique features of the English tradition in this sphere are first, the use
of the term buggery as the legal designation for the crime, though in ordinary
speech in England the word was long considered obscene and offensive; and
second, the frequent commutation of the penalty of death by hanging (not
burning at the stake, as some wrongly assume) to exposure in the pillory, which
was described by contemporary observers as worse than death because of the
ferocity with which mobs, and particularly women eager to punish enemies of
their sex, pelted the defenseless sodomites with missiles and filth of every
kind. It is uncertain just how and when this penalty began, but there is
evidence that the pillory was used to punish sexual immorality well before the
reign of Henry VIII, possibly even as early as the time of Richard II (late
fourteenth century). The standard histories of English law begin in medias res
by relating the abuses to which the pillory led in the mid-eighteenth century
and then its abolition for all offenses except perjury in 1816. In Great
Britain it was finally abandoned in 1837, and the United States Congress
followed suit in 1839.
The sixteenth-century sodomy statutes remained on the books until the thinkers
of the Enlightenment, beginning with Cesare Beccaria in 1764, denounced the
death penalty as a relic of medieval superstition and intolerance.
The number of persons executed for "buggery," "crime against
nature," and the like in jurisdictions subject to the British crown was
probably no more than three a year for the whole period from 1561 to 1861, when
the death penalty was abolished in favor of life imprisonment. Thus the scores
of victims of the law cannot be compared with the hundreds and thousands who
were executed or simply killed just for holding "heretical" beliefs
during the Reformation conflict in the sixteenth century. In fact, the really
significant feature of the English legal development is its lateness in both
directions: the criminalization of sodomy only in 1533, the abolition of the
death penalty only in 1861, and the retention of the offense in the criminal
codes of the English-speaking world long after the influence of the
Enlightenment and of classical liberalism had reshaped almost every other area
of the law. But few as the executions may have been, they left an enduring
stamp on public opinion. And the United States Supreme Court's fateful decision
in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) denying the right
of privacy to consensual adult homosexual behavior keeps alive the legal
tradition that stems from the law of 1533, reinforced by the unrelenting
hostility of religious conservatives and fundamentalists.
See also Canon Law; Law, Feudal and
Royal; Law, Municipal.
Warren Johansson
Slang Terms for Homosexuals in English
The
several national varieties of English offer hundreds of slang terms for
homosexuals, a few of them traceable to the seventeenth century, but most
dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some may be heard wherever
English is spoken (e.g., gay, queer); many more are limited in their area of
use ("jasper," "poofter," "moffie"). Nearly all
these terms were devised by heterosexuals and so tend to express in their
meaning or derivation the hostility, the contempt, the hatred, and the fear
that straight people have felt toward gay sex and those who practice it.
The corpus of slang also reflects long-standing and still prevalent misunderstandings
of homosexuality. Recent exposures of and challenges to these misconceptions
have made as yet little impression on the language, and although individuals
may have modified their usage, offensive, misconceived, and otherwise
objectionable terms continue to be used.
Gay people have themselves adopted many of these terms, because until recently
their understanding of themselves and their sexuality differed little from the
views of the society in which they lived.
Basic Categories. Almost all terms for male
homosexuals fall into four simple categories: first, those taking or assumed to
take the "active," masculine role, the insertor role, in anal
intercourse; secondly, the "passive," feminine role, the receptor
role, in anal intercourse; thirdly, effeminate men who may be gay (there is
some overlap between the latter two categories). Finally, for United States
English, a category of fellator (cocksucker engaged in oral activity) is
needed.
A similar typonymy, without a fourth category corresponding to fellator, applies
to terms for lesbians. First, masculine, "active"; secondly,
(ultra-) feminine, "passive"; and, thirdly, mannish women who may be
lesbian. Again, there is some overlap between the first and third categories.
Even though early sexology distinguished cunnilinctrixes from tribades,
calling the former "sapphists" and "Lesbian lovers" (this
original sense became obscured when these terms became generic for female
homosexuals), English slang does not seem to have developed similar categories.
There are many slang terms for those who perform oral sex on women
("cuntlapper," "-licker"; "muffdiver,"
"plater"; "gamahucher," "gamahucker,"
"gamarucker," and so forth) but none is specifically homosexual in
application.
These categories mirror the traditional equation of biological sex and gender
role, whereby male anatomy entails masculinity and female anatomy femininity.
From this psychobiological determinism flow crude popular notions of male and
female sexuality generally and an erroneous conception of homosexuality that
has not yet been completely dispelled. It is the belief that for a man to
renounce the "active," definitively male role of penile penetration
and submit to the "passive," female role of accepting the
intromission of a penis, he must be a female, either psychically or both mentally
and behaviorally.
Slang embodying this simple active vs. passive categorization according to
roles in sexual activity can be found reduplicated again and again, in
different English-speaking countries, in different periods, and in specific
close knit or exclusive groups. In particular, whenever men are kept in
isolation from women, it is likely that a system of slang corresponding to this
pattern will arise. Examples of such masculine worlds in which situational homosexuality
occurs are prisons, navies (and other armed forces to a lesser extent),
boarding schools, among seafarers and hoboes. Even today there are relatively
few slang terms that do not assign or imply a role in sexual activity, and
these - "queer," "homo," "poof(ter),"
"les," "lez," "lezzie," "gay" - have
usually become general only recently. A few other words are sometimes neutral
when used by homosexuals: fag(got), queen, dyke.
Male Terms. By far the largest number
of male slang terms fall into the categories of male passivity and effeminacy,
which imply the renunciation of one's maleness. By contrast, the active
insertor terms seldom imply femininity or the loss of masculinity. Very often
they refer expressly to taking the active role in anal intercourse:
"arse-king," "arse/ass-bandit," "arse-burglar,"
"booty-bandit," "bud sallogh" (Irish, "shitten
prick," obsolete), "backdoor('s) man," "gentleman of the
backdoor," "backgammoner," "inspector of manholes,"
"dirt-trackrider," "turd-packer," "dung-pusher,"
"poo-jabber." The Australian prison slang for the active partner
"hock" has the same implication, for it is rhyming slang on
"cock." One of the equivalent American terms, "jocker," is
likewise probably derived from "jock," which means "fuck"
as a verb and "cock" as a noun. In the case of the synonym
"wolf" the association is the same but metaphoric rather than direct.
The key to understanding a large number of passive/effeminate terms is the
supposed reversal of gender and sex roles: the adoption of behavior deemed
"natural" or appropriate to the opposite sex. A man who is passive
must in some sense be a woman; even one who is raped is judged to have
"lost his manhood" and becomes de facto a woman. Many slang terms for the passive homosexual directly
personify him as a vagina or an anus: "gash," "pussy,"
"gentleman pussy," "sea-pussy," "boy-pussy,"
"boy-snatch," "boy-cunt," "bum-boy,"
"poonce" (from Yiddish for "cunt"),
"brownie-queen," "browning-sister" or "-queen,"
"mustard-pot," "jere."
Another common procedure is to apply a word that has female reference. The most
direct method is to use a female name. The oldest known slang term
"Molly" is an example, and "Marjery," "Mary-Ann,"
and "Charlotte-Ann" are further obsolete instances. Other nineteenth-century
examples still survive: "Miss Nancy," "Nance,"
"Pansy" (and other flowers), "Mary," "Betty,"
"Dinah," "Ethyl," "Nola" have been recorded in
the United States and in Australia the (obsolete?) "Gussie" (from
Augusta). Or it may be any one of the large number of words normally used of
females: "aunt(ie)," "chicken," "fem(me),"
"girl," "bitch," "belle," "mother,"
"queen," "sis(sie)," "sister," "wife,"
and the like. Or it may be a word that refers to stereotypically feminine
behavior: "limp-wrist," "broken-wrist," "flit,"
"mince," "prissy," "swish." (See Women's Names for Male Homosexuals.)
Another way of seeing male homosexuals as women is to view them as
hermaphrodites. This confusion has seen the word "hermaphrodite"
corrupted into "morphodite," "morphydite,"
"morphrodite," and in South Africa "moffie." It has also
yielded "freak."
One of the most prolific sources of feminine words has been male prostitution.
Evidence of this phenomenon in London exists from the Middle Ages, and late
nineteenth-century writers on homosexuality such as Havelock Ellis and
"Xavier Mayne" (E. I. Prime-Stevenson) state that it was widespread
throughout Europe and the United States. The prostitution took two main forms.
Highly masculine men, especially soldiers, who were poorly paid, made
themselves available as "active" partners. The older tradition
involved very effeminate men, often cross-dressers, who frequented certain
taverns or bars; sometimes their activity was outright arse-peddling, but
often it seems to have been sex in return for a good time paid for by the
masculine male. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such effeminate men
were called mollies (from "Moll," the pet-form of Mary, which meant
"harlot" or "hussy") and the places where they operated
were molly-houses.
The semantic transition from "harlot" and/or "slatternly woman,
hussy" to "effeminate passive homosexual" and hence
"homosexual" generally is the source of some of the most common terms
for homosexuals. Such words include fairy, "nancy" or
"nance," "queen/quean," and, contrary to popular myth,
"fag" and "faggot." Above all there is the term
"gay" itself, which in its present sense has not been traced earlier
than the 1920s but which clearly derives from the earlier slang sense of
"sexually dissolute, promiscuous, libertine," a sense often applied
to female prostitutes. Other less familiar examples of this shift include
"aunt(ie)" (originally meaning "brothel-keeper, old
prostitute"), "ginch," "hump," "kife,"
"twidget," and "skippy."
The long tradition of male prostitution in London has meant that working-class
Londoners have had a long exposure to it. London slang, particularly Cockney
rhyming slang, is very rich in terms for effeminate homosexuals, many of which
live on in Australian slang. One nineteenth-century term was "sod,"
which survives as a mild term of abuse, its original sense largely forgotten.
It in turn gave rise to the rhyming slang "Tommy Dodd," shortened to
"Tommy." More important is "poof" ("pouf"),
attested from 1833, which has yielded the elaborated Australian form
"poofter" (now spread to New Zealand and Britain) and the rhyming
slang "horse's hoof" or "horses" (Australian variant,
"cow's hoof") and "iron hoof" or "iron." The
variant form "puff," attested from 1902, may have originally been
only a spelling variant rather than representing a different pronunciation;
however that may be, it has spawned "collar and cuff" or
"cuff" and "nigh enough" or "enuff." "Queer"
has yielded "Brighton Pier," "gingerbeer," shortened to
"ginger," "King Lear," and, some have argued,
"jere" and "gear." In Australian English "queen"
has given rise to "pork and bean" and (poor example)
"submarine."
United States English is rich in terms for homosexual fellators. Other
varieties of English have no such slang, although associated terms such as
"blow-job" and "head" (neither necessarily homosexual) have
recently begun to penetrate other Englishes. The earliest written record of
the word "cock-sucker" occurs in John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley's Slang and its Analogues, vol. 2 (1891), and interestingly
they define it as "fellatrix." In the United States, however, the
word applies to a homosexual, is one of the most taboo of words, and is also
one of the strongest terms of abuse. The American homosexual's predilection
for fellatio is long-established, for already in 1915 Havelock Ellis recorded
the slang term "head-worker." Later synonyms include
"blow-boy," "flute(r)," "cannibal,"
"gobbler," "larro" (back-slang), "mouser,"
"muzzier," "dick-sucker," "dick(ie)-licker,"
"skin-diver," "nibbler," "lapper,"
"lick-box."
Lesbianism. Terms for lesbians are far
less common than those for homosexual men, a fact that is consonant with the
greater invisibility of the lesbian in the past. No term now current can be
traced earlier than the 1920s. In the eighteenth century lesbian practices were
referred to as "the game of flats," but there was apparently no term
for the practitioners. In the late nineteenth century two spinsters living
together were referred to, in parts of the United States, as being in a Boston
marriage. The phenomenon of "tomboyishness" was widely recognized
and far less deprecated than the male equivalent "sissihood," yet it
was not commonly or usually associated with lesbianism.
The word lesbian itself has given rise to many shortenings: "les(s),"
"lessie," "lez," "lezzie," "lezzo,"
"lesbie" and the associated pun "lesbie-friends,"
"lesbo," "lesley"; and the jocular elaboration
"lesbyterian." All of these are generic. Most other terms fall into
the butch-fem/"fluff" categories and most seem to be of United States
origin.
The oldest term seems to be "bull-dyke(r)" or "bull-dyking
woman." The latter was also shortened to "B. D. woman." These
terms first appear in black circles in the 1920s, and "bull-dyking"
and "B.D." occur in the blues. The most plausible etymology of the
"-dyke" element, which later became an independent word with the same
sense, is that it derives from the late nineteenth-century slang "dike"
meaning "to dress up formally or elegantly." This derivation would
suggest the priority of "bull-dyker" over "bull-dyke,"
which accords with the evidence. There are also corrupt forms
"bull-dagger" and "boon-dagger," and "bull" too
has become an independent word. "Dyke" has spread to other
English-speaking countries, and is often reinforced with the word "diesel."
Other
masculine-lesbian terms include "butch," "amy-john" (from
"amazon"), "jasper," "stud,"
"baby-stud," "tootsie."
The feminine, "passive" lesbian is a "fem(me)," "fluff,"
"fairy-lover," and "lady-lover." This last is used
generically.
Conclusion. Language and particularly slang mirrors salient facts about the
society in which it is used, and this is true of all the slang names for
homosexuals that have accumulated over the past two centuries. They show in
their meaning and derivation the popular understandings of homosexuals and
homosexual behavior and sexual activity. That the understanding and perceptions
involved are so frequently wrong makes the task of overcoming prejudice and
ill-will so much harder, for the detritus remains embedded in the language. It
is no accident that English has so few slang terms that mean homosexual, pure
and simple, without reference to sexual roles and acts.
Studies of the slang vocabularies of other Western European languages have
shown that they are as rich as English. In all modern languages, apparently,
money, inebriation, and sex are all especially productive of popular terms.
However, homosexual vocabularies are highly insular: even Spanish and
Portuguese, so similar in other ways, show hardly any commonality in their
slang terms for gay men and lesbians. Nonetheless, the whole group of Western
languages displays some common semantic elements: gender reversal (imputation
of effeminacy to gay men and masculinity to lesbians); use of women's names as
generic terms for male homosexuals; inheritance of medieval Christian words of
the "bugger" and "sodomite" families; and adaptations of
psychiatric and medical terms. Occasionally slang terms migrate from one
language to another, as French tante
to German
(also variant: Tunte],
and
(probably) in loan-translation form to English as aunt(ie). In recent years the
English word "gay" has entered these languages, and others as well.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Wayne R. Dynes, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of
Homosexuality, New York: Gay Academic Union, 1985; Gershon Legman,
"The Language of Homosexuality: An American Glossary," in George W.
Henry, Sex Variants, New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1941; Guild Dictionary of
Homosexual Terms, Washington, D.C.: Guild Press, 1965; Bruce Rodgers, The Queens' Vernacular, San Francisco: Straight
Arrow Books, 1972.
G. S. Simes
Slavery
The
institution of slavery, under which one human being was the property of another
and his labor power could be exploited by the owner with no remuneration
beyond bare subsistence, existed from the dawn of history down to modern times.
In some countries of the New World the agricultural sector abandoned slavery
only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Most studies of slavery
have concentrated on the economic aspect, fewer on the social and political.
Only a very few have entered into the sexual exploitation that slavery
entailed, and these tended to focus on the problems of marriage and
childbearing rather than on the homosexual side.
General Considerations. The person of the slave
belonged to the master, and could be used for sexual gratification as well as
for economic gain. The slave could not in most cases refuse the master's
advances, whether they were heterosexual or homosexual. The inferior status of
the slave translated into the passive role in homosexual intercourse, which was
always assigned to the party of lowerrank. In ancient city-states the free citizen
was forbidden to prostitute himself without loss of status, so that the
profession of prostitute could be exercised only by slaves or foreigners and
sometimes by freedmen. For this reason handsome young males captured in battle
or in slavehunting raids were likely to find their way into brothels, a fate
preferable to the hard labor imposed on slaves in the mines and latifundia of
the magnates and great landowners. It was no disgrace for the slave to be
subordinated sexually to the master, but simply part of his function as an
"animated tool," an instrument of pleasure. The slave in ancient
Greece was forbidden to be a pederast, that is, to take the active role with a
boy. In situations of this kind, as in relationships between male slaves and
upper-class women, the law and society could be harshly punitive.
So extensive was the sexual abuse of captives and slaves that it was assumed,
tacitly and even explicitly in law codes, that any woman who had been in a city
taken by force or had been a slave had been sexually violated. The same was to
a lesser extent true of males taken prisoner, who were exposed to the
aggression of their captors in a world where homosexual activity was
considered part of everyday life. The slavemonger engaged in practices typical
of the modem call-boy service, grooming and depilating his wares, concealing
their physical blemishes as best he could, and falsifying their ages and other
personal data. Such behavior earned the slave dealer the contempt of polite
society, an inferior status that lingered as long as slavery itself.
At the same time intimacy with the master could afford a slave a relatively
comfortable existence, the superiority of the personal or household servant
over the one who toiled in the fields or in the mines. In the ancient world
particularly, slaves were educated for all occupations, even the highest in the
administrative hierarchy, so that the condition of slave did not imply
intellectual inferiority or lack of culture. It has even been asserted that the
market in slaves provided for a rational distribution of labor power in ancient
society, and the ability to provide "intimate personal services" must
have contributed to the overall value of a boy offered for sale.
The status of the slave set the parameters of the sexual activity that was
obligatory, permitted, or forbidden. The overriding principle in the ancient
world was that the active role was reserved to the superior partner and
forbidden to the inferior one, while the passive role was prescribed for the
inferior partner and forbidden to the superior one. In ancient Athens slaves
and boys were often classed and treated similarly, but with this crucial
difference: for the upper-class Athenian boy the status was temporary and
transitional, the homosexual liaison partook of a rite de passage rather than
of an obligation contingent upon the servile role.
Historical Development:
Ancient Greece. Among the Greeks the pederastic relationship - the legally
and socially sanctioned form of male homosexuality par excellence - did not
occur between equals. In Greek vase paintings the passive partner shows no sign
of pleasure, has no erection, and usually faces straight ahead during
intercourse. For an adult member of the aristocracy, dalliance with a handsome
slave boy was a fleeting pleasure, not a serious involvement. On the other
hand, the passion of the erastes
(lover)
for the eromenos
(beloved)
could be as intense and enthralling as any of which the individual was
capable. In Plato's Symposium
Parmenides
likens the obsession of erastai
to their
young boy friends to that of men "wishing to endure slavery as no slave
would," while in the Phaedrus
Socrates
speaks of the lover's soul as "ready to be a slave, to sleep wherever
allowed, as near as possible to the beloved." Xenophon's Socrates, in the Memorabilia, calls a man such as
Critobulus, who has dared to kiss Alcibiades' beautiful son, likely to become a
slave forthwith instead of a free man, and in the Symposium the eromenos who uses his physical
beauty may rule the erastes.
So for
the youth in possession of the pride of his adolescence the pederastic relationship
could entail a reversal of the role that was imposed upon him as a child; his
physical beauty gives him power over his adult lover - the first experience of
dominating another male. The slave can never have such power, and Aeschines
cites a law forbidding slaves to frequent the palestra - a favorite
trystingplace for young Athenians and their admirers. A second law prohibited
slaves from using free boys as sexual partners at all. Plutarch ascribed the
authorship of both laws to Solon, with the significant proviso that he did not
ban relations between slaves and free women - as the Roman emperors were later
to do.
Rome. Roman pederasty never had
the educational role which Greek society had assigned to the phenomenon. The
same aspect of dominance and submission prevailed: the behavior that is
obligatory for the slave is unworthy and demeaning when practiced by a free
man. But a Roman of the upper class had abundant opportunity to acquire a male
slave as a bed partner if he so chose. The nonchalance with which Roman
society judged such matters is demonstrated by Catullus' wedding poem in honor
of Manlius Torquatus and his new bride Junia, which alludes at length to the
groom's liaison with a young male slave of the household in the jocular manner
typical of Roman straightforwardness in dealing with sexuality. However, for
the Roman, marriage and procreation were duties,- homosexual affairs were
casual matters or opportunities for relaxation. The male prostitute must have
been a characteristic figure of the night life of the metropolis, as during the
reign of Augustus such hustlers had their own specially designated holiday,
duly recorded in the State Calendar. But the mentor-pupil relationship that was
the hallmark of Greek paidezasteia
at its
best never found entry into Roman mores, which always fell short of the
Hellenic ideal.
From the Introduction of
Christianity to Early Modern Times. Christianity influenced the sexual life of slaves by making
a breach in the distinction between matrimonium,
the legal
marriage of citizens, and contubernium,
the union
of convenience between slaves. In principle Christian morality upheld a single
standard for all, slave or free - which implied that the slave could not be
compelled to take the passive role in a homosexual relationship. Byzantine
historians record that after the legislation of Justinian on sodomy, it became
"the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed," and that
convictions were obtained solely on the word of a child or a slave. In this way
the incipient Christian norms of sexual behavior played into the hands of those
who needed a political weapon to strike at their enemies. In a society where
overt homosexuality had been a matter of everyday life, the adherents of the
"old lifestyle" now exposed themselves to the death penalty if the
authorities got wind of what was happening inside their households. The
innovation of Christian moralists and legislators lay, in a sense, in
equalizing master and slave: extending the old prohibitions on the active
homosexual role from the slave to the free man, and those on the passive role
from the free man to the slave. It was the former act that led Friedrich
Nietzsche to characterize Christianity as having a "slave morality,"
since it reduced the whole population to the lowest common denominator, even
if in practice the slave had little opportunity to bring charges against his
master unless he found political protectors outside the household.
It is sometimes alleged that the anti-sexual animus of primitive Christianity
stemmed from its being a religion of slaves and of the "oppressed"
who were forced to submit to their owners, but this view is now being
abandoned. The sexual morality of Hellenistic Judaism which the Church ratified
and reinforced with an ascetic bias had nothing to do with the institution of
slavery, in fact the Mosaic Law held that Israelites should not keep other Israelites
in permanent bondage, j ust as Plato taught that Hellenes should not enslave
other Hellenes. The coincidence of the two doctrines led ultimately to the
abolition of slavery in the center of Christendom, though not on its
periphery, where "barbaric" peoples continued to be enslaved and to
be utilized as the labor force of a slaveholding economy from the early middle
ages until the suppression of the slave trade in the nineteenth century.
In the eighth to tenth
centuries Jewish slave dealers transported Slavic captives from Itil and Kiev
in Khazaria to the slave markets of Moorish Spain, but en route at Verdun the males were
castrated, with the result that in Arabic the word saqaliba meant not just "Slavs" but
"eunuchs," who had their own special role in the sexual economy of
the time. The eunuchs were employed as harem guards and as part of the military
force of the Moorish rulers, but a feminized eunuch could also be the passive
partner in a homosexual relationship. The Arab world preserved vestiges of
slavery down to the twentieth century, and only international pressure and
intervention have terminated the practice in quite recent times.
Relatively little study has been made of homosexual activity among the black slaves of the New World. In the seventeenth century Portuguese sources
show, however, that homosexuality was common among the peoples of Angola, from
which many Brazilian slaves were recruited. Inquisition reports beginning at the same time show
considerable interracial sodomy, in most cases involving free white men and
black slaves. There is also evidence of direct transfer of the social forms,
including transvestism, documented in Angolan homosexuality to the slave
population of Brazil.
Conclusion. In various cultural contexts, slavery
augmented the element of dominance and submission implicit in many traditional
homosexual relationships, and also enhanced the economic value of offspring in
societies where parents could for mere financial gain sell a child into
slavery knowing full well that it was destined for a brothel in some distant
city. Even today the "sexual paradises" of Western tourists in
Southeast Asia continue practices such as these that have survived from
pre-modern societies, so that the champions of "sexual freedom" are
profoundly wrong in imagining them as utopias
of any sort. Rather they
perpetuate a legacy of sexual exploitation and bondage that is incompatible
with modern notions of liberty and self-determination.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Mark Golden, "Slavery and Homosexuality at Athens," Phoenix, 38 (1984), 308-24; Beert
C. Verstraete, "Slavery and the Social Dynamics of Male Homosexual
Relations in Ancient Rome," [ournal of Homosexuality, 5 (1980), 227 6.
Warren Johansson
Smyth, Ethel, Dame (1858-1944)
British composer and
memoirist. The daughter of a Frenchwoman and a British general, Smyth obtained
her musical training in Germany. She also spent some time in the multisexual
foreign colony in Florence, where
she came under the influence of Henry Brewster, who wrote the librettos for
some of her compositions. From him she derived a quasi-mystical Neoplatonic philosophy. Her symphonic choral work The Prison (1930) bears the epigraph: "I am
striving to release that which is divine within us, and to merge it in the
universally divine." Her first major work, the Mass in D Major (1893), was
hailed for its expansive construction, robust enunciation, and rich
orchestration - all qualities that were then unexpected in a woman composer.
From 1898 to 1925 she wrote and produced six operas. She also composed choral
and orchestral works, chamber music, and songs.
An extroverted and even flamboyant personality, Smyth made a significant
contribution to the British movement for women's suffrage. For this cause she
wrote a "March of the Women," which was much used in demonstrations.
Her opera The
Boatswain's Mate (1916)
revolves around a strong female personality, that of the landlady. She battled
for equal treatment of women as artists, tirelessly canvassing conductors and
executants, and staging grand scenes of temperament when her exacting
performance requirements were not met. Smyth also cultivated royalty and golf. In 1922 she
was made a Dame of the British Empire.
She fell in love with a number of women, most notably with Virginia Woolf, whom
Ethel Smyth met when she was seventy-one. "I don't think I have ever cared
for anyone more profoundly," she noted in her diary. "For eighteen
months I have thought of little else." By this time she was suffering from
deafness, and had to stop composing. She shifted her energy to her
autobiographical volumes, which became renowned for their frankness and
excellent prose style. Always forthright, she declared in 1935: "I am the
most interesting person I know, and I don't care if anyone else thinks
so." Her own summation of the three reasons for her remaining undefeated
was: "An iron constitution, a fair share of fighting spirit, and, most
important of all, a small but independent income."
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Christopher St. John, Ethyl Smyth: A Biography, London: Longmans, 1959.
Evelyn Gettone
Social Construction Approach
In the
1980s a seemingly new approach to the study of homosexual behavior arose, which
its advocates termed social construction. Denying the existence of any "transhistorical"
definition of same-sex behavior, the social constructionist scholars hold that
sexual behavior is, in all significant aspects, a product of cultural
conditioning, rather than of biological and constitutional factors. Thus
same-sex behavior would have an entirely different meaning, say, in ancient
Egypt or Tang China from what it would have in nineteenth-century Europe. In
the view of some proponents of this approach, the "modern homosexual"
is sui generis, having come into existence in Europe and North America only
about 1880; hence it is vain to conduct comparative research on earlier eras
or non-Western societies.
The social constructionists contrast their own approach with that of the
"essentialists" (a term of their own devising), who ostensibly
believe in an eternal and unchanging homosexuality. Yet most critics of social
construction are not essentialists, and to label them as such amounts to a
caricature that has proved tactically useful for polemical purposes but has
advanced understanding very little. One should also bear in mind that the
discussion is not current in the gay/lesbian community as a whole, but is
confined to scholars.
Strengths and Weaknesses. What is valuable about the
social construction approach is the fact that it alerts researchers to the
dangers of anachronism. It makes no sense, for example, to refer to such
ancient Creek figures as Socrates and Alexander the Great as gay without noting
that their erotic life was conducted in a framework in which pederasty, the
love of an adult man for an adolescent boy, was the rule, and not the
androphilia - male adult-adult relationship - that is dominant today.
Granting this point, social construction errs too far on the side of difference
in denying any commonality whatever among same-sex love in ancient Greece, in
the Middle Ages, and in contemporary Western society. This denial of
commonality and continuity would deprive scholars of the fruits of cross-cultural
study of same-sex behavior. Another consequence of social construction orthodoxy
is to exclude biological factors from any role in the shaping of sexual desire.
Some extreme adherents claim that the body itself is a mere social construct -
implying a rejection of material reality itself.
Sources. It has been suggested that
the conflict between social construction and its opponents is another version
of the old debate about nature versus nurture, between those who believe that
human conduct is largely conditioned by biological forces and those who
attribute the leading role to culture (the environmentalists). One's first
response is to say that human behavior is the result of a confluence of the
two forces, but this compromise is usually rejected by those in the
environmentalist camp. In similar fashion, the social constructionists hold
that culture is supreme, and are little prepared to concede biological
constants. The social construction debate has also been compared to the
medieval philosophical dispute between the realists and the nominalists, those
who believed that the world contained real essences as against those who
believed that we know only names for primal qualities. The parallel is inexact,
however, since few social constructionists would be willing to adopt the
nominalist views they are said to hold. Indeed, thoroughgoing nominalism would
make the social constructionist claims meaningless, since there would be no
stable social categories to contrast with the purportedly labile ones of
sexual orientation.
The actual roots of social construction as a theory are twofold. First is the
heritage of German historicism, which (emerging in the late eighteenth
century), saw successive historical epochs as each having a distinct character,
radically different from those that precede and follow. This trend, which
posits a series of historical eras almost hermetically sealed from one
another, accounts for the social constructionist belief that there is a
"modern homosexual," a type that has existed only since ca. 1880.
This eighteenth-century source shows that the social construction approach is
not as new as its proponents suggest.
The second source is the tendency of modern sociology and anthropology to
attribute human behavior solely to cultural determinants. In some social constructionists
this tendency is tinged with late Marxism - which may itself be regarded as a
sociological doctrine. These two main sources were given focus by the writings
of the French social thinker and historian Michel Foucault, who though not
self-identified as a social constructionist seminally influenced such
proponents of social construction as Kenneth Plummer and Jeffrey Weeks. These
and other adherents picked up Foucault's ideas of historical discontinuity, of
"ruptures" radically segmenting periods of historical development.
