Was thinking of this a while back, never posted.
We know that the current period where society is cool with gays is pretty rare (Greek had out gays, and apparently some native American tribes did too), and that for most of human history, gays were persecuted.
My question is why?
The Old Testament is pretty clear that hot man-on-man action is a sin. The cultures influenced by Judaism, Christianity and Islam developed their senses of morality and their law from religious traditions.
And it’s always easy for a culture to oppress a small minority, no matter what your ethical system says.
Most of human history is pre-literate so we have relatively little idea how pre-literate societies treated gays, but IIRC based on the few examples we do have based on anthropological studies of primitive cultures they generally weren’t persecuted to nearly the same extent as they have been in modernity. In fact, in thinking about it, most of the really intense historical antipathy towards gays I can recall is generally associated with Judeo-Christian-Islamic societies.
What makes you think society is cool with gays? A few concentrated areas (most of them urban, coastal, and wealthy) tolerate it to a degree but many many people still hate gays. I don’t think you can go around declaring gay tolerance as the normal thing yet.
On the other hand, we don’t tend to throw people in jail for sodomy any more.
Ok, where did Judaism get the idea then?
There is a theory that a friend told me that women favoured gay men as companions (to the extent of having children with them) and straight men got pissed off and started to ban them. He had no evidence for this theory.
True, but just as an anecdote (sorry, but I don’t think the OP’s question can be properly answered here in GQ anyway):
Once I was in the West Hollywood area, which is famous for being extremely gay-friendly. Probably the most gay-friendly place in the country next to San Francisco. (and that’s not to mention the U.S. is way more gay-friendly overall than most countries) I was standing in line for something and two men walked down the street by us holding hands. As soon as they were gone it elicited several sneers and negative comments from the people near me. And this was in the supposed paradise of sexual freedom - just for holding hands.
So I don’t think society is even close to being “cool with gays”. Be careful about representations in TV and film throwing you off, because homosexuals and homosexual-friendly culture is massively disproportionately represented in Hollywood. Doesn’t mean that is the prevailing societal attitude.
OK, so the “cool with gays” period is even rarer than the OP realizes, but that’s really background or an aside. His question is “why is it rare?”
A Civil Partnership Bill is due to be passed soon in Ireland and for the past few weeks there have been people demonstrating against it. They’ve engaged in some vicious behaviour such as heckling the Irish AIDS Alliance when they arranged a photoshoot with politicians to highlight AIDS Awareness Day.
The characters involved in this protest include members of Cóir (aka Youth Defence) who are the loopy fringe of the anti-abortion movement. On top of that they are presently involved in a campaign against plans to enshrine the rights of (living) children in the Irish Constitution. They oppose this move because it would overturn the present situation where it is practically impossible to remove children from the marital home, even when they’re being abused and neglected.
Put simply, they are fanatical about the nuclear family (with the father at the head of it, of course), and are opposed to anything that they think undermines it. They’re loopers, but they do seem to genuinely believe that Human Civilisation As We Know It will fall apart if that structure is not upheld. And homosexuality inherently involves rejecting that structure in favour of another type of relationship, so it’s one of the things they’re opposed to.
Similar types exist in the US and elsewhere, of course, not just Ireland.
I thought it was just for the same reason that people hated black people, or Jewish people, or blind, left handed dentists…because they’re “different”. Nothing more, nothing less.
Did?
Black people - justification for slavery
Jews - owed them money, usury, killed Christ
blind, left-handed dentists - sloppy work
I think this question is probably too complex to be handled easily in GQ (especially since it involves religion). Moving to GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
People tend to be irrational and emotional when it comes to sex. There’s a lot of sense of tradition when it comes to the family, gender roles and sexuality. Abnormal (in the neutral sense) people can upset that and cause opposition.
Deviation from the norm often brings hostility, be it women wearing pants in the 50s, women not merely being coy chaste recipients when it comes to sex, sex outside marriage, cohabitation. Gays break many social conventions.
Also, perhaps one clue as to one of the causes is that men are more likely to be homophic than women and that when people speak ill of homosexuality, they usually have male homosexuals in mind. Many men are queasy when they see homosexual men and people will often go from “it feels queasy” to “it’s morally wrong”.
And don’t forget the anal sex.
Because
I agree with Suburban Plankton. Xenophobia has always been a human trait (and it’s pretty common in other animals as well). Any social group tends to see anyone outside of the group as a potential enemy.
Heterosexual coupling is a fundamental aspect of life in most societies. Those who aren’t part of that are seen as different. So homosexuals are seen as being outside of the group and that makes them targets.
First of all, the concept of a set sexual orientation is relatively recent. Most people would have considered the idea that there was a subset of people who were homosexual to be very weird and counterintuitive. “Homosexual”, the word, wasn’t even coined until the 19th Century.
Secondly, even in times and societies were man/man sexual acts were tolerated or expected, it was a very narrow acceptability. The infamous Greek tolerance for it was limited to older men with much younger men, in a mentor/protege relationship. Two adult men who had such a relationship would have been seen as abnormal and wrong, and the “catcher”, so to speak, would have been taunted and possibly assaulted for taking the “female” role. This was also true in Rome…in the scattered periods in Roman history when male/male sex was less scandalous, it was the receptive male who was most vilified.
A lot of this had to do with the fact that ancient (and really, all the way up to modern times) societies had a population replacement problem. Everyone was expected to marry and produce children because it was necessary for the society to survive, due to infant and child mortality.
But gays didn’t suddenly ‘appear’ - they existed, and then they were taken against.
First paragraph good, second paragraph bad. No one was sitting around planning the society’s mores, and even if they were, it’s doubtful that anyone who lived 2500 years ago was capable of grasping a concept like “homosexuality in itself is fine but the gays need to also have sham marriages in order to reproduce for the state’s benefits.”
Greece was a society of child abuse victims, and we all know that child abuse victims become child abusers. Nothing more or less, and nothing to do with homosexuality as we understand it (that is, consensual sexual relationships between adults of the same gender) had anything to do with it.
I can’t believe that some people have the “noble savage” blindness that leads to statements like “Native Americans were so tolerant,” but I assure you that people in primitive cultures generally are much more scared of deviance than the first world, which is still hardly enlightened about sexual freedom anyway, and being gay in a Western way in any backwards place, whether it’s sub-Saharan Africa now or the world as a whole in 1500, is a one-way ticket to a lynching.
Do you have a time period in mind for the word “then”? In Europe, it seems that opposition to homosexuality came with the spread of Christianity (Leviticus 20:13 isn’t really gay friendly and homosexuals aren’t in the habit of being fruitful and multiplying). The Greeks and the Romans looked down on being the bottom but weren’t hostile to homosexual relations.