Another Gay thread - evidence of historical homosexuality

Great Debates
1

So here’s the question: What is the historical evidence of homosexuality as it is exists today, i.e. a separate category of people who have exclusive attraction to members of the same gender?

I should say at the outset that I am not suggesting that I am sure that it did not exist, or even was less common than today. Merely that I have reason to suspect as much, and am curious as to whether conclusive evidence exists on the subject.

What makes me suspicious is the fact that in the historical and ancient sources that I am most familiar - Bible and Talmud and related material - the concept does not seem to appear. Homosexual acts are discussed in many places, but never (that I can recall) the concept of a type of person who is different in that he is a homosexual. For that matter, most of the historical people who are now thought to have been “Gay” seem to have been people who would now be classified as bi-sexual.

So the thought suggested itself that maybe it is a relatively recent phenomenon. The rationale for such a thing is harder to figure. But I think it just may be possible that most hetero and homosexuals are really bi-sexuals. I seem to recall a “Kinsey Scale” going from 0 to 6 on which the degrees of attraction to people of different genders are measured. What I am wondering is if in our times, as a result of the intense preoccupation with gay/straight issues, many people have sought for themselves a clear-cut identity, and established themselves in their minds as being gay or straight, while really they are bi. So that if the percentage of gays is assumed to be 3% (to pick a number), the real percentage of “true” gays may be considerably smaller, the remainder being bisexuals who have identified themselves as gay. By that same token, the 97% of straights is equally invalid, with many or most of these people being bisexuals who have identified themselves as straight. If this is true, then in other eras the percentage of people who had sexual relationships exclusively with people of their own gender may have been considerably smaller. (This would seem to have relevance to the questions that are constantly being brought up about the effects of evolution on homosexuality).

For an interesting example of this, see this article in Salon.com.

Again, I am not making any conclusive assertions, and am (as always :wink: ) willing to be shown otherwise. Perhaps this should be a GQ thread, but most Gay threads seem to be in GD. Plus, I intend to challenge any evidence that does not meet up.

2

Well, the Sacred band of ancient Thebes was an all gay army.

By all accounts they were truly formidable, in part because of superior training, but also in part because when you fight side by side with the person you love, you fight a lot harder than if he/she is back in town.
Not to mention this whole place in the Bible called “sodom,” but you might want to look into it.

3

From what I’ve seen of it, it appears that these relationships were deliberately encouraged for military purposes.

What makes you think they were gays? In fact the story of Sodom suggests the opposite - upon finding out that Lot had guests, they demanded for them to be turned over for rape. Lot attempted to pacify them by offering his daughters instead - clearly these people were not gay.

4

Men and women fullfilling their traditional ‘biblical’ roles back in the days was probably more actively encouraged and/or recorded in both written and spoken history.

Cut to the 21st century, though gender and sexual stereotyping are certainly not a thing of the past, there are many more shades of grey which are accepted and in some cases celebrated by modern society.

5

Maybe try this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195042255/qid=996597487/sr=2-4/ref=aps_sr_b_2_1/107-5936720-1258168

The problem here is that the “culture” of gay is a relatively new thing. There have certainly been people throughout histroy who have chosen celebacy or members of their same sex rather than be hetero. But sexuality has been rather closeted for a long time. So you will never find “conclusive” evidence one way or the other. Just a lot of pieces to a puzzle that indicate that homosexuality has always been.

But if anyone does have a sixth century version of the Kinsey study, I’m sure they’ll post it. Or an fifteen century gay pride parade.

6

This is a very interesting question, and fortunately one which several good scholars are currently working on. Since I do not consider myself well-informed enough to argue one way or another, I will instead point you to some resources that you might find interesting.

Immodest Acts : The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (Studies in the History of Sexuality), by Judith C. Brown.

This was the first book that popped into my head. It is perhaps the earliest thorough documentation of lesbianism in the west.

As a classicist, I have come across Roman Homosexuality : Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (Ideologies of Desire), by Craig Williams. My colleagues say it’s good, but I have never read more than a chapter or two. If you are interested in ancient sexual self-representation and identity, then this is definitely the book to check out.

If you are interested in material culture, check out Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts, by James M. Saslow.
But I think the book you want most of all is a little paperback called The Construction of Homosexuality, by David F. Greenberg. Again, I have never read this book. It appears to take a sociological approach and places homosexuality in a historical and cultural context. It appears to be polemical; perhaps some people here who know more about Gay & Lesbian studies have strong feelings about this book. I just know that a professor that I know reviewed it rather highly.

I would highly recommend Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. This book I have read, and it is truly excellent. One of my favorites by Foucault, actually. I won’t spoil it with an introduction.

And *Scylla, the Sacred Band was not necessary composed of “gays,” just older men and their younger lovers. This relationship was not necessarily mutually exclusive to marriage, attraction, and sexual intercourse with women.

This is not so. The education and care of young men by older ones, which often included a peculiar kind of sexual intercourse, was a staple of Attic and Boieotian culture that was exploited for military purposes. You have reversed the cause and the effect.

MR

7

Well, part of the problem is, how can you tell if somebody historically was gay or not? If a person married and had kids, does that mean he wasn’t gay, or just that he was doing what was expected of him by society? Take somebody like Richard the Lion Heart…We have evidence that he had sexual relationships with other men, popular gossip at the time accused him of sodomy, we have no evidence that he had sexual relationships with women, and he was married to a woman he never really saw, keeping her virtually prisoner for most of their marriage. How do you classify him?

8

The link in my previous post takes you to the Amazon page for Immodest Acts.

(And here I was thinking that book was obscure).

9

Huh? The men of Sodom are interested in the two male angles and not interested in Lot’s daughters. That suggests they were gay to me.