Two Key Questions. A major objection to the
social constructionist position is that homosexual behavior existed in Western
society during the hundreds of years in which its existence was formally
denied by the dominant culture; the authorities imposed obligatory
heterosexuality upon the entire population and subjected anyone known for
"sodomitical" behavior to economic boycott and social ostracism, if
not to criminal prosecution. A curious outcome of these centuries of
oppression is that when the first writings on homosexuality reached the general
public at the end of the nineteenth century, some individuals revealed to
psychiatrists that, although they had responded solely to members of their own
sex since adolescence, until then they imagined themselves unique in the whole
world. They had "constructed" their own sexual consciousness without
any social input - a feat that should be impossible according to social
constructionist postulates.
Another fact that contradicts the social constructionists is the abundant
evidence for gay subcultures in Europe and the United States for at least a
hundred years before the modern, political phase of homosexuality began - a
subculture whose participants, however, merely thought of themselves as members
of an erotic freemasonry from whose forbidden pleasures the vulgar mass was
excluded. (While the evidence becomes sparser as one goes back in time, in some
sense these subcultures can be traced back to the twelfth century in the Middle
Ages.)
The "modern homosexual" is a political
concept;
the phenomenon began when individuals oriented toward their own sex, in the
wake of trials such as those of Oscar Wilde and Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg,
came to regard themselves as part of an oppressed minority cherishing a
grievance against late Victorian society and its norms of sexual morality, and
demanding their own "place in the sun." This trend was for a long
time characteristic of northern Europe (where generally homosexual conduct was
criminalized) and was foreign to the dwellers of Mediterranean lands. Since
the 1960s, the "gay" identity has had an undeniable component of
political activism; it was the badge of the individual who proclaimed his sexual
nature openly and campaigned for the liberation of himself and others like him
from the unjust prohibitions and discriminations of "straight"
society. One can readily grant that in ancient Greece and Rome no one was
"gay" in this sense. Such a political stance arose only in
dialectical opposition to the Judeo-Christian attitude toward homosexual
behavior and those who engaged in it. Even today many of those who participate
in homosexual activity far from the mass meetings and rallies of the "gay
ghettoes" are heedless of this political aspect of homosexuality, which
they perceive as irrelevant to their desires for erotic gratification.
Conclusions. As has been noted, social
construction theory has made a contribution in warning against anachronism,
the tendency to project back into the past one's own familiar experiences and
life ways. Yet the idea that cultural climates shift, changing the expression
of sexuality with them, is scarcely a new discovery. What is disappointing
about social contraction is that it offers no explanation of the
"grounding" of such change. What mechanisms - economic, political,
intellectual - cause a society to move from one dominant cultural climate to
another? Moreover, social construction has gone too far in seeking to
discourage transhistorical and cross-cultural investigations of homosexual
desire. Implied roadblocks of this kind must not stymie the investigator, for
comparative studies across time and across social systems are a vital prerequisite
to the emergence of a satisfactory concept of human homosexual behavior in all
its fullness and complexity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
John Boswell, "Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories," Salmagundi, 58-59 (1982-83), 89-113;
Wayne R. Dynes, "Wrestling with the Social Boa Constructor," Out in Academia, 2:1-2 (1988), 18-29;
Robert Padgug, "Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in
History," Radical History Review, 20 (1979), 3-23; Kenneth
Plummer, ed., The Making of the Modern Homosexual, Totowa, NJ: Barnes and
Noble, 1981; Will Roscoe, "Making History: The Challenge of Gay and
Lesbian Studies," Journal of Homosexuality, 15:3/4 (1988), 1-40.
Wayne R. Dynes
Social Democracy
This term
has acquired various meanings in the course of the past century and a half.
Late nineteenth-century Europe saw the formation of Marxian working-class parties
that called themselves Social Democrats. These gained in numbers and
influence, but were beset by the unresolved problem of whether to limit
themselves to parliamentary maneuvering, or else to resort to such
extra-parliamentary means as general strikes and working-class violence to
achieve power.
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 triggered a major crisis within the left, in which the
parliamentary and reformist elements sided with Social Democracy, while those
committed to violent revolution joined Communist Parties organized on the
Leninist model. This splitting of the left provoked internecine struggles that
weakened it in the face of the emerging fascist and National Socialist
movements in the years of the Great Depression. Social Democracy tended to
become the party of the petty bourgeoisie and the intellectuals, while the
working class proper rallied to its Communist rivals.
Germany. The first party to welcome
the new homosexual emancipation movement was German Social Democracy. In
January 1898 August Bebel, the leader of the party in the Reichstag, took the
floor in defense of the first petition submitted by the newly founded Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee, while - with the exception of a single National Liberal - the
representatives of the other parties expressed outrage and disgust at the
subject of the petition. In the wake of this intervention, Magnus Hirschfeld
was personally received by Secretary Nieberding, the head of the Imperial
Office of Justice, who cautioned him that the government could do nothing
until the public had been reeducated as to the justice of abolishing the antihomosexual Paragraph 175. The Social
Democrats - with a few exceptions in their own ranks - continued to be the only
party that supported the demands of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee,
while the opposition was spearheaded by the Catholic Centrist Party. At first
the whole issue was limited to Germany, as the Social Democratic parties in
other nations, for a variety of reasons, had no "homosexual question"
to debate.
As happened elsewhere, German progressives took notice - often uncritically -
of Soviet Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 not only swept away the old
order in a cataclysm of blood and violence, it gave the appearance of turning the
new Soviet Russia into a huge experimental laboratory in which official support
was accorded all kinds of pioneering social innovations. The penal codes of the
RSFSR in 1922 and 1926 omitted all reference to voluntary homosexual acts committed
in private, and among reformers in the West the myth arose that the Soviet
Union was the "country of the future" in which the injustices and
inequalities of the past were being overcome. This stance naturally affected
the leftist parties abroad.
In 1922 a highly progressive penal code was drafted by the German Minister of
Justice, Gustav Radbruch, who had been the teacher of Kurt Hiller at the
University of Heidelberg, but Radbruch did not succeed in bringing his draft
before the Reichstag. The Communist Party, with its principle of strict
intraparty discipline, made support for law reform part of its platform. The
Communist lawyer Felix Halle formulated its approach to the issue by writing:
"The class-conscious proletariat, uninfluenced by the ideology of property
and freed from the ideology of the churches, approaches the question of sexual
life and also the problem of homosexuality with a lack of prejudice afforded by
an understanding of the overall structure of society."
On October 16, 1929, decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting
adults was voted by a committee of the Reichstag 15 to 13, with the
Communists, Social Democrats, and German People's Party (classical liberal]
supporting the change. However, the American stock market crash a week later
- heraldinga world-wide depression - provoked a crisis in which law reform was
shelved as the Reichstag struggled with the deteriorating economic situation
and the mounting polarization of political forces within the country.
The Social Democratic Party supported the demands of the homosexual
organizations less out of any principled commitment than because of its
devotion to the principle of individual liberty which it had taken over from
the classical liberal parties of the nineteenth century, but for just this
reason it countenanced defection within its own ranks.
Other Countries. In countries other than
Germany the Social Democratic parties and their equivalents often had no
clearly defined "sexual politics," suffered embarrassment by the issues
which sexual reform raised, and were intimidated by the negative response of
the uneducated and religious strata of the population. The only country where
law reform was realized under Social Democratic leadership in this period was Denmark, which repealed its
sodomy law in 1930 (followed by Sweden in 1944 and Norway in 1948).
In the Soviet Union, Stalin set about repudiating all concessions to liberalism
as he consolidated his power in a one-party state. A law dated March 7, 1934 -
a year after the National Socialist seizure of power - restored criminal sanctions
against male but not female homosexuality. Various contradictory pretexts were
offered for the change, but in practice it meant that - even as the myth of the
"humanist Stalin" was propagated abroad in the interest of the
Popular Front formed to halt the rising tide of reaction in Central and Western
Europe - the Communist parties lost all interest in sexual reform, and Social
Democracy had to carry the ball alone.
The World League for Sexual Reform on a Scientific Basis itself collapsed
after Hirschfeld's death on May 14, 1935, as the two wings - one desiring a
centrist approach with the cooperation of the bourgeois parties and the other
seeking an open alliance with the Communist Party, even at that late date -
could not work together. The movement of the preceding twenty-five years had
pursued a number of different goals which now proved ideologically
incompatible. The sexual reform aspect tended to become the province of the
left, while the birth control movement and sex education were anchored in the
center and the eugenics movement became identified with the right, particularly
after the Nazi accession to power in Germany, where Hitler forced upon his
cabinet a series of negative eugenic measures, including compulsory
sterilization. The Soviet Union relentlessly dismantled progressive social
laws, prohibited homosexuality, forbade abortion and the sale of birth control
materials, and conformed to the model of the clerical-fascist states with their
pronatalist policies. Some leftist scholars have argued that such retrograde
policies were a temporary aberration under Stalin. Yet long after his death,
the Communist regimes of China, Cuba, and Vietnam - not to mention that of the
Soviet Union itself - have continued to adhere rigidly to these policies, with
antihomosexuality prominent among them.
In Western Europe after 1945 the Social Democratic parties sympathized with the
homosexual liberation movement but were often timid in defending it, while the
conservative parties were solid in their opposition to law reform and quite
willing to use homosexuals as scapegoats in the anti-Communist furor of the
1950s. It was only in 1969 that Paragraph 175 was finally repealed under a
Social Democratic government in Bonn.
In Britain a special situation prevailed. Much of the Labour Party's rank and
file persisted in regarding homosexuality as a product of the elite public
schools, as (in effect) an aristocratic vice. Initially it was easier to obtain
support for the work of the Wolfenden Committee from Liberals and even
Conservatives than from Labour stalwarts. When George Brinham, who had been
chairman of the Labour Party from 1959 to 1960, was murdered by a hustler in
1962, the party offered no sympathy, only silence.
Nonetheless, in Parliament the chief support for the AbseBill (1967), which
decriminalized homosexual conduct among consenting adults in England and Wales,
came from Labour Party members. Yet this step was taken in the form of a
private member's bill not officially supported by the Labour government of Harold
Wilson.
Subsequently, homosexuality emerged as an issue in dispute between the
"modem" sector of the party, consisting of intellectuals and elements
of the upper middle class, as against the old-line trade unionists. The latter
remained deeply suspicious of the championing of gay rights and other
progressive social issues by the modem faction. In the 1980s Thatcherite
electoral successes caused frustration that heightened cleavages over social questions.
In theBermondsey by-election of February 1983, when openly gay Peter Tatchell
sought to be returned to Parliament as the official Labour candidate, his
campaign suffered to systematic vilification at the hands of party stalwarts.
In 1988 many Labour M.P.s voted for Clause 28, the notorious measure banning
"promotion" of homosexuality.
Despite the checkered record in some countries, on the whole the growth of
Social Democracy promoted a climate of liberalism in
which, other factors permitting, a visible gay movement could flourish. In the
early 1980s the French Socialist Party of Francois Mitterand proved receptive
to a number of requests from the homosexual movement, eliminating the last
vestiges of the Vichy restrictions on homosexual conduct. The Spanish
Socialists under Felipe González
enormously increased the
whole sphere of sexual freedom. In Greece, however,
the Socialist regime of Andreas Papandreou continued to repress homosexuality.
Conclusion. On the whole, the ideology of Social
Democratic parties has been eclectic rather than doctrinaire, absorbing traits
of nineteenth-century liberalism repudiated
by the conservatives. At the same time they have been gingerly about offending
lower middle-class deference to sexual "respectability," and they
loathe to engage in a vigorous defense of gay rights in crucial electoral
contests where the right (and sometimes the left) openly appeals to
anti-homosexual prejudice. Despite these reservations, the progress achieved
by the gay movement in Western and Central Europe would have been unimaginable
without the intervention and support of the Social Democracy, however
qualified in particular situations it may have been.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Bob Cant and Susan Hemmings, eds., Radical Records: Thirty Years of Lesbian and Gay History, London: Routledge, 1988;
W. U. Eissler, Arbeiterparteien und Homosexuellenfrage: Zur Sexualpohtik
von SPD und KPD in der Weimarer Republik, Hamburg: Verlag Rosa
Winkel, 1980; Harry Oosterhuis, "The Guilty Conscience of the Left,"
European
Gay Review, 4 (1989), 72-80; James D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation
Movement in Germany, New York: Amo Press, 1975; Peter Tatchell, The Battle for Bermondsey,
second
ed., London: GMP/Heretic Books, 1984.
William A. Percy
Social Work
This umbrella term comprises
a range of professional services, activities, and methods concretely addressing
the investigation, treatment, and material assistance of those perceived to be
economically disadvantaged and socially maladjusted. Social work began in late
Victorian England as a volunteer response to the wide disparity between the
"two nations" - the comfortable class and the poor - and spread
quickly to America and northern Europe. In the course of the twentieth century
the field became professionalized, and today most social workers are state
employees. Large claims have sometimes been made for social work: that it can
cure society of its ills, and that it represents the conscience of a people,
but these assertions are usually rejected as grandiose. Lacking a methodology
of its own, social work has sometimes seemed a prisoner of the varying mixtures
of economics, sociology, andpsychoanalysis that have been imported to sustain
its practice. Social work should probably be viewed not as a science but as a
humanistic endeavor, though one in which the imperatives of bureaucracy loom
large. At its best, however, social work avoids ascriptions of pathology, seeking
to build on the strengths of clients so that they may take an active part in
reclaiming their own lives.
Social Work and Homosexuality.
The rise of the modern gay
and lesbian movement after World War II has exposed the inadequacy of the
publicly supported social services for members of sexual minorities. It is not so
much that professional social workers are homophobic - surveys have shown that
they are less so than most segments of society - as that they are ignorant of
the special needs of gay and lesbian clients, and hence prone to insensitivity,
however unintentional. In part this situation reflects the earlier prevalence
of the cultural norm of Western society which decreed heterosexual marriage to
be the only acceptable, recognized form of sexual relationship; other types of
liaison had to be hidden from the prying gaze of the neighbors, social workers,
and the police. Moreover, most gay and lesbian clients, not being members of
economically deprived families, or having severed conventional family ties,
are seen as middle class, and hence outside the area of the social worker's
concern. Of course not all students of social work are the same, and some
individuals attend schools of social work as a prerequisite to the practice of
psychotherapy with middle-class clients.
Gay Self-Help. Almost from the beginning
of the Mattachine Society, America's first successful homosexual rights
organization, the need to organize volunteers to supply counseling and - as far
as possible - jobs and temporary economic assistance was recognized. Today this
need is particularly acute with youth, with the elderly, and with people with
AIDS. Many gay and lesbian teenagers feel compelled to leave home
("runaways"), or may even be pushed out by intensely homophobic
parents ("throwaways"). If they are to escape the self-destructive
subculture of drug abuse and prostitution, they need positive assistance. This
has sometimes proved a sensitive issue, as caregivers may incur suspicion of
impure motives. As regards older gay men and lesbians, research has shown that
the stereotype of a lonely, desperate, unhappy old age is false. Nonetheless,
older gay people have special needs, and these are the focus of such
organizations as New York's Senior Action in a Gay Environment (SAGE).
The AIDS crisis has caused new organizations to be created in major cities in
North America and western Europe. The remarkable social response of the gay
community to this baffling disease contrasts with the situation of the
intravenous-drug-user group of AIDS patients, where dependence on public
sources of therapy and counseling is total.
Even gay-organized social services may display inadequate attention to some
sectors of their population. Because most gay volunteers are middle class, they
may not have a full understanding of those from poor backgrounds; put
differently, commonness of sexual orientation may mask difference in social
class. It is often forgotten that many lesbians and gay men are parents, and
their concern for their offspring is a central aspect of their lives. Finally,
gay men and lesbians of color may have not only economic problems but
psychological ones as well; the latter stem not only from the racism of the
larger society but from lack of understanding within their own ethnic
communities.
Experience has shown that the gay community need not continue to rely mainly on
its own largely volunteer efforts, but that real successes can be gained in
sensitizing social workers employed by the state, either during their training
period or in the course of their professional activity. After all, homosexuals
are entitled to a return on their tax dollars just as much as any other group,
and the social disorganization caused by prejudice against them ultimately
impacts the larger community. In some cases much may be accomplished by
sitting down with the (presumably) heterosexual social workers and patiently
explaining the problem. However, the bureaucratic constraints of public
agencies can make progress slow. Here external pressure, including lobbying
efforts and voting drives, is required. The success of gay groups in organizing
is known to politicians and can be used to advantage in changing the
social-work profession from the top.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
A. Elfin Moses and Robert G. Hawkins, Counseling Lesbian Women and Cay Men: A Life-Issues
Approach, St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1982; Robert Schoenberg, Richard S.
Goldberg, and David A. Shore, eds., With Compassion Toward Some, New York: Harrington
Press, 1985; Natalie Jane Woodman and Harry R. Lenna, Counseling with Cay Men
and Women: A Cuide for Facihtating Positive Life-Styles, San Prancisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1980.
Wayne R. Dynes
SOCIOBIOLOGY
Sociobiology
is the study of behavior (in human beings and animals) from the point of view
of its evolution by natural selection. The term was popularized in 1975 (the
field is sometimes also called "behavioral ecology"). Narrowly,
sociobiology has come to mean the study of the "why" questions of
behavior: why does a particular species of fish have males that act like
females do just before they lay their eggs? Broadly, it can also take in the
"how" questions: how do the fish's central nervous system and
hormones collaborate to produce this behavior?
Nature and Nurture. There are, of course,
other approaches that have been called "biological." To the lay mind,
if a trait "is" biological then it cannot be changed; if the trait
"is" environmental then it can be. This is a false dichotomy, and is
self-contradictory. For example, an "environmental" event like a car
accident can have very fixed and unchangeable consequences (such as permanent
injury), while a "biological" trait such as the growing of a beard
can be routinely overridden by a cultural mandate (shaving). Establishing the
steps leading up to a trait helps one to understand the trait and perhaps to
change it, regardless of whether the causation turns out to "be"
biological, environmental, or some combination. The sizes, shapes, and spatial
distributions of footprints are all socially determined within certain limits
set by the biology of walking. But if the footprints are in sand, they are
easily changed; if they are in wet concrete, they are unchangeable (short of
jack-hammering) after just a few hours.
Unfortunately, this naive nature-nurture dichotomy has been widely taken up in the
social sciences. The most common view is to say that biology has an influence
in the womb and very early in life, but that soon after birth the family and
society socialize the infant and make the influence of biology negligible. A
variation of this view maintains that biology sets the limits but
socialization sets the precise outcome. A few social scientists, including a
few in sexology, believe so strongly in the power of socialization that they
claim that students of behavior should not bother with biology at all.
This point of view is rapidly crumbling, even within the narrow confines of
sexology itself. The massive Kinsey Institute study of male and female
homosexuality in blacks and whites (Bell, Weinberg, and Hammersmith, 1981)
attempted to correlate hundreds of environmental factors (number and age of
siblings, childhood rearing practices, social class, and the like) with adult
homosexual outcome and came up with almost nothing. They very nearly found that
the only powerful predictor of adult homosexuality is childhood gender
nonconformity, a finding that has been replicated often, both retrospectively
and prospectively. This predictor is so strong that the authors of the study
considered it evidence that such nonconformity is closely linked to
homosexuality develop-mentally - i.e., that the commonest type of adult
homosexuality is just the adult expression of the childhood nonconforming
trait. That is a reasonable conclusion, though one cannot thereby assume that
biology has been shown to be the likely cause of sexual orientation
differences.
Yet sexual orientation does run in families, according to a study conducted by
Richard Pillard and James D. Weinrich. If the results are extendible to the
population at large, then about 20 to 25 percent of the brothers of gay men
are also gay, and 20 to 25 percent of the sisters of lesbian women are lesbian
or bisexual. These findings per se do not show the reasons for the trait
running in families. But it is interesting that in recent history, social scientists
have not conducted studies like this one, even though they would quite properly
point out that they would use socialization theory to explain the results.
When homosexuality and biology have been discussed together before the advent
of sociobiology, results have been mixed. Alfred Kinsey approached
homosexuality and biology just as he approached heterosexuality and biology: by
considering the natural evolutionary heritage of our species. Heterosexually,
he noted that a sense of smell is extremely important in the courtship rituals
of many mammalian species, and so he thought it not surprising that some human
beings would be sexually excited by particular smells. Likewise, he found
sexual activities between members of the same sex to be common enough in other
mammals to conclude that homosexuality, too, was within the evolutionary
heritage of the human mammal. However, he resisted finer distinctions (might
something be natural for mountain sheep but unnatural for human beings?) and
seemed to be uninterested in the Why questions, even though he was a
well-enough regarded expert in evolutionary biology to write a textbook about
it.
Genetic Basis for Homosexuality!
The
Kinsey group's surveys did, however, find an incidence of homosexuality among
men and women that was very high, evolutionarily speaking. This significance
of Kinsey's statistics was picked out by the pathbreaking evolutionary biologist
G. Evelyn Hutchinson, who read the Kinsey statistic that roughly 10 percent of
American males had only or mainly homosexual ey írience for 3 or more years of
reproductive Ufe, and argued that there might be a genetic predisposition to
such behavior. This number is evolutionarily extremely large if one assumes
that homosexuality is merely an evolutionary "mistake." Had the
actual incidence of homosexuality turned out to have been what biologists
consider the normal range for evolutionary mistakes - very rare, say one in
10,000 - Hutchinson would not have taken note of it, because (rightly or
wrongly) he could have assumed that if there were a genetic mechanism promoting
homosexuality it was no commoner than any of several genetically transmitted
diseases. But 10 percent is at least 100 times as high a level as 1 in 10,000
is, and so Hutchinson had to ask why natural selection would have
"allowed" the evolution of a species that had sexual learning
patterns in which 10 percent of its male members reproduce at a level
significantly lower than they otherwise seemed able to - not because of some
incurable defect but because they are not attracted to women. After all, attraction
to the opposite sex is one of the first things one might expect evolution to arrange.
So if there were any genetic predisposition to even a portion of male homosexuality,
then Kinsey's statistics pose a puzzle: how could a genetic mistake come to be
so common? Even if one takes an estimate as low as 4 percent, this is still 40
times higher than the highest mutation rates.
Hutchinson's answer was to find the sense in which homosexuality is not an
evolutionary mistake, and in following this radical (for 1959) line of thought
he showed a preference that was also shared by the earliest sociobiological
investigators of homosexuality. When sociobiologists see variation in a trait
in nature, they tend to look not for what went wrong, but rather for what went
right. In Hutchinson's day, the way to see something "right" in a
trait that lowered reproductive success was heterozygote advantage. This was the
first in a number of theories developed in an attempt to explain the
evolutionary value of homosexuality.
Heterozygote Advantage. This is commonly
illustrated in textbooks by the example of sickle-cell anemia, but there is no reason why the principle has to be
illustrated with a disease. The essential point is that sometimes an organism
can need two different genes to maximize its reproductive success. Owing to
genetic recombination, a parent usually passes only one of these two genes on
to any particular offspring, and so only some of that organism's children will
get one of each kind of gene [i.e., be heterozygous like the parent), even if
both parents have both genes (i.e., are are heterozygous themselves). Some
children will get two copies of one and others will get two copies of the other
(i.e., they will be homozygous). Natural selection will be unable to eliminate
either of the two kinds of homozygote, even if one of them (as in sickle-cell
anemia) is extremely deleterious to the carrier's reproductive success, because
there is natural selection for heterozygosity.
Hutchinson's idea could be loosely applied to homosexuality as follows. If
there were a gene which predisposed its carriers to be heterosexual, and
another one at the same locus that predisposed them to be homosexual, and if
those who got one of each gene on average raised more children than those who
got two of either kind, then there could well be a number of nonreproductive,
homozygous individuals who got two copies of the homosexuality-predisposing
gene - a number much higher than the levels of 1 in 10,000 or so discussed
above, and quite possibly in the 4-10 percent range. So Hutchinson viewed
homosexuality not as an out-and-out mistake but perhaps as the inevitable
result of selection for heterozygosity in sexual preference.
It was evolutionary biologists John Kirsch
and James Rodman who put
flesh onto this idea in 1982 by proposing that people with one copy each of the
hypothetical homosexuality- and heterosexuality-predisposing genes might be
bisexuals with a higher average reproductive success than either the average
"pure" homosexual or the average "pure" heterosexual.
There are, for example, many societies in which everyone is expected to marry
but in which male members are expected to engage in extensive homosexual
relationships before marriage (or throughout life). These relationships can be
of profound benefit throughout the men's lives. A "pure" heterosexual
might have more difficulty forming such bonds, and a "pure" homosexual
might have trouble forming a marital bond, and thus both groups might not fare
as well reproductively as the man with bisexual potential. How this might
apply to societies in which extramarital homosexuality was disadvantageous was
not explained in detail.
An entirely different model of homosexuality in sociobiological thought
concerns certain so-called "cross-gendered" individuals such as the
berdache among American Indians, the mukhannath (or khanith) among the Arabs of Oman, and the hijra in India.
In certain societies [with endless variation in detail), boys (and sometimes
girls] with marked childhood gender nonconformity are channeled into
specialized adult roles. In the case of berdaches, these specialized positions
often combine the roles of drag queen, healer, psychotherapist, and teacher.
The theory proposed to account for such people is called kin selection, and in
its previous application to insect societies it constitutes one of
sociobiology's theoretical triumphs.
Kin selection theory points out that Darwin was wrong when he proposed that, as
a result of natural selection, individual animals will act so as to maximize
their reproductive success (or RS; the number of offspring one has which
survive to reproductive adulthood). Instead, says kin selection, natural
selection acts to maximize individuals' inclusive fitness (IF), which is the
number of surviving offspring plus the' number of relatives' surviving
offspring, with each such offspring being devalued by a fraction that reflects
the percentage of genes shared with the individual by direct descent. One's own children
are valued at 1, a full sibling's children at 1 /2, one's half-sibling's
children at 1/4, and so on. Accordingly, some people might maximize their IF
even if they have an RS of zero - which means that one can no longer automatically
assume that an animal without offspring is acting contrary to how evolution
has selected it to act. Accordingly, the homophobes' most smug argument- - that
homosexual acts are unnatural because they cannot produce children - collapses
at its foundation.
In 1976 Weinrich pointed out that this model might be applicable to the
cross-gendered berdaches (following suggestions made by Robert Trivers, Herman
Spieth, and Edward O. Wilson). For kin selection to take hold and allow the
evolution of such reproductively altruistic traits, a certain mathematical
relationship must hold between the cost to the individual of not reproducing
(the cost measured in terms of lost RS) and the benefit to that individual's
kin of having a nonreproducing relative (the benefit likewise measured in RS
units). Under some conditions, an individual might reproductively be considered
"damaged goods," and thus have a lower than average cost of not reproducing.
Under others, an individual might just happen to be particularly gifted in a
given society's nonreproductive role, and might thus maximize her or his IF by
taking up the role - even if taking up the role would require one to forego
personal reproduction.
The damaged goods argument often meets with acceptance, perhaps because it does
not challenge the cultural assumption that homosexuality should turn out to be
below heterosexuality in some sense. But the special-talent explanation often
meets with the following question: if the people supposedly covered by it are
so talented, why do they not apply their talents to reproduction?
Berdaches. A good answer to this
legitimate (even if unfortunately-phrased) question had to wait until 1987.
Recent anthropological research suggests that people like the berdaches are not
so much cross-gendered as they are mixed-gendered, and that they serve(d)
important roles in their societies as arbitrators in the battle between the
sexes. Here, once again, the unique sociobiological perspective [or obsession)
of reproductive success steps in with a surprising theoretical argument. If
mixed-gender individuals are valuable because they can arbitrate different
points of view on gender issues, why is it to the advantage of each side to take
the berdaches' advice? Why would they be considered less biased than others
in the tribe? If a society is willing to reward them (and their families) for
settling gender disputes, arranging marriages, and the like, because they are
not particularly biased for or against (say)menwho abandon their wives and 20
children or women who cuckold their husbands, it would behoove them not to be
men who had abandoned their wives and 20 children themselves or women who had
cuckolded their husbands themselves.
Sociobiological theory suggests that these people would in fact be less likely
to be biased only if they renounced their sex's point of view, which
sociobiologically is seen to result from the different actions each sex is
selected to use in its reproductive strategy. If they pursue a nonreproductive
strategy, then sexual dimorphism suddenly loses its point, and (according to
kin selection) their side in the battle of the sexes would depend not upon
their own sex but upon the sex of their relatives. But on average (and certainly
on average over time!) one's relatives are about equally divided between males
and females. So by renouncing individual reproduction, such people make it
possible for their advice in fact to be less biased. This in turn makes their
advice more likely to be taken (even if, as is the fate of arbitrators, it is
taken grudgingly).
Marriage and Homosexual Behavior.
With both
the kin selection and heterozygote-advantage theories in mind, in 1987 Weinrich
proposed a new theory that put forth a better evolutionary raison d'etre for
homosexuality in societies in which everyone is expected to marry. In such
societies, sexual attraction is often not high on the list of reasons to marry;
pure lust is expected to be gratified in extramarital liaisons or not at all.
Ancient Greece, modern urban Mexico, medieval Japan, and the United States in
several of the past few centuries may well constitute such societies.
"Being homosexual" in such a society, as opposed to "being
heterosexual," means being inclined to having homosexual relations
outside of marriage instead of heterosexual ones outside of marriage.
Obviously, this kind of homosexuality can be considered a form of bisexuality,
and interestingly such a bisexual or homosexual person has two reproductive
advantages over a pure heterosexual when viewed in sociobiological terms: he
or she would be less likely to have children out of wedlock, and she or he
would be less likely to protest a marriage arranged by the parents (i.e., one
would be less likely to be already in love with a member of the opposite sex to
whom one might have wished to become married). Both of these traits had
previously been proposed by sociobiologists as reproductively altruistic acts
(in work published before this theory was circulated).
Conclusion. Of course, any sociobiological
theory worth its salt must be highly aware of social and environmental
influences on the traits being considered, because natural selection is
extremely sensitive to the social forces at work in the society which sets the
rules. If your society offers no berdache role, you can try to improvise one
(as modem "drag queens" seem sometimes to do) but it is unlikely that
your IF will thereby increase. Sociobiological theories help to explain why
imprinting of sexual object choices could have evolved in some species to be
fixed (like footprints in concrete) and in others to be easily changeable (like
footprints in sand). Indeed, it is even conceivable that "fixed"
types may have begun evolving in some societies and "changeable"
types in other societies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Alan C. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith, Sexual Preference: Its
Development in Men and Women, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981; G. G. Gallup,
Jr., and S. D. Suarez, "Homosexuality as a By-product of Selection for
Optimal Heterosexual Strategies," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 26 (1983), 315-22; G.
Evelyn Hutchinson, "A Speculative Consideration of Certain Possible Forms
of Sexual Selection in Man," American Naturalist, 93 ¡1959), 81-91; John A.
W. Kirsch and James Eric Rodman, "Selection and Sexuality: The Darwinian
View of Homosexuality," in Homosexuality: Social, Psychological, and Biological
Issues, W. Paul, J. D. Weinrich, J. C. Gonsiorek, and M. E. Hotvedt,
eds., Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications, 1982, pp. 183-95; Richard C.
Pillard and James D. Weinrich, "Evidence of Familial Nature of Male
Homosexuality," Archives of General Psychiatry, 43 (1986), 808-12; Michael
Ruse, "Are There Gay Genes? Sociobiology and Homosexuality," Journal of Homosexuality, 6:4 (1981) 5-34; James D.
Weinrich, Human Reproductive Strategy: The Importance of Income
Unpredictability, and the Evolution of Non-Reproduction, Ph.D. thesis, Harvard
University Department of Biology, 1976; idem, "Is Homosexuality
Biologically Natural!" in W. Paul, et al., op cit., pp. 197-211; idem,
"A New Sociobiological Theory of Homosexuality Applicable to Societies
with Universal Marriage," Ethology and Sociobiology, 8 (1987), 37-47; idem, Sexual Landscapes: Why We
Are What We Are, Why We Love Whom We Love, New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1987.
James D. Weinrich
Sociology
The term
sociology was coined by Auguste Comte in 1836. Since his time sociology has
developed into a major discipline, with particular resonance in English-speaking
countries.
Yet academic sociology is in some respects a codification of knowledge that has
always been available. In all societies individuals have some view of what is
shared by other individuals known to them. Folk theories exist everywhere about
what is common to members of a human group as well what contrasts with
qualities found in other groups. Programs for scientific comparison of the
evolution of social arrangements were stimulated by reports of social
arrangements at variance with European ones made available during the Age of
Discovery (after 1492). The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution
helped to augment this stimulus and channel it.
Among those trying to make sense of those changes and their place as part of a
process of social evolution were the three architects of sociology's
"grand theory": Karl Marx (1818-1883), Emile Dürkheim (1858-1917),
and Max Weber (1864-1919). None of them was professionally trained in sociology,
and their precursors in theorizing about social order and structure included
Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Vico, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.
The Basic Problem. The central concern of
sociology elaborating this patrimony is world-historical changes in systems of
domination. Its aim is to explain how one system (e.g., capitalism) functions
at a particular time and how one system arises from another (e.g., capitalism
succeeding feudalism). To those ensconced at the discipline's center, others
chronicling the lifeways of "queers" have seemed to be engaged in a
dubious enterprise unlikely to contribute to the building of a unified theory
of society. Indeed, description of how people actually live has often struck
those concerned with abstract, general theories of society as a diversion from
the path to knowledge. And when the people described are homosexual, motives
such as voyeuristic titillation or special pleading are imputed. Yet the
macrohistorical processes projected by Marx and Dürkheim from their
consideration of European history have not been enacted elsewhere as predicted,
nor have subsequent events in Europe followed their scenarios of primordial
loyalties eroding with increasing industrialization.
Even the builders of American sociological traditions, who focused on smaller
social units over briefer periods of time, expected contrasts of race,
ethnicity, and gender to wane. The classic work (1913-18) of W. I. Thomas and
Florian Znaniecki on Polish peasants emigrating to the United States
exemplified Durkheim's conception of the (necessary) breakdown of traditional
(peasant) society with accompanying individual pathology which reflected social
disorganization - both of which were expected to disappear with integration
into the modem world of, say, Chicago. Empirical work in the Chicago School
tradition treated ethnic subcultures under the rubric of "social disorganization,"
an anomaly destined to be resolved as contact with dominant American society
reduced differences. This process - variously termed assimilation, acculturation,
accommodation - was supposed to eliminate hostility and, by the same token,
conflict. Since conflict was regarded as a product of individual attitudes and
values rather than of structured inequalities, it was expected to diminish as
contact dissolved stereotypes and cultural differences - the sources of
inter-group conflict. Ascribed characteristics (such as race, gender, and
possibly sexual orientation) have taken on an importance quite out of keeping
with the confident expectations of those in the "grand tradition"
that these need not be considered, because their significance would decline
eventually and disappear.
Historical reality has proved to be quite different. Groups based on characteristics
which classical theory regarded as already anachronistic a century ago have not
merely "assumed political functions comparable to those of a subordinate
class,-they have in important respects become more effective than social
classes in mobilizing their forces in pursuit of collective ends"
(Parkin, p. 622). Insofar as sociology aims to analyze what is actually
occurring rather than to invoke the tarrying of the messiah, it must endeavor
to explain the continued strength and/or emergence of social movements based on
consciousness óf shared ascribed characteristics. The emergence of a group
consciousness and subsequent mobilization of a "people" who could not
seriously have been designated a "group" three decades ago contrasts
markedly with the erosion of class consciousness and the increasing impotence
of organized labor. Not just Marxist theory, but classical bourgeois social
theory, including the two major American perspectives descended from Durkheim
and from Thomas, functionalism and symbolic interactionism respectively, have
ill prepared the investigator to understand the quite unpredicted emergence and
successes of racial and ethnic, women's and gay movements. Although
understanding homosexual socialization has not been a central theme for
sociological theory, prominent attempts to encompass American (male)
homosexuality in the mid-to-late twentieth century will be discussed below.
Functionalism. The
structuralist-functionalist tradition included some recognition that moral
consensus requires some target: norm-drenched individuals need before them the
cautionary example of negative role models. To be certain that they are within
the bounds of propriety, someone else must be condemned to obloquy outside the
boundaries. Blatant specimens of inadequate masculine socialization can be
tolerated as a butt for jokes (among other things), because such persons serve
as a horrible warning of what boys must avoid becoming. Possibly, public
punishment of. sodomites served the same "function" in Europe during
the Middle Ages, in Aztec Mexico, and in the pre-Columbian Andes. Ridicule was
sufficient in North American Indian tribes and in the Pacific cultures of
Polynesia. To define the moral unit "us" of a society there must be
others beyond the moral pale. Durkheim wrote of "normal" rates of
deviance and crime necessary to provide occasions for exemplary punishments to
affirm the moral order, publicly fixing the line between acceptable and
unacceptable behavior. Durkheim's intellectual heirs have been concerned with
boundary maintenance both between and within societies. Of course, to serve an
exemplary role as a moral counterexample a deviant (of whatever sort) must be
generally recognized as such. Prior to the Kinsey findings concerning
incidence, when it was assumed a homosexual was a rara avis (the village queer)
and that one could be readily recognized by everyone (because of their obvious
gender non-conformity), homosexuality seemed consistent enough with a moral
consensus model of society, i.e., it was "normal deviance" rather
than subversion of the moral order.
The landmark study that showed how widespread homosexuality could reinforce
rather than challenge the moral order was that of Reiss on hustlers and their
clients (1961). For trade individuals, masculinity was defined by insertor behavior.
In their view, the "queers" were the insertees, so their
participation did not erode trade masculine status, so long as they gave
nothing more than their cocks (and possibly an occasional beating), i.e., so
long as they "never took it." Prostitution was not perceived as
demasculinizing as such; apparently this stigmatizing definition was evaded
along with that of "queer." Such a system could persist only with the
collusion of clients willing to enact the role of the "queer" by not
challenging the valuation and self-image of those whose behavior was that of
homosexual prostitution. So long as this system's script for the dominance of
the masculine actor and the submission (and optimally feminization) of the
"queer" was credited, validation of masculinity and depreciation of
homosexuality were actually supported by "deviant" acts. The
"queers" kneeling to worship the symbols of trade's masculinity
quarantined the stigma, protecting the masculine self-conceptions of their
sexual partners. Beyond the financial rewards, sexual release, and the
reassurance of masculinity, the trade participants were exposed to the dangers
of succumbing to any temptations toward passivity. Most presumably
"learned" they weren't "queer" - and did not have to be
such to get off with men. Reiss' study did not assess the degree of "role
distance" of those enacting the "queer" role versus the degree
of self-hatred, but to whatever extent those playing the "queer"
role credited its truth (and justice), the moral order in general and the
superiority of heterosexual males in particular were reinforced by
"deviant" acts.
How far men could venture into homosexuality - beyond adolescence and even
beyond exclusively insertor behavior - without considering themselves
implicated as "queers" either by themselves or by their partners was
demonstrated by the preponderance of married men observed by Laud Humphreys in
his study of toilet sex, Tearoom
Trade. Not only was homosexuality compatible with the existing
moral order, so were homosexuals, for it was not just "trade" who
"compensated" for suspect sexual behavior with hyper-conformity in
espousing traditional social values (especially in regard to sex and gender).
The stratification of sexual encounters (with the "masculine
principle" on top in every sense), along with the "consent" to
stigmatization of those seeking "real men" as partners was perfectly
consistent with the Durkheimian vision.
Blumstein and Schwartz' rich comparative study of married, non-married
cohabiting, gay male, and lesbian couples follows the functionalist tradition
into a social world in which such stratification is mostly obsolete - although
both lesbians and gay men in their sample remain sensitive to being fit into
the opposite gender role. Functionalists delineated complementary instrumental
(the husband oriented toward the world outside the family) and affective (the
wife oriented inward to the family) roles necessary to the functioning of small
groups (not just families). Blumstein and Schwartz substitute a new polarity -
work-centered/relationship-centered - for the instrumental/ affective one. They
contend that for a relationship to endure, at least one partner must be
oriented inward toward keeping the relationship going well, but do not try to
sort out whether relationships work better when both partners are relationship-centered,
or if there is some advantage to one partner being oriented outward from the
relationship to the work world (i.e., whether the roles are genuinely
complementary, not merely different).
Symbolic Interactionism. In the pre-contemporary
period of relative neglect, most sociological research dealing with
homosexuality was done, however, within another, indigenous tradition which
rivaled functionalism for hegemony in postwar American sociology: symbolic
interactionism. The Chicago School included a tradition of studying
"unconventional" careers (e.g., the typical patterns of taxi-hall
dancers, jack-rollers, hoboes] in the same way as the subcultures built by
practically every imaginable social category that could be found in Chicago,
except homosexuals. Like Dürkheim, the founders of the Chicago School believed
the all too visible social pathology they saw around them would first fade,
then gradually disappear (a process to be accelerated by sociological
knowledge itself] as a modern moral order emerged, to be consolidated and
expanded. The modern society envisioned from Chicago was more ethnically
diverse than was the Gesellschaft
conceived
by European theorists. Still, Chicago sociologists believed that the knocking
together of those with different cultural backgrounds would break down, or at
least wear off the rough edges of culturally distinctive differences. And, for
whatever reason, this tradition was far more concerned with documenting the
stages in what they were certain was the evolution of antagonistic groups into
a future unity (moral order) than with discussing the overall process: the
forest of the evolution to a more integrated social/ moral order often
disappeared from view in Chicago descriptions of particular trees (roles,
groups, etc.). Nevertheless, the Chicago tradition focused on socialization
decades before functionalists turned to trying to account for the actual
transmission of social order. The Chicago model of socialization held that an
identity (i.e., a self) is an internalization of the view of significant
others. If a behavior (say a boy playing with dolls) is interpreted by others
(e.g., parents) as instancing a category (say, sissy), they will treat the boy
as if he is that kind of person. By recognizing their conception of what he
is, the boy will learn who (what) he is, and if this self is credible, the
behavior will be transformed into a stable pattern (conduct) and a defining
feature of self.
According to symbolic interactionist theory, the self is a product of social
definition. What transforms behavior into conduct is labeling by others. In the
social system of "trade" and "queers" discussed above, the
homosexual behavior of the "trade" is not transformed into homosexual
conduct (or identity), because the "queers" who know about the
behavior do not so label them. Unless the police chance upon them in the act,
no homosexual label is applied. But what of the "queers"? Who
labeled them? Within encounters with the "peers," "trade"
of course did, but most encounters began with someone already set in the
"queer" role, so explanation must look back before the particular
occasion to locate the manufacture of the "queer." Unfortunately for
the theory, most people with homosexual, gay, or lesbian self-identities report
never having been labeled. In his pioneer study of 182 men who considered
themselves homosexual, Dank (p. 123) found "no cases in which the subject
had come out in the context of being arrested on a charge involving
homosexuality or being fired from a job because of homosexual behavior. 4.5
percent of the sample came out in the context of public exposure." Although
labeling theory posits labeling by agents of the state [policemen, judges) in
official records, those trying to rescue the theory might extend
"labeling" from official acts to internalization of everyday
epithets. Such a tack does not, however, salvage the theory, for even in this
broader sense, labeling does not account for the data which have been gathered.
Even those explaining adult homosexuality on the basis of childhood effeminacy
do not find more than half of those with the effect reporting the supposed
cause, even if labeling as effeminate is widened to self-labeling.
That homosexual conduct is generally reached without ever being labeled by
others should suffice to discredit "labeling theory," and some men
report having come out (and have in some cases joined gay organizations) before
having had any homosexual encounters. That is, identity (secondary deviance)
sometimes precedes behavior (primary deviance). For lesbians, Ponse (p. 125)
lists a series of elements in the process of identity formation that reverses
the primary-secondary deviance order. The first element is that the individual
has a subjective sense of being different from heterosexual persons and
identifies this difference as feelings of sexual-emotional attraction to her
own sex. Second, an understanding of the homosexual or lesbian significance of
these feelings is acquired. Third, the individual accepts these feelings and
their implications for identity, i.e., the person comes out or accepts the
identity of lesbian. Fourth, the individual seeks a community of like persons.
Fifth, the individual becomes involved in a sexual-emotional lesbian
relationship.
Rather than those with a gay identity being a subset of those engaged in some
homosexual behavior, the sets intersect with most of those with gay identity
within the intersection and most of those with some homosexual behavior not in
the intersection. Whether the tinier subset of those labeled is wholly in the
intersection of these sets is unknown.
Stigma Theory and the
Rejection of the Deviant Role. Having explored adult males who engaged in homosexual behavior,
and whose denial of homosexuality correlated with social and political traditionalism,
Laud Humphreys became the first sociologist to give sustained attention to the
puzzles homosexual reality posed to sociological theory. In Out of the Closets Humphreys set out to
analyze the then-young gay liberation movement, which was comprised
increasingly of those who had never been labeled, yet openly proclaimed their
gayness, adopted various idioms of the counterculture, and sought coalitions
with other groups challenging the status quo. Humphreys did not attempt to fit
the emergence of the gay liberation movement into the functionalist or
labeling frameworks discussed above. Instead, he built on Goffman's rambling,
but suggestive book, Stigma.
Erving
Goffman (1922-1982), whose major concern is specified in the title of his first
book, The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life (1959), was interested in how individuals manage potentially
discrediting information. He started with the assumption that in a large-scale,
mobile society, no one is quite what he or she seems to be, that is, everyone
has some things to hide; "deviance" involves not a few
"deviants," but everyone (albeit to varying extents, depending on the
social standards for the gravity of what they have to hide). For Goffman,
everyone who is not discredited is (to some degree) discreditable. The
discreditable must cope with anxiety about being found out, the discredited
with anxiety about being rejected on the basis (which they themselves may
consider legitimate) that they are "that kind of person" (whatever
kind does not deserve to be treated as a whole human being). For Goffman,
feeling oneself discredited does not require labeling by anyone else, nor for
that matter do such feelings require any objective basis (such as "primary
deviance"). Since labels are selectively self-applied, being frozen in the
naming glare of some representative of Society (parent, teacher, policeman) is
far from the only path to a sense of spoiled identity. Goffman's extension of
the concept of managing discrediting information from exotic
"deviants" to everyone led him to glimpse another way of being in the
world: accepting that one is indeed an instance of a discredited category, but
challenging the legitimacy of that category's opprobrium - that is, neither
trying to deny a category ("I'm not like them") nor living in
disgrace ("We deserve it"; "We brought it on ourselves";
and so forth), but instead affirming "I'm fine anyway" (e.g., gay and
proud).
Goffman glimpsed the possibility of organizing to challenge the very stigma
that is the only common feature of a group, and Humphreys provided an exemplar
in his case study of a movement committed to transvaluing the negative
valuation of homosexuality. "Normalization" of deviance can be a
group strategy, but it required a group. Organization of a movement, in
Humphreys' view, had two prerequisites: recognition that present treatment of
one's kind is intolerable, and conviction that change is possible. Both
conceptions now seem so obvious that one is tempted to forget they were once
widely unrecognized, when the sinfulness or sickness that was homosexuality was
perceived to be inevitable and just.
Conceiving the existing reality as intolerable and changeable was clearly
necessary for the formation of a social movement. Undoubtedly the Kinsey data
and the example of the Negro civil rights movement encouraged the early
homophile movement. The formation of a critical mass of people who viewed
themselves as defined to some extent by homosexual desires was the central
precondition for change, and was itself disproportionately facilitated by even
tiny organizations challenging the legitimacy of the dominant society's
picture of homosexuals. There were other fostering circumstances. Wartime
homosociality was one, whether or not World War II sped urban migration for
those who became involved in the homosexual subculture, and even if official
labeling was not part of their experience. Another material change abetting
the postwar expansion of public settings for meeting others interested in homosexuality
was the introduction of penicillin, and the concomitant reduction of anxiety
about venereal diseases. Cultural factors which were important to what the
critical mass did include the North American tradition of printing dissident
views and some general valuing of freedom of the press - a value missing
everywhere else in the Western hemisphere, and a value that was not sufficient
in itself for the extension to the homophile press - the tradition of
voluntary associations derived from the religious pluralism of the United
States, and the welfare state's takeover of insurance against disaster (the
"safety net" function formerly discharged by the family).
Growth and Diversification
of Gay Culture. Early social science discussions of the "homosexual
community" treated it as static, rather than recently-emerged (post-World
War II). Since at least the mid-1970s, sociologists writing about North
American gay culture and gay communities have given nominal recognition to
changes, particularly more assertive demands for social respect and the
diversification of institutions catering to an open, self-accepting gay market.
How did the institutionally elaborated gay communities of the 1970s come about?
Obviously, some of the same factors, notably the coalescence of a critical
mass, the conception that change was possible, the "mobilization of
symbolic resources" (including an embryonic gay press, distorted mass
media coverage, and public examples), and other factors adduced in the
discussion of the "evolution" of gay political organizations, apply
to the "evolution" of gay culture at the same time in the same
places.
In folk conceptions of the past, it is well known that "in the beginning
was the bar" - or more exactly, temporal and spatial segments of bars.
Before the rise of the present range of gay institutions, what most lesbians
and gay men seeking fellow lesbians and gay men did between working, sleep,
and sex was to drink. The gay bar was the first gay institution, and for most
members of the "pre-Stonewall generation" was often the only one.
Before gay people demanded acceptance and forged their own institutions,
profitable gay bars provided a modicum of anonymity and protection from
official and unofficial interference with gay sociation. Of course, bars
provided a setting for arranging sexual liaisons, but their historical importance
for the development of a gay people has more to do with revealing to many individuals
that they were not unique: not only were there similarly-homosexually-inclined
others, but these others were not (all) monsters, and were numerous enough to
have meeting places (of varying degrees of furtiveness and friendliness).
"In the beginning was the bar" will strike some as sociology again
discovering the obvious. However, what is noteworthy about bars' being the
first gay institutions to develop is that it holds true in other cultures (e.g.,
Latin America, the Philippines) in which only embryonic challenges to the
equation of homosexuality with female gender behavior have been made. In
cultures where homosexuality is age-defined, neither gay bars nor gay identity
have developed. Not that alcohol is a necessary catalyst for the crystalization
of gay identity, but drinking together represents a degree of solidarity which
is lacking where one is expected to "graduate" from the receptor
role with age. Solidarity with peers is what is important, not alcohol
dissolving inhibitions and generating addiction. Another reason to consider the
(historical) primacy of gay bars is that, given the generally higher prices of
drinks, undesirability of locales, and poor service, gay bars are also the prototype
of businesses selling their patrons to each other. Manifestly, the business of
a bar is to sell drinks, and the central importance of the bar (followed by the
institution of the cocktail party) likely explains the high rates of lesbian
and gay alcoholism. As Nardi put it, "Drinking is not used to escape from
something; rather it is used to join something. Initial socialization into a
gay community often occurs by attending gay bars and enacting the drinking
roles perceived as essential to gay identity" (p. 28). As a result,
"Getting drunk ... is normal
trouble in the gay community, rather than deviance" (Warren, p. 58 ).
Other preconditions create other institutions.
Organs for communicating a positive view of a group are essential to positive
self-identification, as well as to political organization and social coordination.
In the United States early homophile organizations produced periodicals, and
ONE, Inc. in particular fought a protracted legal battle ( 1954-58) for the use
of the U.S. mail. In Latin America gay periodicals continue to be seized as
subversive even when there is no conceivable prurience to interpret as obscene,
as in Mexico, where the Ley
de Impienta gives a judge discretion
to condemn printed, written, or duplicated materials as "apologias de un vicio" (vice
advocacy). Outside metropolises with gay ghettoes, many people learn that
homosexuality is a possible way of life from print media, the existence of
which is now taken for granted by those living in gay worlds (including gay
scholarship).
State provision of insurance against disaster (Medicaid, worker's compensation,
unemployment insurance) and old age (Social Security) is perhaps the most
important replacement of the traditional family function, and increases the
likelihood of residential concentration of homosexually inclined persons.
Parental control was eroded by the inability to guarantee a livelihood for the
next generation and by increased geographical mobility - opportunity was
beyond the reach and often beyond even the view of parents. Partner choice then
became a more personal decision. Welfare state protection of individuals
clearly reduced the necessity of reliance on the family and may well be a
prerequisite to gay society (contrast Latin America).
Whether geographical mobility was necessary to populate contemporary gay
ghettoes has been questioned. Similarly, while newly created public places
such as railway stations and parks provided anonymous meeting places in the
nineteenth century, there had been recognized trysting places in
pre-capitalist mercantile centers, such as Venice, Paris, and Seville. Welfare
protection, geographical mobility, voluntary relationships, all releasing
individuals from dependence on and control by the family, were at least
foreshadowed by monasticism
and the military in Western history -
locales in which widespread homosexuality occurred or has been posited.
The timing of the emergence of persons recognized by others in terms of
homosexual preference is a major point of contention in the social constructionist position formulated at the
University of Essex and elsewhere ca. 1981. Suggested dates for this
transformation range from the fourteenth century until as recently as the end
of the World War II. The flux of possible human desire has so impressed
advocates of this view that they have ignored the very limited number of known
social organizations of homosexuality (by age differences, gender differences,
or egalitarian comradeship), historically attested labels for roles (e.g., sodomite
and catamite), and the necessary economy
of schematization in all cognitive categorization. Actual comparisons of
social constructions across space or time have not generally been made by
ostensible social constructionists, who seem more intent challenging the
legitimacy of the dominant society's picture of homosexuals. There were other
fostering circumstances. Wartime homosociality was one, whether or not World
War II sped urban migration for those who became involved in the homosexual
subculture, and even if official labeling was not part of their experience.
Another material change abetting the postwar expansion of public settings for
meeting others interested in homosexuality was the introduction of penicillin,
and the concomitant reduction of anxiety about venereal diseases. Cultural
factors which were important to what the critical mass did include the North
American tradition of printing dissident views and some general valuing of
freedom of the press - a value missing everywhere else in the Western
hemisphere, and a value that was not sufficient in itself for the extension to
the homophile press - the tradition of voluntary associations derived from the
religious pluralism of the United States, and the welfare state's takeover of
insurance against disaster (the "safety net" function formerly
discharged by the family).
Growth and Diversification
of Gay Culture. Early social science discussions of the "homosexual
community" treated it as static, rather than recently-emerged (post-World
War II). Since at least the mid-1970s, sociologists writing about North
American gay culture and gay communities have given nominal recognition to
changes, particularly more assertive demands for social respect and the
diversification of institutions catering to an open, self-accepting gay market.
How did the institutionally elaborated gay communities of the 1970s come about?
Obviously, some of the same factors, notably the coalescence of a critical
mass, the conception that change was possible, the "mobilization of
symbolic resources" (including an embryonic gay press, distorted mass
media coverage, and public examples), and other factors adduced in the
discussion of the "evolution" of gay political organizations, apply
to the "evolution" of gay culture at the same time in the same
places.
In folk conceptions of the past, it is well known that "in the beginning
was the bar" - or more exactly, temporal and spatial segments of bars.
Before the rise of the present range of gay institutions, what most lesbians
and gay men seeking fellow lesbians and gay men did between working, sleep,
and sex was to drink. The gay bar was the first gay institution, and for most
members of the "pre-Stonewall generation" was often the only one.
Before gay people demanded acceptance and forged their own institutions,
profitable gay bars provided a modicum of anonymity and protection from
official and unofficial interference with gay sociation. Of course, bars
provided a setting for arranging sexual liaisons, but their historical importance
for the development of a gay people has more to do with revealing to many individuals
that they were not unique: not only were there similarly-homosexually-inclined
others, but these others were not (all) monsters, and were numerous enough to
have meeting places (of varying degrees of furtiveness and friendliness).
"In the beginning was the bar" will strike some as sociology again
discovering the obvious. However, what is noteworthy about bars' being the
first gay institutions to develop is that it holds true in other cultures
(e.g., Latin America, the Philippines) in which only embryonic challenges to
the equation of homosexuality with female gender behavior have been made. In
cultures where homosexuality is age-defined, neither gay bars nor gay identity
have developed. Not that alcohol is a necessary catalyst for the crystalization
of gay identity, but drinking together represents a degree of solidarity which
is lacking where one is expected to "graduate" from the receptor
role with age. Solidarity with peers is what is important, not alcohol
dissolving inhibitions and generating addiction. Another reason to consider the
(historical) primacy of gay bars is that,
on avoiding being labeled themselves than in exploring differences and
commonalities of social processes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, American Couples, New York: William Morrow, 1983; Barry Dank, "Coming
Out in the Gay World," Psychiatry, 34 (1971), 180-97; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self
in Everyday Life, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959; idem, Stigma: Notes on the
Management of Spoiled Identity, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963; David F.
Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988; Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade, 2nd ed., Chicago: Aldine, 1975; idem, Out of the Closets, Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1972; Stephen O. Murray, Social Theory, Homosexual Reahties, New York: Gay Academic
Union, 1984; Peter M. Nardi, "Alcoholism and Homosexuality," fournal of Homosexuality, 7 (1982), 9-25; David Parkin, "Social
Stratification," in R. Nisbet and T. Bottomore, eds., History of Sociological
Analysis, New York: Basic Books, 1978, pp. 599-632; Barbara Ponse, Identity in the Lesbian
World, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978; Albert J. Reiss, "The
Social Integration of 'Queers' and 'Peers,'" Social Problems, 9 (1961), 102-20; Carol A. B. Warren, Identity and Community in
the Gay World, Boston: Wiley, 1974.
Stephen O. Murray
Socrates (469-399 b.c.)
Athenian
philosopher. The son of a well-to-do sculptor or stonemason, he was later
reduced to poverty. Late in life he married Xantippe, who became proverbial in
subsequent ages for her bad temper and shrewishness, though the stories about
her may have been exaggerated. In early life he was interested in the
scientific philosophy of his time and is said to have associated with Archelaus
the physicist, but in the period best known to posterity he had abandoned these
interests and was concerned solely with the right conduct of life, a quest
which he conducted by the so-called "Socratic" method of cross-examining
the individuals whom he encountered. While serving in the army he gained a great
reputation for bravery, and as one of the presidents of the Athenian Assembly
at the trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae, he courageously
refused to put an illegal motion to the vote despite the fury of the multitude.
In 399 he was brought to trial before a popular jury on the charge of
introducing strange gods and of "corrupting the youth." There has
been considerable dispute over the precise meaning of the indictment, but the
first part seems not to have been serious, while the second amounted to a
charge that he had a "subversive" influence on the minds of the
young, which was based on his known friendship with some of those who had been
most prominent in their attacks on democracy in Athens. He made no attempt to
placate the jury and was found guilty and sentenced to die by drinking a cup
of hemlock. Though his friends could have enabled him to escape, he acquiesced
to the sentence.
Socrates left no writings of his own: knowledge of his lif e and work comes
from Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle. He probably never formulated a precise philosophy.
His legacy to his disciples and to later generations consisted in the method by
which he analyzed and criticized the fundamental assumptions of existing systems.
He probably rejected the conventional Greek religious beliefs of his time, yet
professed or created no heterodox religious doctrines. From time to time he
had paranormal experiences, signs, or warnings which he interpreted as
guideposts to his own conduct.
His sexual life, apart from the unhappy marriage, reflected the Greek custom of
paiderasteia to the fullest. He was
both the teacher of the young men who frequented his circle and the lover of at
least some of them. As a boy of seventeen he had been the favorite of
Archelaus, because he was in the bloom of youthful sensuality, which later gave
place to serious intellectual concerns. As an adult he given the generally
higher prices of drinks, undesirability of locales, and poor service, gay bars
are also the prototype of businesses selling their patrons to each other.
Manifestly, the business of a bar is to sell drinks, and the central importance
of the bar (followed by the institution of the cocktail party) likely explains
the high rates of lesbian and gay alcoholism. As Nardi put it, "Drinking
is not used to escape from something; rather it is used to join something.