10

The fact that Lot offered women instead of men suggested that in his opinion the men were not of a type that was exclusively attracted to men - otherwise the offer would have been pointless. A person who is attracted to both men and women might, in any given instance, prefer one or the other.

(Traditional Jewish interpretation is that the Sodomites were not going after the angels for sexual satisfaction - they were intent on discouraging visitors to their paradise, and were interested in a good old gang rape. There is a parralel story later in the Bible about some Benjamenites who demanded a (male) visitor for sexual reasons, and they were placated by the offer of a female concubine).

11

IzzyR, I personally would agree that few people really qualify as a Kinsey 0 or 6. The word “bisexual” is often misinterpreted as meaning “equally attracted to both sexes”, which seems unfortunate to me as many (maybe most) people do experience significant attraction to both sexes although they often prefer one over the other.

As for the frequency of exclusive homosexuality in the past, there are a number of reasons why this is a murky issue. First, in societies where homosexuality is seen as a Very Bad Thing, homosexuals are naturally going to try to keep things quiet. Secondly, in many societies some level of heterosexual behavior is essentially compulsory. If a girl is sold into marriage as soon as she hits puberty then it hardly matters what her orientation is. She has little choice but to at least occasionally submit to her husband’s advances. The situation is usually a little less dire for men, but if the societal structure requires that a man produce an heir he can probably manage to grit his teeth and have sex with his lady wife often enough to impregnate her, no matter how strongly he might have prefered to be having sex with his squire. Since we rarely have evidence of the private thoughts of people in the distant past it is impossible to know how common such people were.

12

Bear in mind also that up until just recently (don’t know the exact date), there was no concept of sexual orientation. Homosexuals were just considered to be normal (in a descriptive sense) people who did strange things. This is another factor working against the historical record.

13

Just because I know it doesn’t mean that it isn’t. :wink:

14

Technically, the story of Sodom doesn’t mention rape, sex, homosexuality, or anything of the sort. Yes, there is a strong tradition of “know” being used “in the biblical sense”, but at least some Bible scholars believe that it simply means “know”. There have been a lot of assumptions made over the years to lead to the traditional interpretation of Sodom as a city of homosexuals.

15

For this reason, I think you have to concentrate on societies in which homosexuality was not seen as a bad thing, and homosexual acts were widely performed. If, as I am suggesting, even in such societies, homosexual acts were not seen as the province of a special type of person, but rather as the type of thing that anyone might do if the mood struck him or circumstances were right, then it would seem that there was no special category of homosexuals. And that evidence of ancient people performing homosexual acts is not evidence of ancient homosexuality.

ultrafilter, I’m not sure I understand your post. Are you saying that there were homosexuals but that no one realized this? Why would this be?

waterj2, I find this hard to believe. It makes no sense in the context of the story.

16

There’s a difference between someone who is primarily emotionally and sexually attracted to members of the same sex and someone who is primarily emotionally and sexually attracted to members of the opposite sex but has sexual relations with members of the same sex. In the ancient world, people were not aware of the first possibility, so they assumed anyone engaging in homosexual acts was of the second type.

Why weren’t they aware of this? It’s a matter of conjecture, but I think that the main reason is that they just hadn’t found out yet. It’s not immediately obvious that there should be differences in sexual orientation (or even such a thing as sexual orientation) among humans.

As I almost posted earlier, I think the best reason to accept the existence of homosexuality in ancient times is simply because we have no particularly compelling reason to think that this was not the case (unless I’ve missed something here).

17

I agree that it is not logical to assume that human nature has changed. But it is possible that the “natural” state of affairs is the opposite, as I mentioned in my OP.

So the question is how compelling the lack of evidence (if indeed there is one) is. I think we may have to disagree with regards to your statement that

I think it is an extremely simple and obvious concept, and can’t fathom that anyone could miss it.

18

Whatever Lot thought about their orientation is irrelevant. Nevertheless I suspect that you are right in that the episode had less to do with lust than power and scare tactics.

Umm, here is the NIV translation:

Genesis 19:4 - Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom–both young and old–surrounded the house. 5 - They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”

Pretty clearly, they didn’t want to get to know them, they wanted to have sex with them.

19

bnorton

His point was that the bible doesn’t actually say “sex” - it says “know”. The people who wrote your translation interperated (correctly) the word “know” to be a euphamism for sex, hence the translation. But you can’t prove it from your translation.

But the idea is nonsense anyway. Here is the IzzyR translation of this passage:

Before they went to lie down, the people of the city - the people of Sodom - surrounded the house, from young to old, from the end[s] of the city. And they called to Lot, and they said to him “where are the men who came to you this evening? Send them out so that we might “know” them”. And Lot went out towards them to the entranceway, and he closed the door after him. And he said "my brothers, don’t do harm. Here I have two daughters who have not “known” a man, I will send them out to you, and you can do with them as you please, but to these men don’t do anything, for they have come under the shade of my roof. And they said “move out of the way”, and they said “did someone come to live here and would now judge [us]? Now we will harm you more than them”. And they pressed to Lot, and they attempted to break the door.

I think the idea that they merely meant to get to know them is ludicrous, and can’t imagine that any Biblical scholars thought otherwise.

20

Well, some scholars have argued that the interpretation of “have sex with” is not the correct interpretation of “know”, but they are in a small minority. I make no claims as to what the correct interpretation is. The explanation that I saw was that the Sodomites (who were not necessarily sodomites) were touchy about strangers in their town, and wanted to find out who the guys were (and probably rough them up or worse). This explanation makes some sense on its own, but in the context of the whole passage, and the stated wickedness of all Sodomites, seems to be a flimsy way to avoid associating the Sodomites with sodomy.

But it is a view held by people who I have seen referred to as scholars (or trying to present themselves as such).