Initial socialization into a gay community often occurs by attending gay bars
and enacting the drinking roles perceived as essential to gay identity"
(p. 28). As a result, "Getting drunk ...
is normal trouble in the gay community, rather than deviance" (Warren, p.
58). Other preconditions create other institutions.
Organs for communicating a positive view of a group are essential to positive
self-identification, as well as to political organization and social coordination.
In the United States early homophile organizations produced periodicals, and
ONE, Inc. in particular fought a protracted legal battle ( 1954-58) for the use
of the U.S. mail. In Latin America gay periodicals continue to be seized as
subversive even when there is no conceivable prurience to interpret as obscene,
as in Mexico, where the Ley
de Imprenta gives a judge discretion
to condemn printed, written, or duplicated materials as "apologias de un vicio" (vice
advocacy). Outsidemetropolises with gay ghettoes, many people learn that
homosexuality is a possible way of life from print media, the existence of
which is now taken for granted by those living in gay worlds (including gay
scholarship).
State provision of insurance against disaster (Medicaid, worker's compensation,
unemployment insurance) and old age (Social Security) is perhaps the most
important replacement of the traditional family function, and increases the
likelihood of residential concentration of homosexually inclined persons.
Parental control was eroded by the inability to guarantee a livelihood for the
next generation and by increased geographical mobility - opportunity was
beyond the reach and often beyond even the view of parents. Partner choice then
became a more personal decision. Welfare state protection of individuals
clearly reduced the necessity of reliance on the family and may well be a
prerequisite to gay society (contrast Latin America).
Whether geographical mobility was necessary to populate contemporary gay
ghettoes has been questioned. Similarly, while newly created public places
such as railway stations and parks provided anonymous meeting places in the
nineteenth century, there had been recognized trysting places in
pre-capitalist mercantile centers, such as Venice, Paris, and Seville. Welfare
protection, geographical mobility, voluntary relationships, all releasing
individuals from dependence on and control by the family, were at least
foreshadowed by monasticism and the military in Western history - locales in
which widespread homosexuality occurred or has been posited.
The timing of the emergence of persons recognized by others in terms of
homosexual preference is a major point of contention in the social constructionist
position formulated at the University of Essex and elsewhere ca. 1981.
Suggested dates for this transformation range from the fourteenth century until
as recently as the end of the World War II. The flux of possible human desire
has so impressed advocates of this view that they have ignored the very
limited number of known social organizations of homosexuality (by age
differences, gender differences, or egalitarian comradeship), historically
attested labels for roles (e.g., sodomite and catamite), and the necessary
economy of schematization in all cognitive categorization. Actual comparisons
of social constructions across space or time have not generally been made by
ostensible social constructionists, who seem more intent loved good and noble
boys with a passion that he asked only to be requited, but he was never given
to a coarse and purely sensual pederasty; if the beauty of the young Alcibiades
made an intense and lasting impression on him, he never forgot his duty as a
teacher to guide his youthful pupils toward perfection. He was capable of
self-willed abstinence and held this power up to others as an ideal; to have
sought to impose it on all others was foreign to the Greek mentality. As a
bisexual Hellene Socrates was always responsive to the beauty of the male
adolescent and craved the companionship of young men; as a philosopher he
practiced and taught the virtues of moderation and self-control. He endures as
one of the outstanding examples in antiquity of a teacher for whom eros was an
inspiration and a guide.
Because Socrates is a major figure in Western tradition, his sexual nature
posed a continual problem. From Ficino to Johann Matthias Gesner
(1691-1761) scholars sought to address the question discreetly. The Marquis de Sade was bolder, using socratiser as a verb meaning "to
sodomize." Even today, however, many classicists choose to evade the
problem.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Hans Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1932; V. de Magalhâes-Vilhena, Le problème de Socrate, Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1952; idem, Socrate et la légende Platonicienne, Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1952; Herbert Spiegelberg, éd., The Socratic Enigma, New York: Liberal Arts, 1964.
Warren Johansson
Sodom and Gomorrah
These
legendary cities have been traditionally located in the vicinity of the Dead
Sea, where they constituted two members of a pentapolis, the Cities of the
Plain. According to the Old Testament account in Genesis 14, 18, and 19, God overthrew
four of the five cities in a rain of brimstone and fire. The names of Sodom and
Gomorrah, especially the former, have become proverbial. Echoes of the episode
recur in the Bible and in the Koran, as well as in Jewish, Christian, and
Islamic exegetical and homiletic writings. From the first city, Jewish
Hellenistic Greek formed the derivative sodomites,
from
which medieval Latin obtained the noun of agent sodomita-, as a result the connection
with male homosexuality is for many axiomatic. However the matter is more
complex.
A number of main constituents of the Sodom legend emerge from the central
passages and fragmentary allusions in the Old Testament and the
intertestamental literature, together with the midrashic writings of later
centuries:
(1) the geographical legend that sought to explain the peculiarly barren
terrain around the shores of the Dead Sea. The ancient world's rudimentary
science of geology correctly related this barrenness to the circumstance that
the water level of the Dead Sea had in prehistoric times been far higher; the
sinking of the water level had exposed the previously inundated, now strikingly
arid and sterile region to the gaze of the traveler.
(2) the theme of sterility by
which the ancient mind sought to explain the origins of this condition; to the
Bedouin living east and south of the Dead Sea it suggested the etiological
inference that at one time the area surrounding this salinized body of water
had been a fruitful garden belt. Yet the inhabitants of the cities of the plain
had even in the midst of their abundance and prosperity denied hospitality to
the poverty-stricken and the wayfarer, while the luxury in which they wallowed
led them inevitably into effeminacy and vice (the parallel in the Hellenistic
world was the city of Sybaris, whose proverbial self-indulgence gave the English
language the word sybaritic).
For this
reason they were punished by the destruction of their cities and the
conversion of the whole area into a lifeless desert.
(3) a Bedouin folk tale on the
perils of city life, of which Lot is the hero who must be rescued again and
again by the intervention of others. In Genesis 14:12 Lot is taken captive when
Sodom is conquered by the four kings who have allied themselves against the
Cities of the Plain; Abraham saves him by military intervention in the manner
of a tribal sheikh with his retinue of 318 warriors. In 19:4 - 9 the Sodomites
threaten Lot's guests with gang rape, but are miraculously blinded and
repelled, and in 19:13, 15 the angelic visitors warn Lot of the imminent
destruction of the city so that he and his family can leave just in time to
escape the rain of brimstone and fire. This underlying motif explains why Lot
later "feared to dwell in Zoar" (19:30), even though God has spared
the place as a reward for his model hospitality toward the two visitors. Over
the centuries Sodom and Gomorrah, along with the Babylon of the Book of
Revelation, came to symbolize the corruption and depravity of the big city as
contrasted with the virtue and innocence of the countryside, a notion cherished
by those who idealized rural life and is still present, though fading in twentieth-century
America.
(4) the occurrence in the region east and south of the Dead Sea of volcanic
activity that persisted throughout antiquity and subsided only after the thirteenth
century. These volcanic eruptions, which have left traces still to be seen at
the present day, inspired the "rain of brimstone and fire" (burning
sulfur) of Genesis 19:24, which supplemented the notion that the four cities
had been "overthrown" (destroyed by an earthquake) that figures in
Genesis 19:25.
(5) the presence in the geographical vicinity of the tribe of Benjamin, which
belonged to the pre-Israelite population of Canaan and had for centuries lived
by marauding and plundering at the expense of its more civilized neighbors. The
culmination of this brigandage in the period of the judges was the outrage at
Gibeah recorded in Judges 19, with its explicit motifs of sexual aggression
and gang rape.
(6) the currency in antiquity of world destruction legends, in which the earth
is annihilated either by water [kataklysmos)
or by
fire [ekvyrosis). The story of Noah and the
deluge is the rendering of the first in the book of Genesis, while the destruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah is a localization of the second, in which the catastrophe
is limited to four cities in the vicinity of the Dead Sea (Sodom, Gomorrah,
Admah, and Zeboiim) even though the epilogue involving Lot and his daughters
clearly derives from a universal conflagration myth.
(7) world destruction legends that actualize elements of fantasy wishfulfillment.
If the human race were annihilated with the exception of a single family, the
earth could be repeopled only by means of sexual unions ordinarily condemned as
incestuous. Thehandful of virtuoushuman beings preserved from the catastrophe
by the gods are the chosen seed of a new mankind.
(8) world destruction fantasies associated in modern clinical experience with
the early stages of schizophrenia. These fantasies reveal a key component of
the Sodomy delusion: the subject cherishes the belief that particular actions
would expose the world to this awful fate, and that only by refraining from
them is he virtuously warding off the catastrophe. Astrological literature
supplied the ancients with an entire list of calamities that betokened divine
wrath, as in Luke 21:11, all of which were later ascribed to retribution for
"sodomy." Fear of homosexual aggression plays a role in these
paranoid fantasies, of the sort analyzed by Freud in the classic Schreber case.
The Sodom legend and its gradual expansion into the delusional form that
obsesses the Christian mind were therefore overdetermined; the conscious and
unconscious associations of the component themes blended to form the later
complex of Christian beliefs that may be designated the "sodomy
delusion." Its priority in the Old Testament sequence notwithstanding, the
more prosaic story in fudges 19 served as the model for the mythical narrative in
Genesis 19, where Lot's angelic visitors are miraculously saved from homosexual
assault. The whole account, reinforced by the enduring geographical features
of the Dead Sea region (the supposed "statue of Lot's wife"),
underlay the theological dogma that the destruction of the Cities of the Plain
had been divine retribution for the homosexual depravity of the former
inhabitants. And so the "sin of Sodom" became synonymous with
homosexual activity and then with "unnatural vice" - a Hellenic, not
a Judaic concept - in general, and the scriptural fate of the cities and
prophecies of future doom made their barren site linger as an eternal warning
to any people that tolerated such depravity in its midst.
The notion of sodomy
is an
innovation of Latin Christianity toward the end of the twelfth century; it is
not found in Jewish or Byzantine writings. Legal usage in various countries has
given the word broader or narrower definitions, particularly in regard to the
character of the actions that "constitute the offense." In the late
Middle Ages the tendency of the allegorizing mind to parallelism led to the
notion that Gomorrah, the twin city of Sodom, had been a hotbed of lesbianism,
even though there was nothing in either Testament that would suggest such a
construction. The hold of the legend on the mind of Christian Europe has been
such that even in the twentieth century literary works have been composed on
the subject, and the less sophisticated part of the population still believes
that the destruction of Sodom exemplified the wrath of God that is revealed
from heaven (Romans 1:18] against those who practice homosexuality.
Warren Johansson
Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, called "II Sodoma"; 1477-1549)
Italian
painter. Born at Vercelli, Sodoma studied under a minor Lombard artist (Martino
Spanzotti) in Milan, where he sustained a more crucial influence - that of the
innovative work of Leonardo da Vinci. Between 1505 and 1508 he executed a
series of frescoes in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto near Siena. He
then became Siena's leading artist. He was also summoned to Rome, where he
painted part of a ceiling in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura, as well as
some handsome frescoes in the Villa Farnesina. Today his works are less
appreciated than those of his Sienese rival, Domenico Beccafumi.
Despite some nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars who have sought to deny
it, his nickname is deserved. According to his biographer Giorgio Vasari,
Sodoma loved unchaste entertainments and merrymaking; he surrounded himself
with an entourage of boys and beardless youths. Cherishing them greatly,
"he acquired the name of Sodoma, which he did not take with annoyance or
disdain, but rather gloried in it, making jingles and verses on the subject,
which he pleasantly sang to the accompaniment of the lute." Once, while in
Florence, his horse won a race, and on being asked what name should be
proclaimed, he insisted "Sodoma, Sodoma!" This effrontery earned him
a session of fagbashing by themob. He was moreover an eccentric, keeping a
menagerie of animals so that "his house resembled Noah's Ark"
(Vasari). In his early years at Siena he did marry, siring a daughter, but his
wife left him in disgust after a year. In a tax return of 1531 Sodoma
facetiously claimed to have three mistresses and thirty grown children - an
assertion that is no more indicative of basic heterosexuality than was Walt
Whitman's comparable declaration three and a half centuries later.
Vasari, who furnishes most of the information on Sodoma's personal life, taxes
him not with immorality, but with lack of industry and imprudent management,
as a result of which he passed his last years in want.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Elisärvon Kupffer, "Giovan Antonio - II Sodoma, der Maler der
Schönheit," fahzbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 9 (1908), 71-167; Mario Masini, "Gli
immorali nell'arte: Giovanni Antonio Bazzi detto il Sodoma," Aichivio di Antiopologia
Criminale, 36 (1915), 129-51, 257-77.
Wayne R. Dynes
Sodomy
As an
overarching term for sexual deviation, the word sodomy today has an archaic,
somewhat obsolescent ring, though it still figures in some legal discourse
("the sodomy laws"). Sodomite, having shrunk to one syllable in early
modern British slang ("sod"), has faded further, so that it is little
more than a jocular term of mild abuse. Historically, however, the concept of
sodomy has been of immense importance. Moreover, it had several nuances of
meaning, which it is essential to distinguish in order to interpret older written
evidence.
The term sodomia
originated
in Medieval Latin about the year 1180 as a designation for the "crime
against nature" that could be committed in one of three ways: (1) ratione modi, by obtaining venereal
pleasure with a member of the opposite sex, but in the wrong manner, e.g., by
fellation; (2) latione
sexus, with an individual having the genitalia of the same sex;
or (3) ratione
generis, with a brute animal. The abstract noun sodomia (for the
sin) derives from the noun of agent sodomita (for the sinner), which had originally
been used in the Septuagint and Vulgate to mean an inhabitant of the city of
Sodom (from Old North Arabic sudum-matu
= the
[Dead] Sea). According to Genesis 19, Sodom had been destroyed because of the
sexual depravity of its male population, which had attempted a gang rape on the
two angels who came to deliver Lot and his family from the impending
destruction. In time the expressions peccatum
sodomitae or crimen
sodomitae came to be used to designate a variety of "unnatural"
sexual acts, but only in Latin Christianity did the new derivative sodomia take hold and become a
theological and legal concept; it remained alien to Byzantine Greek and
Medieval Hebrew. From Latin the term passed into the modern languages of Western
and Central Europe as the technical expression for the crime which was
punishable by death everywhere until the second half of the eighteenth century,
when the Enlightenment began to attack this sacral offense as a relic of the
medieval superstition that divine retribution would overtake any community
that tolerated "sodomy" in its midst.
The terms sodomy and sodomite thus spread until they embraced a far larger
semantic sphere and a higher pitch of affectivity than the later terms (sexual)
inversion and homosexuality, and in reading a medieval or later legal text one
must not immediately assume that homosexual behavior is meant thereby. Most
prosecutions, it is true, were for either male homosexuality or bestiality;
criminal proceedings against lesbians and heterosexuals guilty of fellation or
anal intercourse were rare at all times, though an occasional case figures in
the (admittedly fragmentary) reports from the pre-modern era. The legal
definition of the term - what constituted an "indictable offense" -
has also differed from country to country and from century to century down to
our own time. Eighteenth-century Poland even recorded an instance in which
sexual intercourse between a male serf and a girl of noble birth was punished
as "sodomy" - because it had supposedly resulted in a crop failure on
the estate where it occurred. As a practical definition one may say that a
"sodomite" was one whose aberrant sexual activity had become known to
the Christian community and its authorities; the word should not be confounded
with the later psychiatric notion of "homosexual," which stems from a
different conceptual scheme strongly influenced by the writings of the
homophile apologists Ulrichs and Kertbeny in the 1860s. However, the lay public
on learning the new term then superimposed it upon the semantic field occupied
by the familiar expression "sodomite," so that the afterglow of the
older set of associations has never been fully dispelled.
The verb to
sodomize, which was rare in European languages until the last third
of the nineteenth century, usually has the meaning of anal penetration, whether
homosexual or heterosexual. In England it is a more learned variant of the
common verb to bugger.
Historically, the legend of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain served
to tinge sodomy with the aura of a fathomless abyss of depravity, of the
unspeakable, the monstrous, of "unnatural vice" that provokes the
wrath of God against its perpetrators. The associations were reinforced by the
sight of the barren terrain on the shores of the Dead Sea which generation
after generation of pilgrims from Western Europe described in their travel
accounts. As has been mentioned, the scope of the term expanded to include
"unnatural" heterosexual activity and intercourse with animals - not
even implied in the tale in Genesis 19 from which it derived. As a result of
these manifold enhancements, the diabolical intimations of the notion came to
seem perversely glamorous for a few wayward spirits.
Even now sodomy evokes from the unsophisticated a shudder of horror, though
Biblical criticism long ago demolished the credibility of the composite
narrative in Genesis, analyzing it as the Judaic amplification of a local myth
that explained the barrenness and salinization of the shores of the Dead Sea.
From the time of Justinian (reigned 527-565) onward, however, the legend was
deployed as a theological and pseudo-historical justification for laws
intended to stamp out "ungodly practices" that would expose Christian
society to divine retribution. Recent legislation has tended to avoid the term
because of its ambiguity, its older definitions, and strongly affective character,
not to mention the archaic ties with the Bible that would ill become a secular
code of law.
Warren Johansson
Solicitation
American
law contains various provisions for the action of soliciting, or seeking to
obtain by earnest request, entreaty, petition, or diligent and importunate
asking, of the person of the opposite or same sex for sexual favors. The
concept derives from English law.
Basic Fea tures. Statutes have been
employed to make arrests for solicitation to commit sexual acts in private
between consenting adults which are no longer illegal in those American states
that have decriminalized sodomy. This practice on the part of the police
results in inconsistency vis-á-vis the consenting adult acts, violates the First Amendment,
and is often supported solely by the uncorroborated testimony of a plainclothes
member of the vice squad. If such solicitation contains no offer of or request
for money and thus does not involve prostitution or the corruption of minors,
its criminalization nowhere antedates the English act of 1898. This act
punished with a maximum of two years' imprisonment any "male person who in
any public place persistently solicits or importunes for immoral
purposes," and thus does not specifically mean homosexual conduct. It was
aimed originally at pimps and procurers, but soon became the recognized English
vehicle against all forms of homosexual solicitation. A number of American
jurisdictions soon adopted the concept. The provision of the old New York
Criminal Code (superseded in 1965 by Section 722) was representative, punishing
as a "disorderly person" anyone "who, with intent to provoke a
breach of the peace... frequents or
loiters about any public place solicitingmen for the purpose of committing a
crime against nature or other lewdness." The English statute had required
"persistent" importuning, intending to limit its criminal sanctions
to those who refused to take "no" for an answer and thereby
threatened a breach of the peace, thus extending the common law concept that
underlay the notion of "open or public lewdness," a danger because it
could incite violence.
Modern legislators such as those of New York in 1965 have conveniently
forgotten that the maintenance of public peace was the purpose of the older
laws. They do not insist that the importuning be persistent or continued,
rather they emphasize the affront and disgust experienced by the
"innocent" bystanders to homosexual solicitation. They meant to
protect the public from offensive behavior. Yet it is inconsistent that the
iocus per se (the place itself)
converts a conversation otherwise private into a public one unless overheard
by others. Rather, most men cruising for partners employ ambiguous glances,
gestures, and words, often not even noticed by a disinterested heterosexual,
to evoke a receptive response before unequivocally soliciting. If not
encouraged, they usually desist and seek another partner. Circumspect and
cautious as it usually is, homosexual solicitation subtly using innuendo and
subterfuge belies the myth of flagrant homosexuals brazenly accosting defenseless
and abashed respondents. Instead it is normally plainclothes decoys who entice
and entrap those allegedly so open and brazen as to constitute an affront to
public decency. Most convictions are secured exclusively on the arresting
officer's allegation, particularly in past decades when pocket recording devices
did not exist at all; complaints by private citizens are rare, indeed virtually
non-existent for solicitation, in contrast with indecent exposure. Such
unsavory practices encourage shakedowns and extortion.
Solicitation and Sexual
Criminalization. Where sodomy committed in private between consenting adults
has been decriminalized, as it has been in 25 of the 50 states, solicitation to
commit it should ipso facto have also been decriminalized. But this has not
always been the case. In Illinois, the first state to decriminalize sodomy in
1961, arrests actually increased in the next year or so. Over 95 percent of
those convicted for sex-related crimes are not convicted of sodomy or of other
felonies difficult to prove such as rape, statutory rape, gross indecency, or
incest, but for prostitution or lesser crimes and misdemeanors such as
solicitation, public or open lewdness, battery, indecent exposure, gross
indecency between males, and (until its limitation in recent years) loitering.
Need for Reform. The crime of
"solicitation for sexual activity" should be stricken from the codes
in its entirety. It flies in the face of modern legal thought, is inconsistent
with the remainder of most penal codes, and is of doubtful constitutionality.
On many occasions it has been argued that if someone who is solicited, so long
as the behavior involves only consenting adults in private, is not interested
in the proposal, he need only say "no" to the solicitor. In punishing
solicitations to commit crimes, the law may even infringe freedom of speech.
It might be a matter for the legislature to decide "whether the punishment
of solicitations should be curtailed in order to protect free speech," and
allow sexual liberty. If "a solicitation to commit a crime" constitutes
"a substantial step in a course of conduct planned to culminate in"
the "commission of the crime," the solicitation in those 25 states
that have not decriminalized sodomy is treated as a criminal attempt and is
punished accordingly. But some codes limit the "definition of crimes of
attempt to those situations where the offense attempted is a crime."
"An attempt to commit a disorderly persons offense is ... not sufficiently serious to be made the
object of the penal law. Many disorderly persons offenses are too innocuous or
themselves too far removed from the feared result to support an attempt
offense." Codes punish solicitations to commit prostitution, but
prostitution, by definition, is an offense, while private sexual activity
between consenting adults is in 25 states no offense at all. Under some codes,
any young man loitering on a park bench who asks a girl to go to bed with him
could be sent to prison.
A number of states, including Illinois, Connecticut, Hawaii, and North Dakota,
have eliminated such provisions in the course of adopting new criminal codes.
New Mexico has managed to live quite comfortably without ever having had a
sexual solicitation law on its statute book. These changes are the result of a
growing recognition that such laws are nothing but relics of a puritanical past
and serve merely to make criminals of otherwise law-abiding people without
carrying out any useful social purpose. "To remove criminal sanctions from
the conduct itself, yet to continue to punish solicitations to engage in the
now licit conduct is not only a masterpiece of inconsistency, but provides
blackmailers, extortionists, and others disposed to violence against
homosexuals with a substantive vehicle for their operations."
A solicitation to commit a lewd act may be lewd or not depending on its
character, not on the nature of the act solicited. Speech is not automatically
rendered obscene by its subject matter. More than 30 years ago, Mr. Justice
Brennan said: "Sex and obscenity are not synonymous." Neither is a
solicitation automatically "fighting words" and hence a threat to
public peace and order. Solicitations are thus neither automatically legal or
illegal and should not be indiscriminately punished. The crime of solicitation
is a relic of attempts by the state to suppress sexual activity on the part of
its citizens, attempts legitimate enough under the Old Regime, but without
justification in the modern liberal state whose constitution guarantees freedom
of conscience and of action to those who reject the tenets of an ascetic
morality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Thomas E. Lodge, "There May Be Harm in Asking: Homosexual Solicitations
and the Fighting Words Doctrine," Case Western Reserve Law Review, 30 (1980), 461-93; Arthur
C. Warner, "Non-Commercial Sexual Solicitation: The Case for Judicial
Invalidation," SexuaLawReporter,
4 (1978),
1, 10-20. William
A. Percy and Arthur C. Warner
Solon
Poet,
lawgiver, and chief archon (magistrate) of Athens in 594-93 b.c. Overpopulation had caused the exploitation of Attica's
poor, who were enserf ed or even sold abroad into slavery for debt. Solon
canceled all debts secured by land or liberty and ended serfdom but did not
redistribute all land as the radicals demanded. He standardized coinage,
weights and measures, extended citizenship to immigrant craftsmen, encouraged
export of olive oil, and took other measures to improve the economy. He divided
the citizens into four classes according to wealth, apportioning political
power so that only the rich could serve as archons and areopagitici (councilors and judges),
but also strengthened the ecclesia
(assembly
of citizens).
Having visited Crete to study its laws, Solon institutionalized pederasty in
Athens. Copying the spectacularly successful reforms recently introduced to
Sparta from Crete by Lycurgus to limit the increase of their hoplites (foot soldiers) so that
their estates would not become overly subdivided, Solon ordained that men
should marry between ages 28 and 35, in the fifth seventh of their lifespan.
Setting the example himself, he copied the Cretan and Spartan system of having
each aristocratic young man at about age 22, when released from alert for
military service, take a 12-year-old upper-class boy as ezomenos (beloved) and train him
until he was 18 and with a beard. Then ready for military service, he was often
stationed in barracks. At this time the erastes
(lover),
nearing 30, was eligible for marriage. Solon also imported gymnasia and palestra, where
citizens exercised nude; the seclusion of upper-class women, which later in
Athens was to become more pronounced than elsewhere in Greece; and symposia, all-male dinner clubs that
encouraged pederastic affairs and, in Athens, became, like the gymnasia, foci
of learning. He invited the Cretan "musician" (i.e., sage, lover of
the Muses) Epimenides to Athens to quell the plague and perhaps to promote the
reforms. When one of Solon's eiomenoi,
his
cousin Peisistratus, overthrew his reforms and established a tyranny, Solon
traveled abroad for a decade, visiting Crete again.
Peisistratus and his sons Hippias and Hipparchus ruled from about 545 b.c. until the revolution of 510, which was headed by an old
family, the Alcmeonidae. This family produced Cleisthenes, Pericles, and Alcibiades. The Peisistratids
furthered Solon's economic and social reforms. After the collapse of Samos,
when the Persians in 522 crucified the pederastic tyrant Polycrates, who out of
fear of plots hatched in them had ordered all gymnasia burned, the
Peisistratids enhanced Athens' economic and political rise to dominance in the
Aegean. Hipparchus had Homer
recited
annually at the Panathenaion, establishing the text, emending it to emphasize
the importance of Athens. Hipparchus also patronized immigrant poets, exiles and emigres from Samos and the Ionian
states seized by the Persians, including Anacreon, and others fleeing tyranny
in Magna Grecia. Some of these myth-makers may have invented the fable that
Theseus, after slaying the Minotaur, abandoned Ariadne in Naxos and took an eromenos, thus creating a
"founder" of pederasty for Athens. Most Peisistratids were eiomenoi and eiastai in turn, but Hipparchus,
the chief patron, was exclusively drawn to boys. When Harmodius, beloved and
cousin of the poor but honest citizen Aristogiton, spurned Hipparchus'
persistent advances, the pair decided to assassinate the tyrant brothers. The
desperate lovers, intent on overthrowing the overbearing tyrants, succeeded in
slaying only Hipparchus and were in turn killed (514). Four years later, when
the tyranny was overthrown with Spartan help, these "tyrannicides"
(Harmodius and Aristogiton) remained heroes of the democracy, and were always
toasted at symposia. Their descendants were accorded the right to dine for all
time at public expense at the Prytaneum, and their statues in bronze with an
inscription composed by Simonides were prominently displayed as models of
civic virtue. Thus male lovers became associated with tyrannicide and the
defense of self-government.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Antony Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants, London: Hutchinson, 1956; Charles W. Fomara, "The Cult
of Harmodius and Aristogeiton," Philologus, 114(1970), 155-80.
William A. Peicy
Sotadic Zone
In an
attempt to sketch the geography of the prevalence of homosexual relations, Sir
Richard Burton
introduced
the expression "sotadic zone" in the famous Terminal Essay appended
to his translation of The
Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (commonly known as the "Arabian Nights";
1885-88). Somewhat arbitrarily, Burton took his term from Sotades, an
Alexandrian poet of the third century b.c.
who wrote
seemingly innocuous verses that became obscene if read backwards.
In Burton's words, "There exists what I shall call a 'Sotadic Zone,'
bounded westwards by the northern shore of the Mediterranean (N. lat. 43) and
by the southern (N. lat. 30), including meridional France, the Iberian
Peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Marocco to
Egypt. Running eastward the Sotadic zone narrows, embracing Asia Minor,
Mesopotamia and Chaldea, Afghanistan, the Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir. In
Indo-China, the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, Japan and Turkistan.
It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World.... Within the
Sotadic Zone, the [pederastic] Vice is popular and endemic, held at worst to
be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits
here defined, practice it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their
fellows who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the
operation." Possibly Burton's exclusion of sub-Saharan Africa contributed
to the erroneous modern belief that black people were originally innocent of
the "vice," having been corrupted to it by their slave masters.
Burton's theory was an attempt to give a theoretical framework to his own
observations of sexual mores in various parts of the far-flung British Empire
to which he was posted as a diplomat. Trained as a classicist, he considered
pederasty the only form of homosexuality worth investigating. He did not,
however, come up with a plausible theory as to the factors responsible for this
Sotadic Zone.
The explanation for much of Burton's zone, at least, probably lies in the
persistence of ancient Mediterranean pederasty and its diffusion eastwards by
Islam; this however does not account for China, Japan, Indo-China, the South
Sea Islands and the pre-Columbian New World.
This further extension may indeed lend some credence to Burton's theory if
one looks for climatological factors prevalent in his zone. Northern Europeans,
seeking to explain the differences between their own sexual mores and those of
the southern Europeans, often pointed to the temperature difference between the
two areas and ascribed sexual excitement to the warm climate of the South.
Terms such as "sultry" and "torrid" have a primary meaning
of "hot" but acquired the secondary sense of "passionate";
the German terms "schwul/schwül" associate hot-humid
conditions with homosexuality directly. As yet, there has been little or no
scientific investigation of such notions, which remain largely in the realm of
folklore.
Wayne R. Dynes
South America
See Brazil; Latin America.
Soviet Union
See Russia and ussr.
Spain
Spain is
one of the countries with the richest homosexual history, which is gradually
becoming better known. An appreciation of same-sex love, along with a cult of
beauty and poetry, has been present during many periods of Spain's history.
Antiquity. The rich and mysterious
civilization of the pre-Roman south of Spain is known to have been sexually
permissive, although evidence on homosexuality in that period is lacking.
Hispania was one of the most Romanized provinces, and shared Rome's sexual
morality; perhaps it is no coincidence, though, that Martial, one of the most
homosexual Latin authors, and Hadrian, one of the best and gayest emperors,
were from Spain. That a special term [hawi;
see Encyclopedia of Islam, "Liwat,"pp.
776and 778)existedin Western Arabic for male prostitutes suggests that such
were particularly prevalent there before Islam. The Christian Visigoths, who
ruled Spain after the disappearance of Roman authority, were in contrast
strongly opposed to homosexuality. Sodomy was outlawed in the seventh century,
with castration and exile the punishments; at the same time one finds the
emergence of legal measures against Jews. (See Law, Germanic.)
Islam. In the eighth century most
of Spain became Islamic; the inhabitants were glad to be rid of Gothic rule.
Andalusia or al-Andalus, which occupied more of the Iberian peninsula than
does the modem Andalusia, was an Islamic country from the eighth through the
early thirteenth centuries, and in the kingdoms of Granada and Valencia, Islam
survived well into the sixteenth century. Al-Andalus is a missing chapter in
the history of Europe. During the caliphate and taifas periods (tenth and
eleventh centuries), cosmopolitan, literate, prosperous Andalus was the
leading civilization anywhere on the coast of the Mediterranean - with the
possible exception of Byzantium. It has also been described as the homeland of
Arabic philosophy and poetry. The closest modern parallel to its devotion to
the intellect (philosophy, literature, arts, science) and beauty is Renaissance
Italy. The roots of this cultural supernova are the subject of dispute, as is
the related question of the ethnic makeup of the Andalusian population. While
the culture was officially Arabic, the number of pure Arabs was small; there
was a much larger number of North African Berbers mixed with a native
population of Iberian, Phoenician, or other origin. Women captured during raids
on the Christian states were also an important demographic element.
Al-Andalus had many links to Hellenistic culture, and except for the Almoravid
and Almohade periods (1086-1212), it was hedonistic and tolerant of
homosexuality, indeed one of the times in world history in which sensuality of
all sorts has been most openly enjoyed. Important rulers such as Abd al-Rahman in, al-Hakem II, Hisham II,
and al-Mutamid openly chose boys as sexual partners, and kept catamites.
Homosexual prostitution was widespread, and its customers came from higher
levels of society than those of heterosexual prostitutes. The poetry of Abu
Nuwas was popular and influential; the verses of poets such as Ibn Sahl, Ibn
Quzman, and others describe an openly bisexual lifestyle. The superiority of
sodomy over heterosexual intercourse was defended in poetry. Some of the
abundant pederastic poetry was collected in the contemporary anthologies Dai attiiaz of Ibn Sana al-Mulk and Ray at almvbarrizin of Ibn Said al-Maghribi (The Banneis of the Champions, trans. James Bellamy and
Patricia Steiner, Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1988).
Under the Muslim rulers of al-Andalus, Jewish culture reached its highest peak
since Biblical times; the poetry of Sephardic Judaism suggests that pederasty
was even more common among the Jews than among the Muslims.
Medieval Christian Spain. The small northern kingdom
of Castile viewed itself as the inheritor of the Visigothic claim to rale over
Spain. With encouragement from France, French-born queens of Castile, women elsewhere
in Europe, and the papacy, it gradually won economic and then political control
over the entire peninsula. In contrast and to some extent in reaction to the
hedonism of al-Andalus, Castile was puritanical, although its puritanism was
very reluctantly and half-heartedly accepted in the southern and eastern
sections of the country. Even within Castile, there was much resistance to the
imposition of clerical celibacy at the end of the eleventh century, which
Spain had until that time resisted. This change, not fully implemented for 500
years, was from the beginning seen as unwanted meddling from the other side of
the Pyrenees.
The Fueio ieal, an early medieval law
code, ordered that the "sin against nature" be punished with public
castration, followed by death by hanging from the legs and without burial (the
corpse, thus, eaten by animals). The Sietepaitidas
of King
Alfonso the Wise (later thirteenth century) also specified the death penalty,
except for those under 14 or victims of rape. Documented executions of
sodomites begin in the fifteenth century,- the cases known are from Aragon and
Mallorca, although this may simply reflect better records in those kingdoms. In
fifteenth-century Castile Juan II, his administrator Alvaro de Luna, and his son Enrique IV were primarily homosexual, and homosexuality was
predictably used by their enemies as a political issue. Writers of Juan II's
court created Castilian lyric poetry, which was absent, ascetically, from
previous Castilian literature.
The Renaissance.
With the
incorporation of Naples into the crown of Aragón in 1443, Aragón came into close contact
with an Italian city in which homosexuality was treated indulgently, at least
in aristocratic circles. The great king and patron Alfonso V, who moved his
court to Naples, was at the very least tolerant. He employed as secretary,
librarian, and historian the famous Sicilian bisexual Antonio Beccadelli, as
falconer the founder of Catalan poetry Ausias March, who is linked with
homosexuality in a single document, and Pere Torroella, fifteenth-century
Iberia's archmisogynist, also spent time in his court. Naples was not just the
center for Renaissance Latin poetry but a major Aragonese political center,
through which passed "Spain's best nobles, politicians, and
soldiers." Yet there is no evidence of any reform of what in Spanish are
called costumbres until the introduction of the Inquisition - seventy years
after it had been introduced in Spain - brought widespread revolt against
Spanish authority.
Several decisive steps in the formation of modern Spain were taken by Isabella
with her husband Ferdinand, "the Catholic Monarchs" (1474-1516). Through their marriage
Castile and Aragón became ruled by the same sovereigns, and Catholicism
became even more linked with marriage in the nation's consciousness. Christianity
was seen in Castile, more strongly than elsewhere, as a system for controlling
sexual behavior. Female prostitution, however, was always tolerated; it was
located in the Moorish quarter, a predecessor of the "zona de tolerancia" of the modem Hispanic
city.
Granada was conquered in 1492; its baths, described as the citizens' entertainment,
closed shortly thereafter. (Alfonso VI had destroyed Castile's baths two
centuries before, believing that the "vices" practiced there made for
poorer soldiers.) Jews were expelled the same year, although a majority chose
conversion to Christianity and remained in Spain; anti-Jewish propaganda
shortly before the order of expulsion identified Jews with sodomy ("sodomy
comes from the Jews"). In 1497 Ferdinand and Isabella, presumably responding to the
continued existence of sodomites in Spain, ordered that those found be burned,
with confiscation of possessions by the crown.
The
Hapsburg Era. Hapsburg Spain of the next two centuries was similarly
repressive, and records survive of many public executions of sodomites,
intended to instill terror into the populace. Yet there were ups and downs,
with more freedom in Catalonia, Aragón, Valencia, and Andalusia than in Castile, and more among
the economically privileged than among the peasantry. The most oppressive
period was the reign of Felipe II (1555-1598), which saw arenewed emphasis on marriage; the prudish
Counterreformation, which he championed, opposed sensual pleasure of any sort.
Just before his death Felipe II reaffirmed the death penalty for sodomy, and
made conviction easier. Felipes III and rv (1598-1665) were more liberal, though only by comparison. Testimony in
legal cases, among them those of Felipe II's secretary Antonio Pérez and the Count of
Villamediana, is the largest body of information that survives on homosexual
life in Spain during the period. In Valencia, Inquisition testimony reveals the
existence in the seventeenth century of a clandestine homosexual ghetto. It
should be remembered, in studying modern Spanish society, that pressures
toward marriage were so strong that except for ecclesiastics, most of those who
engaged in homosexual activities did marry. At the same time, opposition to the
Catholic church could be so intense as to make anything Catholicism opposed,
such as non-procreative sexuality, seem especially appealing. It should also be
noted that homosexuality could be ascetic, rejecting all sexual activity, a
purity of which, according to misogynist literature, men were thought more
capable.
As Castile took on a world role for the first time, the official morality interpreted
the world in terms of sexual behavior and religion. Protestants instituted
divorce and clerical marriage, and closed monasteries. New World Indians were
sodomites [see
Andean
Societies), and needed Christianity. The Turkish empire, of which the Spaniards
were terrified, was likewise seen as a land of sexual license, where Christians
were slaves. Italy was decadent and effeminate, and Spain undertook its
defense. There were substantial colonies of expatriate Spaniards in Italy, the
Turkish empire, France, and Holland. Just as those who rejected medieval
Castile's sexual morality could and did emigrate to the Islamic south and east,
in the Hapsburg period there were many among the expatriates who left in search
of greater sexual as well as religious freedom. The expatriates were sometimes
influential in reinforcing the sexual freedom and anti-Catholicism of their
new countries.
Homosexuality appears in classical Spanish literature in subtle forms. In the
world of sixteenth-century pastoral and chivalric romance an atmosphere of
freedom was established, and sex-variant characters, especially women in male roles,
appear. Anonymous chronicles of famous homosexuals (Juan II, Alvaro de Luna, very possibly also
the "Gran
Capitán" Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba) were published in the
sixteenth century. Cervantes presents, through same-sex friendships,
relationships with many homosexual overtones. In drama, a wide variety of
interpersonal and psychological problems were examined. Female roles were sometimes
played by boys. Female characters often used male disguise, and men in female
dress are not unknown,- Tirso de Molina is especially noted for the use of cross-dressing
and female protagonists.
Homosexuality was also treated through the use of classical mythology. The most
important, difficult, and innovative poet of seventeenth-century Spain is Luis de Góngora y Argote. In his masterpiece,
the Solitudes, the alienated young
protagonist is described at the outset as more beautiful than Ida's ephebe ("garzón"); the allusion is to
Ganymede. The Solitudes
started a
furious controversy; the tormented conservative Quevedo repeatedly called Góngora a sodomite and Jewish,
although he is not known to have been either. An important follower of Góngora was Pedro Soto de Rojas, author of a lengthy poem
on Adonis; another was Villamediana; another was the brilliant feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
On
homosexuality in religious literature and monastic institutions much work
remains to be done. In some of the most famous poems in Spanish, San Juan de la Cruz took the female
role in fantasized mystical lovemaking with Christ, and the Mercedarian order,
to which Tirso de Molina belonged, had the reputation, at least in some
quarters, of enjoying sodomy.
Executions of sodomites continued, through in reduced number, into the
eighteenth century. The death penalty for homosexual acts was removed in 1822
with the first Spanish penal code, which referred only to "unchaste
abuses" [abusos
deshonestos). In 1868 the crime of causing public scandal was added, but
no homosexual cases have been discussed.
The Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries. New contact with mainstream Europe, especially Germany, exposed
Spain in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to ideas from which
it had long been sheltered. There ensued a great campaign of intellectual and cultural
renewal; this movement was anti-Catholic, libertarian, and often Arabophile;
some of the leading figures spent time in Granada. The founder is the revered,
celibate educator Francisco Giner de los Ríos, called "the Spanish Socrates," whose Institución Libre de Enseñanza had a great influence
until its demise with the Spanish Civil War. The Hellenism of Giner and his
disciples remains unstudied.
A focus of homosexual Ufe was the liberal Residencia de Estudiantes, an offshoot of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and much more than what
its name would imply. Its small campus, with buildings in Hispano-Arabic style, opened in
1915, and it was in the 20s and 30s a center of the artistic vanguard in
Madrid. Among its residents were Federico García Lorca, the poet Emilio Prados, and the painter Salvador Dalí.
In the
early twentieth century there was little open or published discussion of
homosexual topics, but there were many coded allusions. Figures interested in
homosexuality, at least during part of their lives, include Giner's nephew and
disciple Fernando de los Ríos, the Greek professor, essayist, and fiction writer Unamuno,
the novelist Baroja, and the poets Manuel Machado and Rubén Darío (the former the foremost
Spanish dandy; the latter, a Nicaraguan, the author of the first published
discussion in Spanish of Lautréamontj. The Biblioteca Renacimiento, whose literary director
was the playwright Gregorio Martínez Sierra, published the works of Spanish homosexual authors
along with translations of Freud.
Writers
more openly homosexual were not able to deal with the topic in their works.
These include the conservative dramatist Jacinto Benavente (Nobel Prize, 1922),
the chronicler of Madrid life Pedro de Répide, the short story writer Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, and the music
critic and historian Adolfo Salazar. Many Spaniards escaped to Paris, among them Gregorio and María Martinez Sierra and the
composer Manuel de Falla. Little magazines, such as Grecia of Adriano del Valle, Mediodía
of Joaquín Romero Murube, and Renacimiento of Martinez Sierra, remain
incompletely studied. Even into the 1920's the situation for homosexuals was
oppressive, as can be seen from the reticence of the Espasa-Calpe encyclopedia
and the comments of Gregorio Marañón. It was foreigners living in Spain, the Uruguayan Alberto
Nin Frías
[Marcos, amador
de la
belleza, 1913; Alexis
o el
significado del temperamento mano, 1932; Homosexualismo creador,
1933),
the Chilean Augusto d'Halmar (Pasión
y muerte
delcura Deusto, 1924), and the Cuban Alfonso Hernández Cata (El ángel
de Sodoma,
1928) who
pubüshed
the first
books on the topic.
One type of covert treatment of homosexuality was study of Andalusian culture
or homosexual figures, among the latter the Count of Villamediana. An important
event was the tercentenary of the Góngora in 1927; the commemoration gave the name to the famous
"generation of 1927." This was a celebration of poetry, of Andalusia (Góngora was from Córdoba), an exuberant revolt
against Spain's cultural establishment, and also an affirmation of Spain's
homosexual tradition. Among those participating were the poets Lorca, Prados, Luis Cernuda, Vicente
Aleixandre (Nobel Prize, Í977), and the bisexual poet and printer Manuel Altolaguirre;
Altolaguirre and Prados published in Málaga the magazine Litoral
(1926-29). Especially
important was the role of the great bisexual love poet Pedro Salinas, called
the "inventor" of that poetical generation. Salinas, who introduced
his student Cernuda to Gide's writings, was translator of and much influenced
by Proust.
Pressures for liberalization were building. Besides Freud, Oscar Wilde's works
were available in Spanish, as was Frank Harris' Ufe of Wilde and Iwan Bloch's Vida sexual
contemporánea. Gide's Corydon
and an
expurgated version of Lautréamont's Cantos
de Maldoror
appeared
in the 1920's, translated by Julio Gómez de la Serna,- Ramón Gómez de la Sema wrote a long prologue to the latter. Young
Spaniards studied in Germany, returning with knowledge of its sexual freedom.
Contact with the writings of Magnus Hirschfeld is certain. Emilio García-Gómez's Poemas arábigo-andaluces, which included pederastic poetry, caused a stir when
published in 1930. Also contributing to a much changed climate were the
lectures and publications on gender identity by Spain's most famous physician, Gregorio Marañón. Marañen believed that
homosexuality was a congenital defect, and claimed that "Latin
races" were superior because they allegedly had less of it than did
Germany and England. Yet he strongly and publicly advocated tolerance, and
"treatment" was to be just as voluntary as for any other medical
condition. (Impressed by the newly discovered role of hormones in sexual
desire, Marañón expected a hormonal therapy to be developed.) Besides Los estados intersexuales en la especie
humana (1929) and other writings on sexual medicine, Marañón wrote an introduction for Hernández Catá's Ángel de Sodoma, a prologue for the translation of
Bloch, an "antisocratic dialogue" accompanyingthe second Spanish
edition of Cory
don (1931),
and a historical diagnosis of the homosexual king Enrique IV.
The pressures came to fruition in 1931 with the proclamation of the liberal
Second Republic. The fervently anti-Catholic Manuel Azaña was president; minister of
education and later ambassador to the United States was Fernando de los Ríos,-and the author of Spain's
new constitution, Luis Jiménez de Asúa, had published in defense
of sexual and reproductive freedoms Libertad
de amar y derecho a morir (1928; an epilogue to Hernández Catá's Ángel
de Sodoma). The first few years of the republic were very happy times.
The Chilean diplomat Carlos Morla Lynch kept a cultural salon, but published
only heavily censored excerpts from his diary. A Hispano-Arabic institute was
created and it launched the journal Al-Andalus;
surprisingly,
both survived the Civil War. Even more surprising, they produced as offshoots,
in fascist Spain at the peak of Nazi Germany's campaign to free Germany and
the world of Jews, a Hispano-Jewish institute and its journal Sefarad.
Homosexuality
moved toward open appearance in Spanish literature: while the Ode to Walt Whitman of Lorca was privately published in
Mexico (1933), Cemuda published Where Oblivion
Dwells in 1934, The
Young Sailor and The
Forbidden Pleasures in 1936, and Lorca's Sonnets of Dark Love and The Public were being read to friends
shortly before his assassination. As with the Nazis, a motive of the Catholics
who began the Civil War in 1936 was to free Spain of homosexuals, although one
of their heroes, the assassinated José Antonio Primo de Rivera, is reputed to have been a homosexual and a friend
of Lorca.
Toward the Present. From 1939 to 1975 Spain
was ruled by the joyless clerical-fascist regime of Franco, during which all
nonprocreative sexuality was again furtive, although there was liberalization
in the 60s. Any positive treatment of homosexuality in the media would itself
have been a criminal offense. A re-criminalization of "homosexual
acts" in 1970 produced an embrionic gay movement, and the first gay
magazine in Spanish, Aghois
(1972-73).
Founded by Armand de Fluvià, Aghois
was
prepared in Barcelona, then sent clandestinely to Paris, where it was
reproduced and mailed. The Franco criminalization was itself repealed in 1978.
Poetry, especially difficult poetry, attracted the least attention and was,
therefore, the preferred homosexual genre. Literary figures of this period
are Aleixandre, Aleixandre's protégé the poet and critic Carlos Bousono, the poets and literary
scholars Luis Rosales and Francisco Brines, and the less secretive, and thus
more marginal, poets Jaime Gil de Biedma and Juan Gil-Albert {Heracles, written 1955, publ. 1981).
From voluntary exile in Paris came the major voice of Juan Goytisolo, who in
his novel Count
Julian presents an Arabophile interpretation of Spanish history
and a trip through the vagina of Queen Isabella. His En los reinos de taifas is the first public
discussion by a Spanish author of his arrival at a homosexual identification.
After the death of Franco in 1975, Spain entered its most liberal period since
the end of the Middle Ages; Catholicism has again been deposed from its
position as state religion. While there is not a selfconsciously or publicly gay
culture, a gay movement is now well-established. It is primarily based in
Barcelona, home of the Institut Lambda. Bilbao has had a gay center since 1980,
and Gay Hotsa, the most important gay
magazine in Spain, is published there.
Major cultural figures are more or less openly gay-identified. Authors emerging
or flourishing during this period include, besides Goytisolo, the novelist
Terenci Moix, the playwright Antonio Gala, the poet and essayist Luis Antonio
de Villena, translator of the Greek anthology [La musa de los muchachos, Madrid, 1980), the Bohemian,
self-publishing poet Manuel Gámez Quintana [Apuntes
sobre el homosexual, Madrid, 1976), the bisexual philosopher Femando Savater, and, from Paris, the novelist Agustín Gómez-Arcos (The Carnivorous Lamb, Boston, 1984). A film
renaissance has produced two major gay filmmakers, Eloy de la Iglesia (Hidden Pleasures; The Deputy; Pals) and Pedro Almodóvar (Law of Desire; Dark Habits), both of whom have been acclaimed
abroad; also gay is the country's leading and most admired pop singer, Miguel Bosé. Spain has become a
favorite destination of gay tourists, with gay resorts located in Ibiza,
Sitges, and the Costa del Sol. Gay tourists also go to Barcelona and Valencia,
and to a lesser degree Madrid and Seville. AIDS has not had a large impact in
Spain, and the majority of reported cases are intravenous drug addicts.
Lesbians. Little is known about
Lesbianism in Spain. Female-female sexuality is believed to have been enjoyed,
along with many other forms of pleasure, by the eleventh-century courtesan and
poet Wallada; presumably it flourished among the concubines and multiple wives
of Andalusia, but other documentation is lacking. (Later Turkish practice would
suggest that eunuchs served as cooperative partners for lengthy sessions of
cunnilingus and intercourse.) In Christian Spain, the protagonist of the very
popular Celestina
of
Fernando de Rojas (1499) enjoyed lovemaking with women. There is a single
report of a woman sentenced to exile for "attempted sodomy" in 1549,
and there is also mention of women in prison who strapped on a phallus. Women
were simply less cause for concern, perhaps because, as an inquisitor said,
they did not have the "instrument" with which to commit sodomy. Women
were able to live for years in male dress without detection, even serving in
the army. Two well-known cases, Catalina de Erauso (1592-1650) and Elena/"Eleno" de Céspedes (late sixteenth century) -
the second, possibly a true hermaphrodite, married first as a woman and then
as a man - were only discovered by chance.
The role of lesbians in the early twentieth century and Civil War remains to be
examined. The actress Margarita Xirgu was at the center of a sympathetic body
of theatre people. The Songs
of Bihtis were published in Spanish translation by 1913; that they
were the work of Pierre Louys was not yet known. In the contemporary period a
number of women writers have dealt with lesbian topics, without, however,
making public their own sexual orientation. Among the most important of these
are the novelists Esther Tusquets, who also directs a libertarian publishing
house, and Ana Maria Moix.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Gail Bradbury, "Irregular Sexuality in the Spanish Comedia," Modern Language Review, 76 (1981), 566-80; Rafael Carrasco, Inquisición y represión
sexual en Valencia. Historia de los sodomitas (1565-1785), Barcelona: Laertes, 1985; Ana M. Gil, "Rosa i
lila a la literatura catalana," El Temps, October 24, 1988, pp. 104-06; El homosexual ante la
sociedad enferma, Barcelona: Tusquets, 1978; Victoriano Domingo Loren, Los homosexuales frente a
la ley: los juristas opinan, Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1978; Antoni Mirabet i Mullol, Homosexualidad hoy, Barcelona: Herder, 1985; Mary
Elizabeth Perry, "The 'Nefarious Sin' in Early Modem Seville," Journal of Homosexuakty, 14:1/2 (1988), 67-89;
Ramon Rosselló, L'homosexualitat a Mallorca a l'edat mitjana, Barcelona: Calamus Scriptorius, 1978; Angel Sahuquillo, Federico García Lorca y la cultura de la homosexualidad:
Lorca, Dalí, Cernuda, Gil-Albert, Prados y la voz silenciada del amor
homosexual, Stockholm, 1986; Phyllis Zatlin, "Homosexuality on the
Spanish Stage: Barometer of Social Change," España Contemporánea, 1:2 (Spring 1988), 7-20.
Daniel Eisenberg
Sparta
Ancient
Greek Sparta was the chief city-state of the Peloponnesus in the archaic and
classical ages. Inspired by the Dorian ancestral hero Heracles, who loved
Iolaus and taught him to hunt and fight, Spartans developed the strongest
Hellenic society under the Eunomia (good order), laws given by an oracle to the
semi-mythical regent Lycurgus, but actually promulgated just after the Second
Messenian War. Victorious under its peculiar constitution that early provided
for two hereditary kings but evolved during the First (735-715 b.c.) and Second (635-615 b.c.) Messenian Wars, Sparta
enslaved its neighbors, assigning a certain number of these helots to work the
9,000 cleroi (plots of land), each assigned to a Spartan. Thus relieved of
work, each male citizen devoted his days from six to sixty to gymnastics and
military training to become a perfect hoplite, as the new-style warrior for the
phalanx was called.
Pederasty. The semilegendary Lycurgus
banned money except for iron spits and ordered periodic redistribution of
cleroi. Faced with the need to limit the population of "equals" so
that each would possess a cleros, the reformers after 615 b.c. imported the Cretan customs of delayed marriages for men,
training nude in gymnasia, common messes for citizens, and pederasty. Provided only with one
rude cloak annually, boys roved in herds (agelai), as in Crete, each under an older boy -
an "ciren" of 20-22 - slept outdoors, stole food from helots and harassed
and even murdered them. If caught stealing they were flogged publicly, not
infrequently to death in order to teach them to steal more craftily and to
endure greater physical hardship. At 12 each boy was taken by a 22-year-old
"inspirer," who trained him for the next eight years. Then, as the
"listener" began to sprout facial and body hair, he went on active
full-time military duty and was assigned to a barracks where he had to sleep
until he was 30, continuing to return to dine with his messmates until the age
of 60. At 30 the inspirer married a girl of 18, who on her wedding night lay
face down in a dark room in boy's attire with close-cropped hair, and
henceforth he slept at home. Eighteen- to 20-year-old ephebes and 20-to
22-year-old eirens, being constantly together, made the transition from
"listeners" to "inspirers."
That Lycurgus borrowed Cretan institutions is attested not only by Ephorus,
Herodotus, Plato, and Plutarch, who state that he traveled in Crete to study its
constitution, but also by the fact that common messes in Sparta were at first
called by the Cretan term andreia
(men's
house) before it became the classical syssitia.
The
Spartan gymnasia and palestra, from which, as in Crete, helots were excluded
and citizens trained nude, were modeled on Cretan dromoi, running tracks. Also
Thaletas, the Cretan musician (devotee of the Muses, hence poet and scholar)
and disciple of the Cretan Onomacritus, who had institutionalized pederasty on
Crete ca. 650, came at Lycurgus' request to help improve the Spartan
constitution and introduced there from Crete the Dance of the Naked Youths.
After institutionalizing pederasty and the related reforms, neither Sparta nor
Crete sent out any colonists, unlike the other poleis.
The Spartan Apogee. After implementing the eunomia, Spartans became the
greatest warriors and athletes in Greece. Their earlier poets, like Tyrtaeus
(fl. ca. 630), had not described pederasty (nor had any other earlier surviving
authors) but afterwards other Greeks, except those in the most backward areas
such as Macedonia, quickly adapted Spartan institutions though in a less
severe form. Solon, for example, with the help of the Cretan musician
Epimenides, institutionalized pederasty in Athens.
All famous Spartans personally practiced pederasty, but much debate raged in
antiquity as in modern times over whether inspirers physically loved their
boys. Defenders of the so-called "pure" Dorian form [because Cretans
and Spartans were the most famous branch of the Dorians, they and other modern
scholars assumed pederasty to be a prehistoric institution common to the
"Dorian race") of pederasty range from Xenophon to Karl Otfried Müller (1797-1840) and the contemporary
Harald Patzer. The majority, however, adhere to the skepticism of Cicero:
"Only a thin veil [the tunic separating the lovers who reclined side by
side on a couch at symposia] preserves their virtue" (De República IV, 4). Many charged the
Spartans with homosexual and/or even heterosexual promiscuity because Spartans
secluded their women far less than did other Greeks, even letting them exercise
nude in public as the males did and not marrying them until they were 18
whereas most other Greeks of 30 took brides of 15. Aristotle accused the Spartans,
like the Celts and other "warlike" races, of being dominated by their
women and given to pederasty. Alcman's Partheneia
indicates
that corerasty (love of maidens) was practiced betw een women and girls, both
classes of the population less restricted than elsewhere and, according to
Aristotle, women owned two-fifths of the property in Sparta as a result of
inheritance from warriors slain in its constant wars.
As the Spartans heroically led in repelling the Persians in 480-479 b.c., their reputation soared. Even at their maritime rival
Athens, a pro-Laconian, anti-democratic party, mainly composed of aristocrats,
existed during the bitter Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.), pitting Sparta's Peloponnesian League against Athens'
Delian League. Socrates' most famous pupils allied en masse with him in praise
of Sparta: Alcibiades, Critias, who had headed the "Thirty Tyrants"
installed by the Spartans after their victory to control Athens, Plato, and
Xenophon. This factor plus his questioning the wisdom of the war and the existence
of the gods led an Athenian jury to condemn Socrates to death.
Dechne. After Sparta's victory,
its commanders and harmosts (governors) often became corrupt, taking bribes
and ravishing boys in the territories they controlled. Great inequality of
wealth resulted from such plunder as well as from inheritances and many unable
to contribute as required to syssitia
lost
their status as equals. At battles in 371 and 362 b.c. Thebans led by the "Sacred Band" of lovers organized
by Epaminondas overthrew Spartan hegemony and liberated Messenia, slaying so
many Spartan warriors that the city never fully recovered, hampered, some say,
by a low birth rate caused by pederasty. Two pederastic kings, Agis III
¡244-241 b.c.)
and
Cleomenes 111 (235-219 b.c.),
revived
the old constitution, redistributing wealth and restoring discipline, but they
were defeated by the Romans, in alliance with the Achaean League, in 222 b.c.
Conclusion. The Spartan system of
education discouraged intellectual development and fostered
"Laconic" brevity of speech. But when the mercantile societies of
Ionia, the Aegean Islands, and Athens, following Sparta's lead, copied and
intellectualized pederasty, it became the driving force of the Greek miracle.
Each boy eromenos had as a distinguished private tutor his erastes or lover.
Sparta was to the Greeks themselves and remains the eternal model of an
aristocratic warrior society whose unwritten law combined male bonding with an
especially virile, austere form of homosexuality. Neglecting the cultural endeavor
that was the particular glory of Athens, Sparta nonetheless made its own
contribution to the Greek miracle. Inspired by man-boy love, the heroism of
Spartan warriors shielded nascent Hellenic civilization from the menace of
Persian despotism.
See also Greece, Ancient.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Paul Cartledge, "The Politics of Spartan Pederasty," Proceedings of the
Cambridge Philological Society, 207(1981), 17-36; idem, Agesilaos and the Crisis
of Sparta, London: Duckworth, 1987; Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in
European Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
William
A. Percy
Spicer, Jack (John Lester; 1925-1965)
American
poet. Stemming from a Minnesota family, Spicer spent most of his life in California.
As a freshman at the University of Redlands (1944) Spicer became interested in
Calvinism,- later he took a Ph.D. in linguistics. Glimpses of his personal life
are found in his letters, whose whimsical style attests his keen sense of
language, and in recollections of friends.
The earliest published verses date from 1946, when poems appeared in Occident, the Berkeley student
magazine. In later years Spicer repudiated his early verses, calling them
"beautiful but dumb." They are tender and lyrical, qualities attributable
to Spicer's study of Yeats.
For the poet Robin Blaser, his close friend and literary executor, Spicer's
poetic career actually begins in 1957 with the appearance of After Lorca. This is the first of the
books written after he changed his approach to creativity and accepted the
notion of "divine poetic infusion," a method he traced to the Greek
writer Longinus. Blaser writes, "It is indicative of a new consciousness
of the power and violence of language, and in Jack's work, it becomes an
insistent argument for the performance of the real by way of poetry." With
the publication of After Lorca in 1957, Spicer began a steady production of verse in his
new style. During this creative phase Spicer exercised a charismatic sway over
his San Francisco circle. Among the poets he influenced are Robin Blaser,
Harold Dull, Robert Duncan, and Richard Tagett.
The dozen volumes he wrote are gathered in the posthumous Collected Books (Los Angeles: Black
Sparrow, 1975). Uncollected items appear in One Night Stand and Other
Poems (San
Francisco: Grey Fox, 1980). His 1965 Vancouver lectures remain unpublished.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Paul Mariah, ed., [Jack Spicer Issue], Manroot (Fall/Winter 1974/ 75).
George
Klawitter
Sports
See Athletics.
Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946)
American
writer. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Stein spent much of her youth in
Oakland, California, where her father had business interests. As an
undergraduate at Harvard's Radcliffe College she was influenced by the
psychology classes of William James. She then pursued medical studies in
Baltimore, where she had an affair with a woman named May Bookstaver. This
experience provided the basis for the novel Q.E.D., the only work in which
Stein wrote explicitly of a lesbian relationship; she did not allow the book to
be published during her lifetime.
In 1903 Gertrude Stein left for Europe, in due course settling into a Paris
apartment with her brother Leo. The two had a keen interest in avant-garde art,
and began a pioneering collection of contemporary paintings. Gertrude became
friends with Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso - then regarded as an enfant
terrible, but about whom she wrote with insight. In 1905 her Baltimore friend
Etta Cone came to Paris for some months; she and Gertrude had an affair, while
Cone typed the manuscript for Stein's book Three Lives. Etta soon came to share
the Steins' passion for contemporary art, and after her return to America she
and her sister Claribel built up a collection of modern masterpieces, which
later entered the Baltimore Museum of Art. Etta continued to rely implicitly on
the aesthetic advice and judgment of Gertrude Stein, and in this way the
bonding of the two women was to play a role in the introduction of modern art
to the United States.
At the end of 1907 Alice B. Toklas arrived in Paris. Toklas, who came from a
similar upper-middle-class Jewish family of the Bay Area of California, had an
almost immediate rapport with Stein. They were to be together for 38 years.
Their relationship was a version of the butch-fem dyad: Alice did the cooking and kept house, while
Gertrude concentrated on her writing. When heterosexual couples would visit,
Gertrude would talk to the men, while Alice made the women feel at home. In her
forties Stein wrote love poetry reflectingherrelationship with Toklas;
although sexual particulars are noted in a private code, this can be deciphered
without too much difficulty. Like Q.E.D.,
these
poems were not published in her lifetime.
After World War I, Stein's Rue de Fleurus apartment - in competition with the
nearby establishment of Natalie Clifford Barney - became a favorite gathering
place of the American and English writers of the so-called "Lost
Generation," including Robert McAlmon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest
Hemingway. Although Hemingway acquired some of his own style through studying
Stein's more experimental work, he was later to write harshly about her - as
she seemed to have struck a tender nerve in his own sexual self-concept. For a
fellow Harvard graduate, the homosexual composer Virgil Thomson, Stein wrote
an opera libretto, Four Saints in Three Acts in 1927; it was
successfully produced in Hartford in 1934 with sets by Florine Stettheimer.
In 1933 Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, deliberately composed in
an accessible style. The next year she followed this book with a triumphant
tour of America - her only trip home. While her literary eminence was assured,
her artistic judgment in this period seemed less certain,- she became very
interested in a minor English gay painter Francis Rose, and acquired a number
of his undistinguished works.
During the Occupation years of World War II, Stein and Toklas lived undisturbed
at their country home in the south of France. After the liberation Gertrude
Stein was able to return to her Paris apartment, where she delighted in receiving
the visits of American soldiers. She died of cancer in 1946, leaving her manuscripts
to Yale University, where they have been gradually brought to publication.
Continuing to live in the Paris apartment surrounded by the paintings, Alice B.
Toklas became renowned for her cookbook. After converting to Roman Catholicism,
perhaps in the hope that somehow it would assist her in being reunited with
Gertrude, Toklas died in 1967.
Stein's writings have acquired a reputation for being difficult and opaque. She
sought to develop a literary parallel to her cherished Cubist paintings, with
their fragmented presentation of reality. An early interest in automatic
writing, which grew out of her classes with William James, fused with the
stream-of-consciousness techniques that she shared with James Joyce, Dorothy
Richardson, and Virginia Woolf to produce work of striking modernity. Apart
from these innovative concerns, the obscurity of much of her writing is
probably also linked with her desire to advert to aspects of her lesbianism,
but without openly avowing it. While Gertrude Stein will probably never become
a popular writer, she was a pivotal figure in the development of literary
modernism, and as such has exercised considerable indirect influence. Her
first-hand responses to the work of modem artists, and the little museum of
major works that so many saw in her Paris apartment, earned her a secondary
role as a tastemaker in the field of modem painting.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, New York: Oxford, 1970;
James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, New York: Praeger, 1974;
Linda Simon, The Biography of Alice B. Toklas, New York: Avon, 1977.
Evelyn Gettone
Stereotype
The term
stereotype had its origin in the printing trade, where it meant a solid metal
plate, a printing surface that could be used for thousands of identical
impressions without need of replacement. The American journalist Walter
Lippmann introduced the concept to the social sciences in his book Public Opinion (1922), in which he argued
that in a modern democracy political leaders and ordinary voters are required
to make decisions about a variety of complex matters which they do not
understand, but judge on the basis of stereotypes acquired from some source
other than direct experience. The inflow of new empirical data fails to correct
the situation because the individual who has embraced a stereotype sees mainly
what he expects to see rather than what is really present.
The esteem in which Lippmann was held by Americans in public life furthered
the adoption of the term essentially in the meaning he gave it. When a concept
is designated a stereotype, it is implied that (1) it is simple rather than
nuanced or differentiated, (2) it is erroneous rather than accurate, (3) it has
been acquired through secondhand rather than direct experience, and (4) it
resists modification by later experience. Very little systematic investigation
of the dimensions of stereotyping has been done, apart from the dimension of
resistance to change. In empirical research the term has usually been
restricted to a pejorative designation for commonly held beliefs about ethnic
groups. This "group concept" usage was established in a classic study
by Katz and Braly of 1933. The questionnaire asked the subject to select from a
list of 84 traits the ones he considered characteristic of each of ten ethnic
groups, then to choose the five "most typical" traits for each group.
This procedure has been repeated many times, for many ethnic groups, and in
many different countries. While most of the studies have dealt with beliefs
about ethnic groups, a considerable number have probed attitudes toward
occupational groups, social classes, the differences between the sexes, and
like topics.
One conclusion that may be drawn from this research is that most individuals
are willing to make at least a guess about the traits of almost any defined
social group on the basis of information that a social scientist would
consider inadequate. Opinions are derived first of all from the mass media,
which today by electronic means reach even the uneducated and barely literate
masses in backward countries, as well as educated publics in advanced ones.
Other individuals and fortuitous personal contact supply further bases for
opinion-forming. The circumstances under which stereotypes are likely to be
accurate or inaccurate are the object of many hypotheses. A widely held belief
which Lippmann himself propagated is that the stereotypes of the educated are
in general more accurate than those of the uneducated, and that concepts formed
by social scientists are the most accurate of all. This view, however plausible,
has never been demonstrated. A secondary problem is a group's self-image, which
may be as stereotypical as any other. If the self-image of a collective and a
second group's image of it largely coincide, this fact is usually taken as
evidence for a "kernel of truth" in both sets of stereotypes.
Stereotypes of
Homosexuality. Research on attitudes toward homosexuality is relatively
recent, and the dimensions of the stereotyping of homosexuals are not fully
defined. Several general observations may, however, be made on the basis of
the extant findings and of more theoretical presuppositions. The first is that
there are diachronic layers of stereotypes. In the West, the oldest layer, inherited
from antiquity and the early Middle Ages, is that homosexuals behave like
members of the opposite sex, or conversely that they violate the appropriate
norms of behavior for their genital sex. Thus terms like "effeminate"
and "swish" are applied to male homosexuals by some if not always
many of the subjects questioned. Conversely, lesbians are perceived as
mannish, crude, and aggressive. Another archaic layer, attested in the Greek
comedies of Aristophanes, is that male homosexuals and bisexuals are constantly
thinking about sex, and even (in many cases) almost indiscriminate in their
choice of sex objects. The third layer derives from the central and late Middle
Ages, when the church systematically defamed homosexual activity and those who
engaged in it, with the outcome that terms such as "immoral,"
"repulsive," "dangerous," and "sinful" are
stereotypical responses to questionnaire studies. The fourth layer is the one
propagated by psychiatry and psychoanalysis from the late nineteenth century
onward, to the effect that the homosexual is "sexually abnormal,"
"perverted," "mentally ill," "maladjusted,"
"insecure," and "lacking self-control." The most recent
layer, and the one characteristic of individuals who have overcome the
traditional social distance from homosexuals, holds them to be "sensitive,"
"individualistic," "intelligent," "imaginative,"
"sophisticated," and "artistic." Undoubtedly the standard
movement propaganda about the homosexuality of great men and women, and also
the image of the creative writer or artist as homosexual, have contributed
mightily to the diffusion of the last layer. Although it would appear to be a
rare example of positive stereotyping (and to a considerable extent it is), the
notion of creativity has been traditionally associated - at least in American
culture - with lack of manliness.
Such stereotypes are harbored and propagated not only by members of the host
culture (the "heterosexual maj ority"), but also - to a degree that
may seem surprising in the era of homosexual liberation - by many homosexuals
themselves. As part of the coming-out process, the tyro homosexual or lesbian
may display "obvious" mannerisms and dress, even in an exaggerated
form, to gain adhesion to the group. Later these flaunting signals are likely
to be toned down, as the need for them decreases. In a more subtle way, traits
redolent of stereotypes may be selectively unfurled in order to signal one's
orientation nonverbally to other gay people. Such communication serves a
specific function, but it also lends a specious validity to the more baneful
stereotypes. Dilemmas of this kind are probably inseparable from the
experience of a stigmatized minority as such.
Class Differences. There is a class aspect to
stereotyping: the lower social classes, being less educated andmore given to
concrete than abstract thinking, incline more to stereotypic responses because
their thinking is in imagery rather than in logical concepts, and their mental
life more affective than intellectual. Moreover, the uneducated may cherish a
random set of stereotypes that contradict one another, as when the male
homosexual is thought inordinately aggressive and "a danger to every boy
on the streets," but also timid and wanting in masculinity. Also, in the
lower classes far more importance is attached to sex roles that are rigidly
and unequivocally defined. A man must be masculine, a woman feminine, and there
is a relatively low level of toleration for deviant behavior. In this situation,
if a man is homosexual and therefore behaves sexually "like a woman,"
his whole personality is expected to conform to this model. Hence the
stereotype - or more precisely the most archaic layer of stereotypes - is
reinforced by the majority of lower-class homosexuals who opt for a female
identity and then project that identity through overtly effeminate behavior.
Conversely the upper-class individual exposed to homophile propaganda may form
his stereotypical notion from the biography of a famous novelist or painter, or
from literature that stresses the "positive achievements" of
homosexuals in history. In general, the more educated part of the population in
a society that prides itself on its individualism can tolerate - if not accept
- a deviation in sexual character so long as it is not patently disharmonious
or incongruent with other societal norms.
Correlations of Stereotypes.
A further
question is the correlation of negative stereotypes of the homosexual with
attitudes toward other outsider, minority groups. In the wake of the findings
of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and his associates in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), investigators have
sought a common denominator in a personality type that relies on authority, is
unable to tolerate ambiguity, and is deeply immersed in the specific value
system of the ethnic group and social class in which it has been reared. A
heterosexual having such traits is likely to be even more intolerant of the
homosexual than of other deviant groups, and to perceive homoerotic behavior as
threatening to his own sexual identity and potentially harmful to society. That
is why the effeminate homosexual may be disliked because he violates the norm
of masculinity, but conversely the masculine homosexual may provoke even more
anxiety because of the ambiguity which his even subtler departure from maleness
entails. It is also a fact that homosexual behavior is often believed to have
originated with, or to be characteristic of, another ethnic group, as when
Frenchmen call homosexuality "le vice allemand" (the German vice).
The very terms sodomite
and bugger are in English the legacy of
such labeling of a people or dissident sect as guilty of "unnatural
vice." This general tendency to ascribe undesirable characteristics to
disliked groups is termed ethnophaulism.
The centuries-long stigmatization of the sodomite as a criminal and an outcast
in Western civilization has left behind a negative residue of stereotypes that
only an equally lengthy process of education and positive-image building can
efface. A conference of gay movement leaders held in 1988 placed the creation
of a positive image of the homosexual at the head of its agenda for future
activity.
See also Authoritarian Personality;
Discrimination; Homophobia,-Myths and Fabrications.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Ronald A. Farrell and Thomas J. Morrione, "Social Interaction and
Stereotypic Responses to Homosexuals," Archives of Sexual
Behavior, 3 (1974), 425-42; Robert Gramling and Craig J. Forsyth,
"Exploiting Stigma," Sociological Forum, 2 (1987), 401-15; Sharon B. Gurwitz and Melinda Marcus,
"Effects of Anticipated Interaction, Sex, and Homosexual Stereotypes on
First Impressions," Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 8 (1978), 47-56; Gregory
R. Staats, "Stereotype Content and Social Distance: Changing Views of
Homosexuality," Journal of Homosexuality, 4 (1978), 15-27; Alan
Taylor, "Conceptions of Masculinity and Femininity as a Basis for
Stereotypes of Male and Female Homosexuals," Journal of Homosexuality, 9 (1983), 37-53.
Warren Johansson
Stevenson, Edward Irenaeus Prime-("Xavier Mayne"; 1868-1942)
American
novelist and scholar. Born in Madison, New Jersey, and educated in the United
States, he began to write for the press while still in school. He was admitted
to the New Jersey bar but never practiced. Stevenson was a member of the staff
of the Independent,
Harper's Weekly, and other magazines, and gained a wide reputation as
musical, dramatic, and literary critic. He specialized in foreign, including
European and Oriental literatures and claimed fluency in nine languages. Down
to 1900 he divided his time between the United States and many parts of Europe,
then settled permanently abroad out of dislike for the homophobia of
contemporary American society, ultimately dying in Europe in 1942. He wrote
many novels and short stories, several of which broach the homosexual theme but
in the innocuous guise of "male friendship." In a boys' book about
Bonnie Prince Charlie, White
Cockades (1887), there is "half-hinted" an erotic liaison
between the prince and a rustic youth.
Under the pseudonym "Xavier Mayne" he published in Naples in 1908
what was perhaps the first explicit homosexual novel by a native-born American:
Imre: A Memorandum. The novel's simple plot
describes the love affair between the thirty-year-old Oswald who is spending a
leisurely summer of language study in Hungary and the twenty-five-year-old
Imre, a Hungarian cavalry officer.
More important was his nonfiction book The
Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (Rome, 1908), the first
large-scale survey in the English language of the subject of homosexuality
from all aspects. It was based not just upon his reading of nearly everything
that had been published until then in the homophile movement press and in the
psychiatric literature, but also upon his first-hand observations of the
homosexual scene in the major cities of Europe and the United States, with much
folklore and gossip thrown in for good measure. The author describes the mores
of the gay subculture of that era, from the nobleman in his salon to the
hustler on the street, with an objectivity that is free of both polemic and
condemnatory bias. He alludes to many all-but-forgotten incidents and
scandals that made the metropolitan newspapers, and names scores of illustrious
figures of the past and present as Uranians or Uraniads (lesbians). Stevenson
adheres to the line of Magnus Hirschfeld and the Scientific-humanitarian
Committee that homosexuality is inborn and unmodifiable, that homosexuals should
not be forced to don "masks" to hide from would-be persecutors, and
that religion and the law are powerless to extirpate a predisposition of human
nature. So thorough is the volume that not a few of the topics broached on its
more than 600 pages have yet to be investigated by modern scholars. As the
work of a participant observer, The
Intersexes remains a precious collection of fact and commentary that
anticipates Donald Webster Cory's The
Homosexual in America of 1951, its first American successor.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Roger Austen, Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America, Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1977; Noel I. Garde, "The Mysterious Father of American
Homophile Literature," ONE Institute Quarterly, 1:3 (Fall 1958), 94-98.
Warren Johansson
Stoicism
Founded
by Zeno of Citium (335-263 b.c.),
Stoicism
became the leading philosophical school under the Roman emperors, until the
triumph of Neoplatonism in the third century. Insisting in the trying times of
the Hellenistic monarchies that even poverty, pain, and death are as nothing
to the eternal soul, Stoics vanquished their materialistic rivals, the
Epicureans, who stressed pleasure rather than virtue as the aim of life.
Almost all earlier Stoics, sometimes labeled the First Stoa, praised homosexual
love and shocked most Greeks by claiming that, contrary to the convention that
one should cease loving a boy once he sprouted a beard, one should keep one's eromenos until he reached his
twenty-eighth year. Paenatius and other Greeks introduced Stoic doctrines,
which appealed to the Latin sense for gravitas
and endurance
of hardships, to the Scipionic circle in Rome. Perhaps fearing the wrath of
old-fashioned patresfamilias,
who disapproved
of Greek love and arranged the marriage of their sons during their teens to
girls of 12 or 13, in contrast to the practice of upper-class Greeks to
postpone marriage to 30 and then take brides whose ages ranged from 15 to 19,
they omitted the emphasis on boy-love. Aristocratic Roman women lived with
their husbands and circulated in society, in contrast to Greek women who were
secluded, shut away in gynaikeia
(women's
quarters). Aristocratic Roman women thereby attained a far higher status than
Greek women had and fostered the emphasis of later Stoics on marriage. Often
designated the Second Stoa, most of the later Stoics deemphasized homosexual
love and some, notably the Roman Musonius Rufus in the first century, demanded
reciprocal fidelity to one's wife. Others, however, like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius
(reigned 161-180), remained bisexual. The slave philosopher Epictetus (ca.
50-ca. 135) demonstrated the Stoic doctrine that one's station in life was
indifferent, only one's virtue mattered.
Many have seen Stoic emphasis on the soul and on virtue and restraint of
appetites as a harbinger of Christianity. Indeed, Patristic writers from
Clement of Alexandria (150-215) to St. Augustine (354 - 430) dressed up
Christian doctrine in Stoic phrases to convert the upper classes. But while
Stoic philosophers, like pagan physicians, recommended moderation in sexual
activity as in diet and exercise to improve the body and mind, most Christian
Fathers advocated complete chastity and total sexual abstinence. Christians
wished to transcend nature, while Stoics preferred to live in harmony with it.
To control sexual urges, Christians mortified the flesh, often in the
deliberate attempt to achieve male impotence and female frigidity, states that
Greco-Roman physicians treated as diseases to be cured. Christians condemned
sodomy with the Stoic phrase, "against nature." The evolution from
uninhibited pagan sexuality through Stoic restraint to Christian asceticism and
chastity that some philosophers and historians claim to detect is thus more
apparent than real, more superficial than fundamental, one of vocabulary rather
than essence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Daniel Babut, "Les Stoiciens et l'amour," Revue des Etudes Gricques,
6 (1963), 55-63, G. w. Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1969, Michel Foucault, The Caie of the Self, New York: Random House,
1986, J. M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, Aline
Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, New York: Basil Blackwell,
1988.
William A. Percy
Stonewall Rebellion
This
event, which took place in New York City over the weekend of June 27-30, 1969,
is significant less for its intrinsic character than as a symbol of
self-assertion for the gay liberation movement. So successfully has the symbol
been propagated that it has largely, though not completely, obscured the
history of the preceding century of heartbreakingly slow and arduous work on
behalf of homosexual emancipation. The Stonewall Rebellion was a spontaneous
act of resistance to the police harassment that had been inflicted on the
homosexual community since the inception of the modern vice squad in
metropolitan police forces, but it sparked a much greater, indeed national
phenomenon - a new, highly visible, mass phase of political organization for
gay rights that far surpassed the timid, semi-clandestine homophile movement of
the 1950s and 1960s.
What Occurred. The event began with a
police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar at 51-53 Christopher Street just
east of Sheridan Square in New York's Greenwich Village on the night of June
27-28. A police inspector and seven other officers from the Public Morals
Section of the First Division of the New York City Police Department arrived
shortly after midnight, served a warrant charging that liquor was being sold
without a license, and announced that employees would be arrested. Over the
preceding two decades such raids had become almost routine for the police, and
they were confident that with a little strong-arm and menace the "queers"
would go quietly, as usual. The Stonewall was a dimly lit dance bar in a
neighborhood that abounded in homosexuals with flamboyant, unconventional lifestyles,
including transvestites known as "street queens." Partly because
their overt non-conformity gave them little to lose, as the patrons were being
ejected from the bar by the police others lingered outside to watch the
proceedings, and were joined by passers-by, including many street people. Some
were attracted from the nearby MacDougal Street entertainment area. It was the
arrival of the paddywagons that changed the mood of the crowd from passivity
to defiance. The first vehicle left without mishap, though there came a chorus
of catcalls from the crowd. The next individual to emerge from the bar was a
woman in male costume who put up a struggle which galvanized the bystanders
into action. As if prompted by a signal, the crowd erupted into heaving
cobblestones and bottles. Some officers had to take refuge inside the bar,
where they risked being burned to death. Others turned a firehose on the crowd,
while they called reinforcements which in time managed to clear the streets.
During the day the news spread, and the following two nights witnessed further
violent confrontations between the police and gay people.
Underlying Causal Factors. To understand why this
riot occurred, and why it came to have such resonance, it is necessary to
recall that the nationwide wave of opposition to the American intervention in
Vietnam, which had culminated in the student uprising at Columbia University
on April 23, 1968, and in riots in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic
National Convention in the summer of 1968, had replaced the conservatism of
the Eisenhower era with a mood of radicalism that through the "youth culture"
of the late 1960s fed into the subterranean world of the hippies and beatniks
of the bohemias in the large cities. There was among the young, the outsiders,
the aggrieved of the land a sense of mounting opposition to an establishment
headed by President Richard M. Nixon that persisted in maintaining an American
presence in Indo-China, but also embodied "straight" society and
everything that stood in the way of the liberation for which the rebellious
generation of the late 1960s yearned.
Why did the event occur in New York City? After all, Los Angeles had been the
birthplace of the American gay movement, and other significant social disturbances
took place in the 1960s in San Francisco and Berkeley, California. Reinforced
by creative exiles and emigres, New York City during the 1940s had become a
major center of avant-garde culture, which had brought with it from Europe a
bohemian tradition of mockery of authority, revivifying Greenwich Village's
reputation for innovative nonconformity. The paintings of New York's Abstract
Expressionists, championed by poet-critic Frank O'Hara, horrified the
establishment with their seemingly anarchic "drip" style. Pop art
appeared with its principal shrine in Andy Warhol's "factory." New
York was also the home of the experimental New American Cinema, whose
"Baudelairean" films, some of them made by gay directors, explored
aspects of the underground in a highly disjunctive, poetic style. MacDougal
Street, the vibrant, often raucous center of the folk music scene, was only
two blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. Finally New York, together with London,
was the home of a new spirit of innovation in the theatre; scores of
Off-off-Broadway theatres, some accommodating only a score of patrons, sprang
up as sites of sometimes daring excursions into novelty, including nudity and
obscenity. The Stonewall Rebellion, which involved some of the same
transvestites who hovered around the avant-garde theatre, reflected the
confluence of these cultural trends.
Although it had played virtually no role in the first fifteen years of the
American homophile movement, New York City - as perhaps nowhere else in the
country - sheltered a long radical tradition. In the late 1960s this tradition
merged with a counterculture - whose geographical center and symbol was
Greenwich Village - that openly rebelled against the values of
"respectable" American middle-class society and fostered a state of
mind that could successfully challenge even so long-standing and unquestioned a
taboo as the intolerance of homosexuality. That youthful nonconformity,
reinforced by the growing sexual freedom and the drag culture that had taken
firm hold of the college generation in the mid-1960s, led to the loss of
inhibitions and unreflecting bravado which inspired the spontaneous resistance
to police harassment. The experience of having their privacy invaded and their
civil rights violated, of being the victims of entrapment and of perjured
testimony brought home to many heterosexuals the kind of injustice that homosexuals
had long suffered at the hands of the police. This overall pattern of assaults
- not simply the arrest of bar patrons - was the grievance against the police
shared by the youth culture and the homosexual subculture alike, both sensing the
officers of the law as villains because of their persecution of drug users,
student radicals - and gay people.
Significance. If the Stonewall Rebellion
was not self-consciously political, it was still an intensely felt refusal to
endure any longer the humiliation, the constant insults, the rightlessness that
had been the traditional lot of the homosexual in Western society as long as
anyone living could remember. Craig Rodwell, who stumbled upon the crowd in
front of the Stonewall Inn - named after the legendary Confederate General
"Stonewall" Jackson - tried to set up a chant of "Gay
Power!" but almost no one joined in.
But times were changing rapidly. Partisans of the New Left saw an opportunity
to enlist homosexuals for their movement, and the homophile activists of such
groups as the Mattachine Society began to rethink their positions in the light
of the left's critique of the oppressive and exploitative character of
American society. After two days, members of New York Mattachine were in the
West Village handing out leaflets hailing "the Christopher Street
Riots" as "the Hairpin Drop Heard around the World," echoing
Emerson's Unes of 1835 on the patriots at Lexington who "fired the
shot heard round the world."
The American media, centralized in New York City, diffused and reshaped the
image of the event. And the Stonewall Rebellion, however brief and local, however
apolitical it may have been, did echo around the globe. Enveloped in legend
like the Easter Sunday Uprising of 1916 in Dublin, it has been commemorated by
a parade held each year in New York City on the last Sunday in June, foliowing
a tradition that began with the first march on June 29, 1970, and by parallel
events throughout the United States. From a score of organizations cowering in
the shadowy bohemias of the large cities, the gay movement expanded into the
Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activists Alliance, and many other groups with
chapters the length and breadth of the land. Stonewall became the symbol of an
oppressed and invisible minority at last demanding its place in the sun and
the freedoms which Americans had been taught since childhood were the right and
heritage of everyone. The gay subculture that outlasted this radical episode
in American politics - a radicalism which quickly faded once the Vietnam War
ended, at least provisorily, in 1973 - has been the archetype of a wave of
political and cultural innovation throughout the world, so that the modern
phase of the gay movement can truly be said to have begun on those June nights
in Greenwich Village outside the Stonewall Inn.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1981; Donn Teal, The Gay Militants, New York: Stein and Day, 1971.
Warren Johansson
Strachey, (Giles) Lytton (1880-1932)
English
biographer and critic. The son of a general in the Indian Army, Strachey
attended Abbotshulme School, Leamington College, Liverpool University College,
and Trinity College, Cambridge. As a boy at Leamington he experienced homosexual
crushes, which left him with an abiding vision of his need for ideal male
companionship. At Cambridge Strachey, whose gawky and unattractive figure was
no bar to recognition of his brilliance, was elected a member of the exclusive
Apostles group, together with John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf. He
embarked on his first grand passion, with the painter Duncan Grant, whom he was
shortly to lose to Keynes.
After taking his degree at Cambridge, Strachey settled in London, where he was
almost immediately integrated into the Bloomsbury group. The first years of his
literary career were difficult and, apart from reviews, produced only a
textbook, Landmarks
in French Literature (1912). In 1917 he settled into a country house with the
painter Dora Carrington, who had fallen in love with him. After the war, they
were joined by an ex-officer Ralph Partridge in a menage a trois. This
arrangement gave Strachey the serenity and support he required to complete his
biographical works, Eminent
Victorians (1918), Queen
Victoria (1921), and Elizabeth
and Essex (1928). Written with great panache, these books effected a
revolution in biography through their ironic, often mocking distance from their
subjects. Strachey's last years were enlivened by several successful affairs with
young men, notably Roger Senhouse. After his death from cancer, his companion
Carrington committed suicide.
As a result of the reaction against aestheticism occasioned by the Depression
and World War II, Strachey's work went out of fashion, along with Bloomsbury
itself. In the freer climate of the 1960s, however, this attitude changed, and
Strachey's sexual unorthodoxy, which had been largely hidden, became an asset.
The major factor in the restoration of his reputation came in the 1,200-page
life story by Michael Holroyd, the homage of one major biographer to another.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, 2 vols., New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1968.
Wayne R. Dynes
Students, Gay
Until the
end of the 1960s the plight of the gay college student on an American college
campus was a difficult, sometimes even a tragic, one. Confronted with the
growing consciousness of his own sexual orientation, he found himself
inasociety where negative attitudestoward homosexuality were reinforced by peer
pressure, where the obligations and opportunities of undergraduate life were
all cast in a heterosexual mold, and where confidences made to a psychologist
or psychiatrist could be betrayed to the college authorities. Such betrayal
would entail disastrous consequences: further disclosure to his parents and
family, forced psychiatric treatment, or even expulsion. The few courses in
which homosexuality might have been mentioned usually treated the subject with
evasion or disdain; the books available in the college library relegated the
topic to the realm of the pathological or criminal. If the student was
fortunate, he could make the acquaintance of another individual who had
accepted his homosexuality, found a modus vivendi in the midst of an intolerant
society, and begun the arduous task of fashioning a mask to deceive the
unfriendly heterosexuals around him. If he failed to make contact with the gay
subculture that existed on some campuses or the nearby bohemian milieu, he
could be doomed to lead a lonely life of silent alienation from the world of
the rest of the undergraduates. Opportunities for social-sexual contact with
others of his age such as the dances and fraternity-sorority life offered the
heterosexual were unavailable to the homosexual student.
The introduction of war veterans on American campuses in the late 1940s
(through legislation known as the "GI Bill of Rights") might have
changed matters, for many of these older students had experienced freer sexual
lifestyles in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. Though generally credited
with pioneering a new seriousness that competed with the prewar model of late
adolescent hedonism ("Joe College"), the veterans were generally too
preoccupied with economic struggles and grades to accomplish much social
innovation on campus.
The First Campus Groups and
Their Vicissitudes. Only toward the end of the 1960s did this situation begin
to change, reflecting a new mood among American youth. Robert A. Martin (b.
1946), a student at New York's Columbia University (which in 1945 had
suspended undergraduate Allen Ginsberg for suspected homosexuality),
conceived the idea of a student group that would create a movement presence on
the campus. Martin, better known under the name Stephen Donaldson, had been a
member of the Mattachine Society of New York since the spring of 1965 and had
spent the summer of 1966 living with Mattachine Society of Washington president
Frank Kameny.
Returning to the campus as a bisexually-identified sophomore in September
1966, Donaldson discussed the idea with interested students and, finding resistance
within New York Mattachine to an autonomous group on campus, he chose the name
Student Homophile League (SHL). The incipient group, which mixed both gender
and orientation, found a protector in the courageous Episcopal Chaplain of
the University, John Dyson Cannon. In October 1966 the chaplain arranged a
meeting in Earl Hall to introduce the organization to the administration and
the religious and psychological counselors. A certain amount of opposition was
voiced, and to gain official standing the group was required to submit a list
of names of members to the university administration - which could have been
ordered to disclose them to the government. This proved an insuperable barrier
until a set of prominent student leaders agreed to become the official charter
members in April 1967.
With this list in hand, the university capitulated, and when the resultant
story printed in the Columbia
Spectator came (a week later) to the attention of the New York Times, on May 1, 1967 the
front-page news was broken to an astonished world: "COLUMBIA CHARTERS
HOMOSEXUAL GROUP." The reaction was all the more violent in that college
administrations had everywhere clung to the concept of in loco parentis, that they replaced the
parents as moral guardians of the students and their sex lives, and often held
that students needed "protection" from such corrupting influences as
homosexuality. The Columbia administration was flooded with letters from
indignant alumni, many of whom assured the school that they would never give it
another penny.
The newly recognized Student Homophile League was primarily interested in
educating the campus, in promoting gay rights, and in counseling. Lectures and
panels drew hundreds, while some 15 to 30 people attended the business meetings,
and informal parties were held, though at first no public dances. Many students
still in the process of "coming out" needed peer counseling, while
frequent, informal discussions in the dormitories had the aim of enlightening
the rest of the student body. A series of leaflets taking uncompromising
positions foreshadowing gay liberation ideas was issued.
Two other SHL chapters were formed at New York University (under Rita Mae
Brown, later author of the lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle) and at Cornell University
(under Jearld Moldenhauer, subsequently an editor of Toronto's The Body Politic, and with the sponsorship
of well-known anti-Vietnam War activist Rev. Phillip Berrigan), and in the fall
of 1968 an independent organization called FREE was established at the University
of Minnesota. The fledgling gay student movement participated in the North
American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) and its Eastern
Regional Conference as a radicalizing force, with Donaldson holding several
offices at various times.
On April 23,1968 (coincidentally the same day radical students began a
week-long occupation of campus buildings), the SHL, denied participation on a
psychiatric panel on homosexuality held at the Columbia medical school,
picketed the event and distributed over a thousand multipage statements to
members of the audience, many of whom turned over their tickets to the
protesters, who proceeded to dominate the question period. This was the first
demonstration against the psychiatric establishment's "medical
model" of homosexuality.
The Columbia uprising of April 1968 did not involve the gay movement
immediately, as the radical groups on campus - following the Old Left and
Maoist rejection of sexual reform - kept their political distance from it. The
Columbia SHL did, however, join the student strike after a few days and issued
its own set of demands.
By the spring of 1969 the gay student organizations were beginning to integrate
school dances and sponsor their own, while their ideological positions,
originally heavily influenced by Kameny through Donaldson, who broke away in
1968, became even more assertive in enunciating what were to become known as
"gay liberation" doctrines.
Then the radical wave of the late 1960s, within which the Columbia revolt had
become a worldwide symbol of the rebellion of alienated youth, sparked the
Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969, which marked the beginning of a new, far more
aggressive and activist phase of the homosexual emancipation movement. Following
the lead of the antiwar protestors who occupied campuses, marched through the
streets with huge banners, and constantly agitated for their cause, the
supporters of the Gay Liberation Front defied centuries-old conventions and
taboos and "came out" for gay rights. With this model, the student
groups multiplied across the country, and by the end of the 1970s virtually
every major campus in the country had one. To be sure, the end of the draft for
the Vietnam War in 1973 saw student activism fade, but the gay student
movement remained, constantly renewed as new generations of homosexual students
entered the colleges and universities. The activities of the groups were mainly
social, with a certain amount of peer counseling as a sideline. Gay dances
became a feature of campus Ufe, the organizations were able to sponsor lectures and public
discussions, and each year on Gay Pride Day in June the groups would march
behind their banners in the parades held in major cities from Boston to San
Diego.
Stabihzation. By 1975 at least 150 gay
and lesbian groups had been established on American college campuses. They
tended to be concentrated in the Northeast and on the West Coast and to be most
vigorous in older private universities and major state institutions. A decade
later the number had at least doubled, and the groups were well represented in
the midwest and south as well as the older areas. Even many religious colleges
had their groups, though the gay students at Georgetown University in
Washington DC (Catholic) had to take their case to the federal courts. Although
the gay groups were sometimes resented by insecure heterosexually identified
students (and feared by administrations as a potential focus of alumni
grumbling), the new associations fit well enough into the existing
kaleidoscope of campus clubs which catered to blacks and Asians, to
vegetarians and chessplayers. A new factor is diversification: twenty years
after the founding of the Student Homophile League, Columbia University boasted
fifteen separate groups spread out among the affiliated institutions on
Morningside Heights instead of just one. Some schools even provided special
counseling services for gay and lesbian students, though funding shortages
tended to make the future of these uncertain.
Gay student groups sprang up in other English-speaking countries, notably
Canada and Australia. On the European continent the American model did not take
root, because European universities do not usually have campuses as such. In a
few countries gay youth groups fulfilled some of the same functions.
A number of North American campus groups sponsored annual conferences attended
by hundreds of students from their respective areas, which were an opportunity
to hear talks by prominent activists and leaders of the national gay movement,
as well as to discuss the problems of coping with enemies on the campus and
around it. In recent years regional conferences with a long list of workshops
and speakers have been held at major schools in the Northeast and elsewhere.
In the history of the gay movement, the student groups have been significant
as pioneers of intellectual innovation, as seminars for leaders who went on to
mainstream organizations, and as a source of "out front" militants
willing to take risks their job-holding seniors were reluctant to undertake.
Gay studies as a unified academic discipline have not fared so well; after some
promising beginnings in the 1970s they largely disappeared from college curricula,
and the Gay Academic Union founded in New York City in 1973 was unable even to
produce a textbook for an introductory course, while in the same time women's
studies were able to take root and create institutes for research and teaching.
In 1987 two separate projects for similar institutions that would promote
academic investigation of homosexuality were launched at Yale University and
the City University of New York; the future of both is problematic. While the
social needs of the gay undergraduate and graduate student are far better
served than before the late 1960s, the academic side of the movement faces many
tasks and challenges in coming decades.
See also Education,- Public
Schools; Youth.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
J. Lee Lehman, Gays on Campus, Washington: United States National Student Association,
1975; Robert A. Martin, "Student Homophile League: Founder's
Retrospect," Gay Books Bulietin, 9 (1983), 30-33.
Warren Johansson
Subculture, Gay
The term
"subculture" (introduced as recently as 1936 by the sociologist
Ralph Linton) applies to ethnic, regional, economic, and social groups showing
special worlds of interest and identification which serve to distinguish them
within the larger culture or society.
Basic Features of the
Subculture Concept. A subculture differs from a category of people or a common
behavior by virtue of its heightened sharing of values, artifacts, and
identification. It is intensified by the degree of social separation between
its members and the rest of the larger society. This formulation implies a
two-level analysis, society and subculture, but in fact there are multiple
layers, so that subcultures themselves have what might cumbersomely be labeled
subsubcultures, subsubsubcultures, and so on, almost ad infinitum; in practice
the definition of a particular subculture must be seen as relative to the
larger context in which it is set by the def iner.
There is, furthermore, a range of emotional attitudes between the larger
society and the subculture; for the former they range from acceptance (e.g., of
yachtsmen) through disdain (gamblers) to hostility (heroin addicts). This
range appears also in the response of the subculture, which may support the
larger society (radio hams) or actively oppose it (bikers). In the latter case,
the term "counterculture" is often used; here the sense is of a more
broadly applied and more conscious emphasis on an alternative to the larger
society rather than an enclave within it. In general, there seems to be a
relationship between the degree of alienation from the larger society and the
relative powerlessness of the subculture members. Social separation tends to
correlate with alienation, so that the more emotional distance between the
subculture and the larger society, the stronger the subculture becomes,
developing independent values, beliefs, roles, status systems, communications
networks, and even economic structures. Conversely, as a larger society attenuates
its hostility to a subculture and becomes more accepting (in modern consumer
societies often exploiting the subculture as a ready-made market), the hold of
the subculture on its members tends correspondingly to weaken,- at some point
an expanding subculture crosses the line over into mass culture.
It has also been noted that subcultures play major roles in the process of
social change, being both powerful agents for change and bulwarks against it.
Examples of the latter would include religious fundamentalists and ecological
conservationists. The concept of the subculture remains, however, a somewhat
amorphous one, and for that reason perhaps, has resisted attempts to provide a
general theoretical explanation accepted by a wide range of scholars.
Sexual Imphcations. The homosexual subculture
is often regarded as constituting the individuals who have come out or emerged
from the closet and are openly pursuing a gay lifestyle, often in the setting
of the urban gay ghetto. In keeping with the preceding discussion, emphasis
should, however, be laid rather on the self-identification of the participants
(as "gay" or "lesbian") and on their common interests
(same-gender sex, opposition to homophobia), artifacts (publications,
jewelry, buttons), and values (sexual autonomy, social pluralism). In this
sense, the homosexual subculture is much smaller than the aggregate of those
engaging in homosexual acts, or even those who consciously define themselves as
homosexual, inasmuch as many of these do not participate in group activities or
acquire artifacts. Sociological theory also has difficulty in accounting for
people who identify themselves not as homosexual but as bisexual (or even, in
some cases, such as with many male prostitutes, as heterosexual), but who are
otherwise seen to participate widely in major aspects of the "homosexual
subculture."
Even conceding these limitations, it is apparent that the description of an
overall "gay subculture" remains problematic, particularly in
respect to common values and interests, and retains validity primarily when
placed in the context of social separation from the majority (heterosexual)
society. The gay subculture or community is far from homogeneous, its members
have widely varying individual power positions and attitudes toward the larger
society, and the latter displays a considerable spectrum of attitudes (compare
those toward, say, a pair of macho cowboys and those toward promiscuous
pedophiles). An even stronger argument can be made against the grouping of
lesbians and gay males in the same subculture. For many purposes it seems more
helpful to think of the gay or lesbian social worlds as collections of
subcultures or subsubcultures: participants in the leather "scene,"
street transvestites (drag queen), bar-goers, call boys, opera buffs, and so forth.
Stephen Donaldson
Historical Perspectives. Some light is thrown on the origins of European homosexual
subcultures by a debate between the social constructionist scholars and their
opponents. A major thesis of the social constructionist school is that the
"modem homosexual" began only in the last two decades of the
nineteenth century in response to the psychiatric concept of homosexuality as a
psychological state differentiating a minority of individuals from the
remainder of the population.
This view can be challenged on a number of grounds. The major argument against
the social constructionist thesis is that there is sound evidence for homosexual
cliques and groupings as far back as the Middle Ages. The question is rather,
how did they define themselves in relation to the environing society? This
question can best be answered in three time segments:
(1) 1280-1780. In this period the homosexual groupings probably defined
themselves, or would have been defined by Christian society, as part of a
heretical or criminal subculture. In not a few respects they paralleled such
historical phenomena as the Marranos, the crypto-Jews in Spain and Portugal after the Reconquista,-the Recusants, who were
secret Catholics in Elizabethan England; the Nicodemites, secret Protestants in
countries where the Counterreformation triumphed over the opponents of the
Church; the crypto-Christians in the Ottoman Empire after the conquest of the
former Byzantine possessions and the Balkan peninsula; and the
crypto-Catholics in Japan between 1630 and 1865. All these are instances of
clandestine rejection of the official religion of the state and obstinate
adherence to proscribed beliefs and practices - often, if not always, at the
risk of death if their covert activities came to the attention of the secular
authorities.
(2) 1780-1880. Following the penal reforms of the Enlightenment and the
granting of religious tolerance, the death penalty for heresy receded into the
past, but the homosexual subculture now took on the character of an erotic
freemasonry, with its rites, passwords, and traditions known only to a
limited circle of initiates. Their counterparts in the political macrocosm
were the Freemasonic lodges, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, and similar
bodies that played a signal role in the modernization of European life at the
end of the eighteenth century - as nuclei of the "new society" within
the old. This is the situation attested by the Don Leon poems in England, and by
August von Platen's poem of January 31, 1823, with the line "Was Vemünft'ge hoch verehren/ Taugte
jedem, der's verstünde" ("What gay people greatly honor/ Well served all who
understood it"); in this poem vernünftig,
"rational"
was a code word meaning "gay."
(3)
1880-present. This so-called modem period was inaugurated not by the work of
the psychiatrists, but by the vanguard of homophile propagandists beginning
with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Károly Maria Kertbeny in the 1860s, and continuing with Magnus
Hirschfeld and the Scientific-humanitarian Committee in the late 1890s. The
"new homosexual" saw himself as a member of an aggrieved minority,
and therefore as a political activist, one who not simply gratified his sexual
drive with members of his own sex, but openly called for the emancipation of
all individuals so oriented from the taboos and prejudices of Christian
society, and above all from its restrictive laws. From 1918 onward, the view
formulated by Kurt Hiller, that such individuals were a minority entitled to the
same protection accorded ethnic groups in Central and Eastern Europe by the
"minority treaties" appended to the peace settlement in the spirit of
President Wilson's Fourteen Points, gained sway among politically conscious
homosexuals first in Germany and then in other countries. (Psychiatrists -
apart from those who endorsed the homosexual emancipation movement - did
little or nothing to encourage or promote this view, as they preferred to argue
that homosexuals were mentally ill and should be compelled to undergo
treatment, not that they had rights of any kind.) The gay liberation organizations
that sprang up in the English-speaking countries inherited this political
tradition, in many cases in the indirect form adopted by racial and ethnic
groups struggling for equality, and on it have based their own demands and
aspirations for justice, to which only a few countries have thus far adequately
responded.
It can be stated categorically that always, even in times of the worst intolerance,
beneath the surface of society there has lurked a gay subculture, for the
simple reason that the anathemas of the church could no more abolish homosexual
activity than they could have altered the function of an internal organ of
the human body. Such matters are the outcome of human macroevolution, which
probably ended some 57,000 years ago, and certainly would not undergo major
change even in a hundred generations. The historical differences lie in the
mode of adaptation to the religious and political beliefs and practices of the
environment, hence they belong to social and cultural history rather than to
sexual psychology.
Warren Johansson
Conclusion. As currently being conducted, the debate between the social
constructionists and their opponents masks problems of definition that have
been insufficiently addressed. It is necessary to distinguish whether one is
dealing with (a) homosexual networking - patterns of association and meeting
places, together with a rudimentary argot and "semiotics" as
facilitators; or (b) consciousness of belonging to a distinctive segment of
society, of being in short a "homosexual" (or "sodomite"
in earlier days); or (c) a complementary sense of not belonging to the larger society with its obligatory
heterosexuality.
It is evident that (a) can precede (b) and (c), and almost certainly did. Those
in quest of the origins of subculture, looking for earlier versions of the
contemporary gay scene, tend to confuse these separate aspects. Moreover,
what is termed the homosexual subculture in the first sense was, in early modem
Europe, immersed in the larger sphere of deviance or marginalization, so that
homosexuals formed part of an underground comprising thieves, vagabonds,
entertainers, cardsharps, sorcerers, and so forth.
Even in recent years the degree of social separation (c, above) exhibited by
gay people has displayed considerable fluctuation. Until the late 1960s, the
general tint of social rejection was considerably attenuated by the widespread
practice of "passing," and this worked against the development of a
strong subculture. In the "gay liberation" period of the seventies,
social separation increased as large numbers of homosexuals "came
out," joined gay baseball teams, attended gay churches, read gay
periodicals, marched in gay parades, voted against homophobic politicians,
and swelled the "gay ghettoes." The proliferation of gay special
interest groups and the radical stance of movement activists in this period
tended to push the subculture toward the counterculture pole. In the latter
part of the decade, however, the pull of greater acceptance by the larger
society and the attractions of increased power (political and financial) for
the members of the subculture acting together were already evident. We may
expect that a continuation of that trend, once the AIDS crisis has ebbed, will
tend to undermine the cohesion of the gay subculture further, while conversely
strengthening the internal unity of such emerging subcultural-type groupings as
sadomasochists and pederasts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Giovanni Dall'Orto, "La fenice del Sodoma," Sodoma, 4 (1988), 31-53; Claude S.
Fischer, To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and
City, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982; Joseph Harry and William B. Devall, The Social Organization of
Gay Males, New York: Praeger, 1978; John Allen Lee, "The Gay
Connection," Urban Life, 8 (1979), 175-98.
Stephen Donaldson
Suetonius (born ca. 69)
Roman
biographer. Suetonius led a largely uneventful life as a bureaucrat, but his
access to the records of the imperial palace lends his writings authenticity.
Of the books that he wrote the only one to survive in full is the Lives of the Twelve Caesars, presenting biographies of Roman emperors from Julius Caesar through
Domitian.
Suetonius' Lives
have been
criticized for their lack of chronological organization, making it hard for
later historians to date the anecdotes he presents. In comparison with his
contemporary Tacitus,
whose
powerful moral vision caused him to edit and shape the material to make points,
Suetonius presents facts without any particular tendency.
Of the rulers he profiles, only one, Claudius, seems to have been purely
heterosexual. Often criticized by earlier generations for the profusion of racy
details, his sexual material is used to illustrate the character of his
subjects. In the case of Julius Caesar,
his
affair with Nicomedes of Bithynia shows his charm and resourcefulness. But in
the Life of Nero,
the
"marriages" with Sporus and Doryphorus reveal the wilful profligacy
of that emperor's later years. In a period in which imperial power was
absolute, it is not surprising that the emperors should have been tempted to
have their way with the attractive bodies that surrounded them at every turn.
The mores presented are those of the highest society rather than of the people,
whose lives must have remained more prosaic and conventional. Refraining from
making such contrasts, in his attitudes Suetonius is a naturalist rather than a
moralist.
Much read through the centuries, Suetonius' portraits have - probably contrary
to his intention - contributed to the image of the decadence of Rome. In fact he treats the rising age of Roman rule, with its
very height - the second century - still to come. The material he provides
therefore represents sidelights on an era of exuberant prosperity and imperial
ostentation, rather than object lessons of the decline that was to come two
centuries later.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
K. R. Bradley, Suetonius' Life of Nero: An Historical Commentary, Brussels: Latomus, 1978;
Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius: The Scholar and His Caesars, New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1983.
Ward Houser
SUFISM
Sufism,
Islamic mysticism, is that aspect of Islamic belief and practice in which
believers seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct
personal experience of God. A difficult term to define, it consists of a great
variety of mystical paths that give rise to different kinds of personal
feelings and experiences. All paths are aimed at culmination in the ultimate
union of lover and beloved, signifying the abandonment of the personality (or
self) of the mystic in the Absolute Reality. The western term
"Sufism"
(Arabic tasawwuf)
derives
from the Arabic word for mystic [sufi],
which in
its turn is derived from 'wool' \suf),
referring
to the woolen garments of early Islamic ascetics. Sufis are also known as
"the poor," yielding the words "dervish" and
"fakir."
Basic Features. The origins of Sufism can
be found in Islamic asceticism, which developed in the seventh and eighth
century in reaction to the increasing worldliness of the expanding Muslim community
and to the purely dogmatic and non-emotional trend of orthodox Islam. Love
mysticism took the place of asceticism in the ninth century and reached its
height in the thirteenth century. Sufism still exists among the Muslim
communities around the world, often organized, as in earlier days, in mystical
orders centering on a mystical guide (shaykh
or
master).
Strict obedience to the religious law, especially to the inner aspects, is
basic to Sufism, although some mystics attracted public contempt by acting outwardly
contrary to the law, while hiding their inner devotion to God. The absolute
indifference of some Sufis to socially accepted norms and values led to a
mostly unjustified reputation for Sufism in general as being licentious and
libertinistic, which was further strengthened by the use of intoxicants (wine
and hashish) and illicit love as symbols in Sufi writings and talk.
Because mystical and intuitive feelings and experiences were hard to express
and therefore difficult to convey to others, Sufis used metaphors derived from
worldly experiences, especially those of love and intoxication. Love and wine
both led to drunkenness, to loss of reason, to an absolute indifference to the
world, and ultimately to a loss of self. The cupbearer [saki], of ten a beautiful youth,
symbolized the spiritual guide, who helped the lover on his way by making him
drunk with love. The use of worldly images in Sufi-symbolism led to a
fascinating ambiguity, intensified by the fact that non-mystical writers, such
as the famous Persian poet Hafiz (ca. 1325-1390), tended also to use mystical
symbols. It is especially this ambiguity, combined with the dominating theme
of love, which continues to make Sufi literature so attractive and charming.
Forms of Love. Love was essential for
all mystics. Some Sufis even explained themselves solely in terms of love, and
that is why they have been called the "School of Love," of which Rumi
is the most famous example.
Mystical reasoning about love and beauty was somewhat like the following:
because God in his Absolute Essence could not be known, he created the world as
a reflection of it, shining through forms so that lovers could realize part of
his Essence through its manifestation in forms. The most perfect manifestation
of the Divine Reality on earth was man, "created after His own
image," and especially the beardless boy was considered to be the purest
witness (shahid)
of God.
As in a saying of the Prophet: "I have seen my Lord in the form of
greatest beauty, as a youth with abundant hair." Looking at beautiful
faces was considered a religious activity, as Rumi said: "Behold that face
on whose cheeks are the marks of His face, contemplate him on whose brow
shines the Sun." Looking at beauty would inevitably lead to love,
"wherever beauty dwelt in dark tresses, love came and found a heart
entangled in their coils."
Some Sufis practiced shahid
bazi, the
game of love with the witness of God's beauty on earth, in which contemplation
of its beauty was a central form of meditation. Shahid bazi consisted
primarily of looking at the face and form of the beloved, with possibly some
embracing and kissing, while the meditation was sometimes accompanied by music
and dance, which could lead to ecstatic experiences. Famous Sufi shaykhs who
practiced shahid bazi were Ahmad al-Ghazzali (d. 1126), Awhad ad-Din Kirmani
(1164-1238), and Fakr ad-Din Iraqi (1213-1289).
The ideal witness was generally a beardless youth because of his almost perfect
beauty and purity. His beauty was often described in Sufi literature in lyrical
terms: He was as beautiful as Joseph, with a face for love of whom the moon
turned upside down, and for which the sun trembled like an epileptic before the
new moon. One look at him and day would break in the midst of the night. The
fresh down on his cheeks was like calligraphy, and his curls like ambergris
rolling over the face of the moon. The lasso of his locks cast over the earth,
while his hps caused confusion into the heavens. His eyes were like two Negro
children caught in a snare; each Negro child with a bow to shoot arrows in the
hearts of desperate lovers. In short, he was the paragon of God's beauty and creative
power. Sufis often were misogynistic, and looked upon women as symbols of the
material world, caught up in forms, while boys were seen as innocent and pure,
unconscious of their attraction, and of course much more available.
Worldly love, also known as the love of outward forms, was considered an
education experience which prepared the lover for his path of passion and
yearning, suffering and submission, and could serve as a bridge to Real Love.
In Sufi literature, stories of worldly love relationships were used to teach
mystics what kind of behavior and feelings were expected of real lovers.
Apart from some male-female couples, one of the exemplary loves was the legendary
relation between Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (969-1030) and his faithful slave Ayaz
(d.1057).
Shahid bazi and worldly love in general were considered positively when chaste
and spiritual, and striving for the higher love of God; aimed at the Reality
that was reflected, and not at the beautiful form itself, which was only
illusory and relative. Mystics were not supposed to linger on the bridge of
worldly love, while they should definitely not become entangled in sensual
love. The latter was rejected as a desecration of love, leading to unlawful
sex, for example with boys. Feelings of lust and desire, the so-called
"sinful self," were sometimes designated as "the menstruation of
men," signifying the uncleanliness resulting from such feelings, which
would make union with God impossible. Therefore the "sinful self" had
to be shackled and controlled, struggling against the seductive snares and
devilish temptations of worldly entanglements, which diverted from the road to
God. Only those mystics who had conquered their "sinful selves" were
capable of enduring the irresistable beauty of beardless boys or the
seductiveness of women, while loving them. Shahid bazi was therefore only allowed
to masters and advanced mystics. Paradise was promised for those who stayed
chaste, but were not able to cope with their passionate feelings, and died
because of them as "martyrs of love."
Controversial Aspects. There were also mystics,
however, who fell victim to sin, and although some of them repented and mended
their ways, for which God had promised forgiveness, it gave Sufism a bad name.
Even worse for the reputation of mysticism were people who behaved as if they
were mystics, but did not follow the rules at all, and only reaped the fruits
of behaving indifferently to the world. All this confirmed the orthodox in
their criticism of Sufism, and was cleverly exploited.
Because a mystical current deviates from the established, dogmatic path, and
therefore threatens the authority of orthodoxy, a clash will become inevitable,
often leading to accusations of immorality and heresy. According to orthodox
Muslims, the only way to seek knowledge of God was through his words (the
Koran) and through the example of the Prophet {hadith, Tradition); their path was
one of obedience and not one of love.
Looking at and loving beautiful forms was considered immoral and sinful, and a
devilish diversion of real love, because it would inevitably lead to passionate
love that, in its turn, would give rise to sexual desire and unlawful
sex. They maintained it was common knowledge that no healthy man was capable of
resisting the seductiveness of a beautiful boy.
Even when chaste, the orthodox argued, passionate love led to an idolization
of the beloved, which was blasphemous because there was only one God, and
besides, all worldly love had to be subordinated to real love. The orthodox
viewed practices like shahid bazi as typical of the hypocrisy of Sufism, which
used religion as a cover for sexual debauchery and lustful and perverse
activities. The continuing self-criticism among Sufis about the paths taken,
intensified out of fear of persecutions because of seemingly heretical ideas,
gradually led the mystics to become more careful in their expressions and
practices. The path of love became more hidden and discrete, which it still is.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Joseph Norment Bell, Love Theory in Later Hanbalite Islam, Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1979; Ahmad Ghazzali, Sawanih, trans. N. Pourjavady,
London: KPI, 1986; Fakruddin Iraqi, Divine Plashes, trans. W. C. Chittick and P. L. Wilson, London: SPCK, 1982;
Awhaduddin Kirmani, Hearts Witness, transl. B. M. Weischer and P. L. Wilson, Teheran: Imperial
Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1978; Hellmut Putter, Das Meer der Seele, Leiden: Brill, 1955;
Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1975; idem, "Eros, Heavenly and Not So Heavenly, in
Sufi Literature and Life," in A. L. al Sayyid Marsot, ed., Society and the Sexes in
Medieval Islam, Malibu: Undena, 1979; Mir Valiuddin, Love of God, Famham: Sufi Publ., 1972;
Peter Lambom Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy, New York: Autonomedia
Inc., 1988.
Maarten Schild
Suicide
Suicide
is the voluntary termination of one's own life, either to escape unbearable
pain or humiliation, or because one's toleration of grief or disappointment is exhausted.
Both types of suicide are known in homosexuals. The constant need to hide and
falsify one's sexual identity, the burden of leading a double life, the gnawing
fear of discovery and social ruin, if not actual prosecution, were motives
enough for the homosexual to think of ending his own existence.
Earlier Data. In 1914 Magnus Hirschfeld
claimed that of the ten thousand homosexual men and women whose case histories
he had collected, no fewer than 75 percent had thought of suicide, 25 percent
had attempted it, and 3 percent had actually taken their own lives. Similar
figures, albeit more fragmentary, were reported by other investigators from the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hirschfeld frequently observed
wounds left by suicidal attempts, such as knife wounds on the wrists or bullet
wounds in the vicinity of the heart or the temples. Many homosexuals, he
indicated, carried poison on them at all times so that they could end their
lives on the spot if arrested or similarly compromised.
The chief cause of suicide in Hirschfeld's time was threat of legal prosecution,
double suicides of lovers were second in frequency, and blackmail was third.
Other motives were family conflicts, depression over one's homosexual orientation,
grief at the loss of a lover, and the situation of being pressured by one's family
into a heterosexual marriage that entailed an impossible sexual role.
Hirschfeld conceded that in many cases the threat was exaggerated and the
situation not so hopeless as the homosexual subject imagined, and he did his
best to console his patients and make them feel that their lot was at least
bearable. However, in his propaganda for repeal of Paragraph 175 he laid great
stress upon suicide as a consequence of the legal plight of the exclusive
homosexual, and the theme became a usual one in subsequent homophile
literature. Today it is seldom mentioned, even if suicides by AIDS patients
have figured in the history of that affliction in the gay male community.
The Present Situation. Eric E. Rofes, in his book
of 1983, brings Hirschfeld's findings up to date. He mentions that of the
respondents to the questionnaire analyzed in The Cay Report (1977), 40 percent of the
men and 39 percent of the women stated that they had attempted or seriously
considered suicide, and 53 percent of the men and 33 percent of the women who
had considered or attempted suicide said that their sexual orientation was a
causal factor. For many years there was a virtual convention that any novel
with a homosexual character had to show him committing suicide, if not being murdered by one of his partners.
Since the homosexual had sinned in the eyes of the world, his death was a
fitting retribution.
Young homosexuals confronted with the trauma of the discovery that their sexual
interests set them apart from others of their age and unable to find
trustworthy or sympathetic counsel are especially prone to suicide. The late
adolescent years, when one's sexual orientation forces its way into
consciousness, despite the indoctrination for obligatory heterosexuality, are
often a time of major crisis. The thought of being alienated from one's family
and one's peers, of having to lead a perilous and uncertain existence to gratify
one's sexual desires, even of loving someone who is totally unable to respond,
creates unbearable tensions compounded by guilt and self-hatred.
Even gay activists are not exempt from feelings of alienation and isolation.
Rofes recounts several case histories of activists who turned to the movement
to resolve their personal conflicts but found these as intense as ever, while
the radicalism which they encountered, if not in gay politics, then in the
radical organizations that overlapped for a time with the Gay Liberation Front
and similar groups, only intensified their sense of helpless rage at a society
that inflicted so much suffering and injustice on its homosexual members. The
ultimate resolution of the crisis was - suicide. Alcoholism and narcotics abuse
can play a role in homosexual suicide, much as in the case of heterosexuals who
have become dependent upon addicting substances. To combat such tendencies
programs are needed specifically oriented toward the homosexual with problems
of this kind, since a program that does not face the special situation of the
individual who must cope with a homosexual orientation will often miss the
crux of the dependency.
Prevention. Suicide prevention and
suicide intervention are strategies for alleviating the distress associated
with homosexuality. The first is the long-range planning that will decrease a
population's risk for suicide, the second is the immediate counseling and other
services that will deter a subject from taking his own life. The homosexual in
need of psychological counsel must find a trained individual who is
knowledgeable about his special problems and difficulties and not bent upon
exacerbating them for religious or other reasons. Hotlines and crisis
intervention agencies can be a good source of advice for gay people beset with
suicidal tendencies; such services have developed in many parts of the country,
though specifically homosexual-oriented ones are confined to urban areas and
college towns.
More important in the long run is eliminating the ramifications of intolerance
and discrimination that impose intolerable burdens upon the homosexual trying
to lead his life within a society that is implacably hostile to his whole
personality. Real as this burden is, the conventions of Christian morality
until recently forced the subject to endure it in silence, or even to interpret
it as his own moral failure that justified the hatred and contempt to which he
was exposed. In demanding that society recognize the existence of gay people
and the problems that their homosexuality engenders, the gay movement has
taken a major step toward ending the silence and the hypocrisy of the past -
potent factors in isolating homosexuals and driving them to self-destruction.
Comparative Perspectives. Social attitudes toward
suicide have varied greatly over the centuries. Severely condemned by
Christianity, suicide has been in other cultures regarded as a heroic way of
ending one's earthly existence, almost as a defiance of the fate that would
have doomed the subject to prolonged unhappiness or physical pain. In circles
such as the Japanese samurai, with a strongly homocrotic ethos, suicide could
even be part of the warrior's code of honor, in particular when a page did not
wish to survive the knight whom he had accompanied on the field of battle, or
vice versa. Suicide might therefore also be reckoned for situations in which
one of a pair of lovers has sought death in war or some especially dangerous
mission with the implicit wish that his sacrificial act should reunite him with
the other. Suicide missions undertaken for patriotic or ideological motives
are the heroic and self-sacrificing facet of the subject, and one that fills
the pages of history with deeds of glory.
The literature on suicide includes some classic sociological writings in which
the topic of homosexuality never appears, but the invisibility of the motive to
outsiders did not mean that it was inoperative. Of course, homosexuals could
commit suicide for reasons wholly unrelated to their sexual orientation, just
as could others overwhelmed by the difficulties and sorrows of life, or simply
the desire not to be a burden to one's family and friends. Suicide is part of
the tragedy and the heroism of human existence, and as a resolution of life's
dilemmas it will remain a finale of the human condition chosen by homosexuals
and heterosexuals alike.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, Berlin: Louis Marcus,
1914; Eric E. Rofes, "/ Thought People Like That Killed Themselves": Lesbians,
Gay Men and Suicide, San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1983.
Warren Johansson
Sullivan, Harry Stack (1892-1949)
American
psychiatrist. Throughout his life Sullivan had to struggle with emotional
problems in his relationships with other human beings, and these struggles in
turn had a marked effect on the psychiatric concepts that he evolved. But for
just this reason he was never detached from the problems of the patients he
was studying.
Born in Norwich, a small town in upstate New York, to an Irish Catholic family,
he had a shy, inept father who dwelt on the margin of his son's life, while his
mother poured out on the boy all of her resentment at her unhappiness and low
social status. Sullivan was a socially awkward boy who felt rejected and ostracized
by other children. Scholastic excellence won him esteem, but it further isolated
him from those around him. At the age of eight and a half he formed a close
relationship with a boy some five years older who introduced him to sex.
Neither Sullivan nor the older boy, who also became a psychiatrist, ever
developed into heterosexuals. In 1908 he entered Cornell as an undergraduate,
but in June of 1909 was suspended for failure in all academic subjects. He may
have had a brief schizophrenic illness, but the result of this obscure
episode was that he lost his scholarship and never thereafter attended any
college. His lack of a college education handicapped him in later life.
In 1911 he entered the Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery, a diploma mill
that was closed down some six years later as part of a campaign to raise the
standards of American medicine. As a struggling medical student he lived in
poverty, taking odd jobs in order to make ends meet. Only in 1922 did he enter
psychiatry through an appointment to St. Elizabeths, a large federal
psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. There he learned psychiatry in a
haphazard, inaccurate manner, more from contact with the patients themselves
than from any book or teacher. He was greatly influenced, however, by Edward
J. Kempf, who had written the classic paper on homosexual panic, named after
him "Kempf's disease." In early 1929 Sullivan organized at the
Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital the special ward for treating schizophrenics
where his success elevated him to the status of a prominent figure in American
and then world psychiatry. His therapeutic method focused on fostering
comfortable interpersonal relationships with these patients that would enable
them to return from the psychotic world into which they had retreated.
Between 1929 and 1933 he composed a book, never published, that acknowledged
his own homosexuality, and his belief that a prolonged period of active
homosexuality in adolescence is necessary if a person is to have sound mental
health in later life. This phase is moreover essential for the later
development of heterosexuality, and may protect the individual from other
psychiatric disorders. Presumably he had stumbled upon the positive aspect of
Greek paideiasteia, though to the American
society of his lifetime his views were totally unacceptable.
From 1931 to 1939 Sullivan practiced psychiatry privately in New York, and
underwent psychoanalysis (300 hours in all) by Clara Thompson, who stopped the
sessions because she was overawed by Sullivan's intellect. He had ever less patience
with colleagues who clung to Freudian concepts in preference to his own. He
founded in 1938 the journal Psychiatry,
and after
much bitter quarreling with the other editors made it a personal journal. He
also elaborated his "interpersonal" theories to emphasize that
society itself needed to change in order to create a healthy environment for
its members. In 1947 his lecture series, Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry, was published in book form
and sold essentially on the basis of word-of-mouth advertising. After 1942 he
wrote little, but lectured and taught extensively, and after the war ended, he
devoted much time to optimistic efforts at decreasing international tension and
avoiding another war. He died in Paris on January 14, 1949.
Sullivan did not have a positive attitude toward adult homosexuality. He felt
that the therapeutic task in treating a homosexual was to remove the
deep-seated psychic barriers that kept him from genital contact with the
opposite sex - a goal he himself seems not to have attained. With this
irrational dread removed, the patient would no longer seek partners of his own
sex but gravitate toward the opposite one. However, his concepts are useful
for evaluating and solving the problems of social groups, since they were
developed in the context of social settings and expressed in interpersonal
terms. He stressed the removal of interpersonal barriers between hostile
groups in order to make close, harmonious contact possible. His work therefore
has implications not only for the reduction of ethnic conflicts and the gap
between generations, but also for coping with the alienation and isolation of
homosexuals in a society that has been taught for centuries to hate and fear
them. So, however biased his thinking may have been by the tragic circumstances
of his early life, he may yet have bequeathed a psychiatric legacy that can
contribute toward the reintegration of the gay community into the environing
society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
A. H. Chapman, Hatty Stack Sullivan: His Life and Work, New York: G. P. Putnam,
1976.
Warren Johansson
Sweden
The
Scandinavian kingdom of Sweden lies in Northern Europe between Norway and
Finland and contains over 8 million citizens, who enjoy one of the highest
standards of living in the world. Having adopted Christianity as its official
religion in the twelfth century, Sweden participated in all the social and
intellectual currents of Europe. For the earlier centuries of the country's
history our information bears chiefly on the legal situation of same-sex
conduct. Only after considerable struggle and educational progress was the
country's present enviable state of social enlightenment attained.
Legal Developments.
For a
long period in its history, Sweden lacked any specific laws against same-sex
relations. The all-Swedish law codes from 1350 and 1442 contained no
prohibitions concerning sodomy between men (orwomen). Instead, the newly
established Catholic Church exercised its moral (and economic) power through
penitential and local statutes. The bishop of Skara, for instance, proclaimed
in 1281 that "a person who sins against nature, must pay a fine of nine
marks to the bishop."
Thus, "sodomy" between males was not officially a crime worthy of
death (but a sin serious enough) when St. Bridget in a politically motivated
attack accused King Magnus in 1361: "You have the most indecent reputation
inside and outside this land that any Christian male can have, namely that you
have had intercourse with men. This seems likely to us, because you love men
more than God or your own soul or your own wife."
Despite such religious and political attacks on heretical sexual behavior, it
was in fact not the Catholic Inquisition, but the Protestant Reformation that
would impose severe punishment for sodomy between men in Sweden.
The Protestant King Erik XIV in 1563 made a list of crimes that had to be
punished by death to avoid the "wrath of God" (which implied not
earthquakes but "plagues, hunger, poverty and other troubles").
Among such crimes worthy of death were "bestiality with dumb animals and
other such vices."
"Other such vices" were probably interpreted as sodomy between men.
But the fact that no such cases were brought to trial in Stockholm until the
seventeenth century seems to imply that this vague reference served more as a
warning than as effective new legislation.
It was not until 1608, when the Swedish law code was published in a new
version, that the climate became really severe. The old laws were not changed,
but Charles IX added as an "appendix" to the 1608 lawbook a new list
of crimes "abstracted from the Holy Scriptures." The appendix stated
in section IV (on "fornication," and other like offenses):
"Thou shalt not sleep with a boy as with a woman, for this is an
abomination. And they both shall die, their blood be upon them." This
text, echoing the prohibitions in Leviticus, was assumed to include sodomy
between adult males.
It was, however, bestiality and not sodomy between men that mostly occupied the
imagination of rural Swedish society. Extremely few court cases of sodomy
between men are known. There is no evidence of a sodomitical subculture in
Stockholm at this time, and official campaigns against "sodomites"
are unknown.
On the female side, the courts had, as in other European countries, some
difficulties with cross-dressing women, who supported themselves as soldiers
and even married other women. The fact that the courts failed to see any
"sodomitical" dangers in such same-sex marriages, but instead
concentrated on marriage legislation and the religious crime of cross-dressing,
shows that "homosexuality" as such was not yet the concern of the
authorities. (Sodomy between women, according to Swedish courts, demanded some
physical hermaphroditical peculiarity in the sex organs.) At the highest level,
Queen Christina was involved with same-sex sentiments, if not acts.
From 1734 onwards, the official Swedish policy toward sodomy between males
became one of total silence. The new law code of 1734 contained no such
references at all, despite the fact that sodomy in the form of bestiality was
still a crime worthy of death. The law commission stated that it was "not
advisable to mention more sodomitical sins; it is instead better to keep
silent as if they were not known, and if such a bad thing happens that they
occur, let them be punished anyway."
This peculiarly lawless state of affairs seems to have led to a paradox: the
scope of punishable sodomitical sins widened, and a few very unclear (and very
secret) court cases with only one person involved may imply that also
individual sins like masturbation from that point on were punished, if found
out.
Very few death sentences for sodomitical acts between males are known from this
"silent" period in Sweden. And in 1778 King Gustav in, the
"enlightened" king who opposed capital punishment as such, issued a
new order that all death sentences had to be confirmed by His Majesty. In
practice this means that from 1778 on no executions for sexual crimes were
carried out in Sweden.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Sweden lacked any laws directly
applicable to sexual relations between males (orfemales), and under the impact
of the French Revolution and Code Napoleon, an era of limited and conditional
legal freedom for "sodomitical sinners" seems to have begun, and
lasted until 1864 (the period is poorly researched, however). There are no
traces of a "sodomitical" or "pederastic" subculture,
despite this formal freedom. And even if the regime of Gustav m at the end of the
eighteenth century, with its Hellenic-classisist ideals, directly or
indirectly may have introduced the Greek term "pederasty" into
Swedish language, the term surely had lost its Hellenist and poetic overtones
by the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The "radical" anti-Gustavian military coup in 1809, directed against
the son of Gustav III, was followed by anti-pederastic gossip about the old
regime. Such propagandistic gossip of course also discredited
"pederasty" as such, referring it to the former sodomitical and
"unnatural" context.
Sweden soon also followed the example of many of the German states, which about
the middle of the nineteenth century reintroduced old or obsolete laws against
"unnatural behavior" between males. A Swedish law commission in 1832
stated that even if bestiality was a disgusting crime, it was not as dangerous
to society as "other unnatural ways of committing fornication, when
committed between persons." In 1864 (at the same time as the Swedish
parliament was reformed and democratized) a new law against "unnatural"
behavior between persons was issued. The new law book stated in paragraph
18:10: "If anyone, with another person, engages in fornication against
nature, or if anyone engages in fornication with an animal, he shall be
punished with hard labor in prison up to two years."
Paragraph 18:10 was also applicable to relations between women, which however
was not officially recognized until 1943, when a few women in a lesbian
network were sentenced.
Emergence of Modernity. During the 1880s, when
Stockholm (the capital) reached about 200,000 inhabitants, we have the first
signs (police records) of a "sodomitical" subculture in parks and
public places. At the same time there are on the cultural level expressions of
an emerging homosexual identity. In 1879 the popular and highly respected
Swedish philosopher, Pontus Wikner (1837-1888), secretly wrote a pamphlet,
called "Psychological Confessions, " which demands the right for
people of the same sex to marry and to have sexual relations on the same terms
as men and women.
Wikner unfortunately never published his pamphlet, but a famous lecture he
held in Uppsala in 1880 about male and female "borderline people,"
"The Sacrificial System of Our Culture," was a subtle attack on
sexual/religious hypocrisy and prescribed gender-roles, which caused some alarm
in conservative circles.
The author and national poet Viktor Rydberg (1828-1895), who was a friend of
Wikner, at the end of the nineteenth century also published poems and essays,
where disguised homoerotic Hellenist ideals were brought to a newly formed mass
audience of bourgeois readers (who mostly preferred not to understand his
homoerotic hints). Vilhelm Ekelund (1880-1949), who was inspired by Count von
Platen, wrote brilliant, if enigmatic, poems and essays.
The real "homosexualization" of Sweden does not begin until 1906,
when a certain Paul Burger Diether, contact man for the German
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Stockholm, announced a lecture on
homosexuality with the title "The Revolution of the Twentieth Century."
The lecture was treated as a public nuisance and was silenced. But the revolution
was not to stop: a "scandal" in Stockholm in 1907, involving a
well-known factory-owner and designer, Nils Santesson, gave broad circulation
to the term "homosexuality," providingthe homosexual cause with its
first public martyr in Sweden.
Artists such as Eugen Jansson ("blue painting" and athletes), Gósta Adrian Nilsson
("GAN": modernistic and cubistic paintings of sailors and sportsmen),
and Nils Dardel ("decadent" dandyism) also expressed hidden and open
homoerotic sentiments during and after this period.
A sign of backlash was the book of Martin Koch in 1916, Guds vackia valid ("God's Beautiful
World"), which was a crusade not only against social misery, but also
against the "sodomites" who seduced, exploited, and corrupted the
young.
In 1916, however, Mauri tz Stiller and Axel Esbensen also produced the first
film with a homoerotic theme, Vingarne
("The
Wings"), based on the novel Mikael
by the
Dane Herman Bang (but having a Ganymede statue instead of a painting at the
center of the plot). In 1919 the first Swedish sexology book devoted entirely
to homosexuality was published by Dr. Anton Nyström, who was a friend of
Magnus Hirschfeld.
During the twenties, a vivid discussion about homosexuality took place in the
"yellow press" of Stockholm and Göteborg, and letters from
homosexuals were published on page after page (with reprimands and corrections
from the editors, of course).
Another phase of homosexual emancipation started in the thirties, when lawyers
and doctors and radical philanthropic organizations, such as the National
Federation for Sexual Enlightenment, demanded revision of the old paragraph
18:10 "in accordance with new scientific findings." The Swedish
iron-mill worker Eric Thorsell at the same time returned from a study period at
Hirschfeld's Berlin institute in 1932, and started a one-man movement against
paragraph 18:10 with public lectures, newspaper articles, and the like.
The campaigns were successful. From 1944 homosexuality in private was declared
legal in Sweden, with some discriminating clauses such as a higher age-limit
(18 years instead of 15, in the case of prostitution, and 21 for dependent relationships).
Toward Today. In 1950, the first
homosexual organization in Sweden was founded by the engineer Allan Hellman. At
first it was a Swedish branch of the Danish/Scandinavian Federation of 1948,
but soon became an organization in its ownright, acquiring its present name
RFSL (National Federation for Sexual Equality) in 1952.
The fifties, however, also meant a new wave of anti-homosexuality. In Sweden
the gay baiters were not right-wing but "radicals" and
"anti-fascists." A labor newspaper and the author Vilhelm Moberg
played the role of McCarthy, accusing the authorities of being corrupted by
"homosexual leagues." The campaign was in practice an attack on all
homosexuals (and on homosexuality as such). But the RFSL succeeded in
strengthening itself in the struggle, and in presenting its goals and aims in
the press during a difficult period.
The sixties were politically a silent era for the homosexual movement. But
they also meant a consolidation of RFSL and the new indoor subculture: the cafés and small dance halls that
had emerged during the fifties.
When gay liberation swept in from the West at the beginning of the seventies,
gay life in Sweden was vitalized and radicalized. At the end of the seventies,
the first sizable gay demonstrations in Stockholm were held, organized by
RFSL. They grew from 400 people in 1977 to several thousand in the eighties.
The Stockholm Gay Liberation Week held in August every year during the eighties
became one of the biggest social and political gay events in Europe.
One of the achievements in the gay struggle during this period was setting the
same age of consent, 15 years, as for heterosexual relations (1978). This followed
on a statement from the Swedish Parliament in 1973 that "cohabitation
between two parties of the same sex is from the standpoint of society a totally
acceptable form of relationship."
In 1987 Parliament passed two historic laws. The first forbids discrimination
against homosexuals by authorities and private enterprises. The second grants
homosexuals many of the same economic and legal privileges (and obligations)
that unmarried heterosexual couples living together have in Sweden. Thus for
the first time a positive homosexual status, homosexuellsambo ("homosexual
cohabitant"), has been introduced into the Swedish language and Swedish
society, after a struggle of more than a century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Bent Hansen, Noidisk bibliografi: Homoseksualiteit, Copenhagen: Pan, 1984.
Fredrik Silverstolpe
Symonds, John Addington (1840-1893)
English
scholar. John Addington Symonds was born into a prosperous London family; his
father was a renowned physician and the young Symonds was educated at Harrow
and at Oxford.
Symonds realized that he was homosexual at a very early age. Even as a child,
he had vivid dreams of being in a room surrounded by naked sailors: odd dreams,
since he had not seen a nude adult male, much less a nude sailor. According to
his Memoirs, the central theme of Symonds'
Ufe
was his
ongoing attempt to deal with what he felt to be an inborn propensity to love
the male sex. His innate timidity and romanticism caused him to be disgusted by
the abundant homosexual activity available to students at Harrow. This puzzling
rejection (of what he was later to value most highly) culminated in his first
adult action on the scene of the wide world: he accused the Harrow headmaster,
Dr. Vaughan, of loving one of his pupils, and with the cooperation of his
father, procured Vaughan's removal from the headmastership and subsequent exile
to obscurity. This malicious act caused several of his closest friends to cut
him off for the rest of his life, and he was deeply troubled by the remembrance
of it. What, after all, was the difference between him and Dr. Vaughan, except
for Symonds' vague feeling of spiritual superiority?
He had already, by this time, read Plato and become enthusiastic about the
ideals of Greek pederasty; he was, indeed, in love with an English choirboy
named Willie Dyer, with whom he twice exchanged kisses which he would remember
to the end of his days. This passionate friendship was terminated on the advice
of his father, who pointed out that Symonds might be accused of the same
"crime" as his recent victim, Dr. Vaughan.
In his twenties, again at the advice of his father, Symonds married, and
eventually fathered four daughters. He never had any passion for his wife.
Fortunately, she loathed sex and pregnancy, and soon they were living in
separate parts of the house, while Symonds continued to pursue young men as
soul mates.
Serious illness made Symonds incapable of any real career, so he turned to
literature as an avocation. He pursued another schoolboy named Norman Moor in
an ardent Platonic fashion, which eventually culminated in their spending six
nights in bed together, nude and kissing, but without doing anything which
would offend the laws of the time.
Several things happened in a short space of time, which decisively altered
Symonds' life. His father died, he moved to Switzerland for the sake of his
health, he had his first "base" homosexual interaction with a
nineteen-year-old soldier, his literary output increased substantially, and his
health improved. This would perhaps indicate that the beloved father was in
fact an obstacle to Symonds' self-actualization.
In any case, he quickly got the knack of making close and passionate friends
among the Swiss peasants and Italian gondoliers, and discovered that it was
quite possible for two men to share their sexuality, in moderation, without
being immediately damned and thrown into jail.
Symonds became one of the foremost men of letters of his time, famed for his
reviews, essays, books of art history, and expositions of poetry. He became a
cultural arbiter for the Victorian era, and also published several volumes of
bad poetry.
Unknown to most of his contemporaries, however, Symonds was pursuing a second
career. As he grew more accustomed to his own homosexuality and discovered
Walt Whitman, he produced the pioneering essay A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883), published in an
edition of 10 copies. As he grew older and read the works of such pioneers as
Krafft-Ebing, he realized that he was not alone and wrote the larger essay A Problem in Modem Ethics (1891), issued in 50
copies. He also began a collaboration with Havelock Ellis, which resulted in
the publication of Sexual
Inversion after Symonds' death. (The family made trouble about the
book, and demanded that Symonds' name and life history be removed from the English
edition.)
Symonds also committed his memoirs to a distant posterity. The sealed memoirs
were handed to his literary executor, H. F. Brown, and were willed to the
London Library by Brown on his demise in 1926, with instructions to withhold
them from publication for fifty years. They finally appeared in 1984.
As Symonds' respectable Victorian persona retires into obscurity (he is mostly
remembered for his enormous Renaissance
in Italy), his fame as a homosexual theorist and apologist takes up
the failing torch and secures for him a new and perhaps more lasting
reputation. He has certainly been a major influence in the cause of social and
legal reform, and, with the sad exception of Dr. Vaughan, a valuable ally for
homosexual men everywhere.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Woeful Victorian: A Biography of John Addington Symonds, New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1964.
Geoff Puterbaugh
Symposia
In
ancient Greece, symposia were convivial meetings for drinking, conversation,
and intellectual entertainment; they were all-male, upper-class drinking
parties that beginning ca. 600 b.c.
were held
following the evening meal.
After pouring libations to the gods, the guests - usually ten or twelve - began
to drink wine diluted with various amounts of water. Often garlanded and
perfumed, they reclined usually two together - often erastes (lover)and eromenos (beloved) - on couches
propping themselves up on one arm while servants brought round the calyx, the
common drinking cup filled with watered wine. Though some did not drink, others
became riotous. Besides drinking and conversing, they told riddles and fables
and sang drinking songs (often ribald and pederastic) and recited verses,
whether archaic (the most popular being those of Theognis) or of recent
composition. Athenaeus preserved a collection of scolia, as the drinking songs
were known, from the fifth and sixth centuries b.c. Each sang in turn when he was passed the myrtle branch.
Having wrestled nude with his boy in the gymnasium, a gentleman might recline
with him in the evening on a couch at a symposium sipping wine together and
exchanging glances and singing love songs. Flirtation was the rule, and
sometimes kisses and embraces. Going farther in public with one another was
considered indecorous, although young girl and boy slaves were often pinched
and pummeled, and attending musicians, often slaves themselves, were available
and often fondled and groped by intemperate guests, and hetairai (female companions) often
attended. But ladies, after 600 b.c.,
were shut
away in the gynaecea (women's quarters), and children were formally excluded
from these parties. They were held in the men's chamber that each greater house
possessed, often furnished with stone couches upon which pads and pillows were
placed. One of the more popular games was kottabos (winethrowing) in which,
reclining on their left elbows on the couches, the guests threw the last drops
of wine from the calyx
into a
basin set in the middle of the room without spilling any.
In the seventh century, first at Crete, then at Sparta, lawgivers founded men's
houses [andieia],
where
upper-class males messed together. The institution was imported to Athens and
the rest of Greece after 600 b.c.,
along
with gymnasia, pederasty, and the seclusion of women, but in Athens the eating
clubs, often bound together by pederastic relationships, met only occasionally
for dinner parties and symposia, many of which became very intellectual. Some
ended in komoi,
drinking
processions revelling through the streets to serenade an eromenos outside his house. Heroes
and others whom the state wished to honor, such as the descendants of Harmodius
and Aristogeiton, were dined at public expense in the Prytaneum, but most upper-class
men outside of Crete and Sparta, normally dined en famille. The symposia fulfilled the
need of educated Greeks for relaxation and stimulation, as restaurants and
night clubs did not exist. They could, however, also degenerate into drunken
orgies that brought out the mutual hostility of the participants.
Plato, Xenophon, and many others set dialogues in symposia, which became a
recognized literary form that allowed the author to ramble over his choice of
barely related themes. Prominent in this genre is the Deipnosphistae of Athenaeus, who had a
most artificial arrangement, with 40 guests and a three-day banquet. Vase
paintings preserve a vivid picture of the proceedings at such affairs. Crude
Roman imitations of the Greek banquets were satirized, more in literary form,
by Petronius in the Cena
Trimalchionis, the banquet episode of the Satyricon. Christian hostility to
such centers of pederasty and intellectual analysis, as well as the loss of
wealth and leisure beginning with the third century, led to their decline. In
the late fourth century Libanius complained that at Antioch banquets had
degenerated, citing an egregious case in which a father regularly prostituted
his son.
A survival of the symposium is the Jewish Passover meal, where the guests are
formally required to recline in the manner of upper-class Greeks, proving that
they are no longer slaves after being delivered from bondage in Egypt. Also, a
ceremonial part of the meal is the aphikoman,
from
Hellenistic Greek epicomon,
the final
course of the banquet.
English colleges created their own, more sedate versions of the symposia. The common room
and dining hall arrangements with sherry, port, and other wines, where a
variety of opinions are expressed, parallel those of antiquity. Tutorials,
though one-on-one, traditionally end with the quaffing of a glass of sherry.
William A. Percy
SZYMANOWSKI, KAROL (1882-1937)
Polish
composer. The son of Polish landed gentry, Szymanowski was born in Tymoszowka,
in eastern Poland (now part of the Soviet Union). He began to play the piano
and compose at an early age, and while at the Warsaw Conservatory quickly
acquired a reputation as a composer of talent, and a follower of modern musical
trends.
Szymanowski's wide travels (he visited America in 1921) brought him into
contact with many European artistic trends. This is reflected in his evolving
and somewhat eclectic style, which moves from a Chopin-Scriabinesque early
period, through a more Germanic chromaticism, to an impressionist period. His
final compositions reflect Polish folk traditions and are more Bartokian in
style.
Evidence of Szymanowski's sexual preference is largely indirect but nonetheless
telling. He remained unmarried, and once jokingly remarked that the only woman
in his life was his mother. Correspondence with several close male friends is
extant, although not published in its entirety (no similiar correspondence with
women exists). Contemporaries of the composer make reference to his fondness
for men. B. M. Maciejewski, in Karol
Szymanowski: His Life and Music (London, 1967), states that it was common knowledge
throughout European cultural circles that Szymanowski was homosexual. The
Polish biographer Stef ania Lobaczewska is more circumspect, stating only that
Szymanowski was regarded in his youth as zepsuty [decadent, immoral) and
that his music is marked by a strong erotic drive.
The most direct evidence is the composer's two-volume novel, Efebos, written in 1917. It is
described by the composer as an apologia
pro vita sua. The hero of the novel is a divinely beautiful young man in
whom are united physical and divine love. Unfortunately, all but the
introduction to the novel was destroyed during the bombing of the Polish
National Archives at the beginning of World War II. Contemporary accounts
describe it as the composer's theory of Greek love.
Szymanowski's musical output spans the gamut from solo piano works (three
sonatas, preludes, studies, mazurkas) to songs for voice, orchestral works,
symphonies, concerti, ballets, and opera [King Roger, premiered in the United
States only in 1988). Szymanowski was director of the Warsaw Conservatory from
1927 to 1931, and was a strong advocate for contemporary music in prewar
Poland. At his death, he was widely heralded as Poland's greatest composer
since Chopin.
Peter Gach