Well, part of the reason for that is, what are we calling “mainstream media”? If mythological stories count, Loki has the whole Grecoroman pantheon beat dicks down and not because the Greek mythos were particularly SFW. Does literature and theater count only if it is known to the majority of the board, or is it ok if it won’t be so? You’re ignoring the reference to Dumas in your list of countries, will a reference to zarzuela count, or will it also be ignored?
Dumas was French, so even if I count that, it still fits into my claim that Western Europe was ahead of the U.S. And that’s literature, not TV or movies in any case. Literature has generally been ahead of TV and movies in its attitudes toward homosexuality. I can’t find any reference to zarzuela in this thread. I know that it’s Spanish (and thus, again, Western European). Can you explain to us what you mean by referring to it?
I post on another board with Infamous Sphere, she reviews queer media, mostly cinema. I asked her about this and this is what she had to say. She mostly knows about anglosphere stuff, so keep that in mind:
[QUOTE=Infamous Sphere]
Ok!
Well, I’ll try my best off the top of my head and with a little googling. So in terms of notable positive stuff? You’ve got Shakespeare’s sonnets to the fair lord, which were most of them. Apparently many of the writings of Christopher Marlowe were quite queer.
Novels I’ve read include Better Angel by Forman Brown, which was published under a pseudonym in 1933. It’s not a particularly interesting novel by modern standards but it’s a relatively benign and not at all tragic or condemning story of some dude realising he’s gay and ending up dating someone.
There’s also Maurice by E.M Forster, which was written in 1913 and published in 1971, primarily because it was far too explicitly gay and too positive for the time. From what I’ve read of Forster’s work, it’s my favourite of his novels. In A Room With A View he’s too detached to the subject, it’s all very mannered and fussy, whereas in Maurice you can tell he actually cares and has personal investment in the character’s happiness.
I haven’t read any Herman Mellville but apparently there’s some very friendly homoeroticism in several of his books - Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick and more explicitly in Billy Budd, although that doesn’t end so positively.
The Price Of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (adapted as Carol by Todd Haynes) is one of the first lesbian novels to not end with the characters going insane/straight.
I’m not up on my musical theatre or even my regular theatre.
Televisionwise, Matt Baume has a couple of videos on queer depictions on mainstream tv in the 1970s. TV and theatre wise I recently saw an article about this queer televised play from the 50s.
I can point to early queer representation in cinema but some of it’s rather depressing, like Different From The Others (which is a gay film from 1918!!!) where the main character ends up killing himself because his reputation is ruined by an evil blackmailer. If I try and avoid the depressing (but sympathetic) stuff like 1961’s Victim, which starred a (closeted) gay actor playing a gay character and was the first English-language film to use the word “homosexual”, that leaves us with coded movies like Winter Kept Us Warm, which was so secretly gay that not even the actors knew they were in a gay film.
1971’s Sunday Bloody Sunday is notable for being a film about a polyamorous relationship featuring a bi guy, where nothing terrible happens and there aren’t any moral judgments about their sexuality. Considering that positive bi male characters are thin on the ground even today, it’s especially worth watching. (Most bi male characters in film and TV, of which there are very few, are more-or-less Bret Easton Ellis style psychopaths.)
Side note about Sunday Bloody Sunday? I have no idea why it’s called that, since it came out before the Bloody Sunday massacre in Ireland - and apparently in footage of the massacre/in the movie about it, you can see posters for Sunday Bloody Sunday in the background because it was still screening. What the hell!?
Ok that’s all I can think of at the moment. Sorry, I’m not really up on my theatre - not my wheelhouse. Explicitly queer opera seems quite recent (although homoerotic themes in opera have been there pretty much since it was invented) but it’s something you might not have even thought about, like Patience and Sarah, which is a lesbian opera. There’s also a Brokeback mountain opera, and a Harvey Milk opera. Yes. Really.
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Zarzuela is a type of musical theater which was very popular in Spain between the late 18th and early 20th centuries; its themes and settings range from the “typical Spanish” (with everybody in regional dress) to the exotic (set in Russia and other faraway places), and from the mundane (we’re tearing and rebuilding a big chunk of Madrid) to the irreverently religious (biblical themes, generally treated with exactly zero seriousness).
Nowadays it’s mostly performed as reviews or by local theater groups, mostly in Spanish-speaking countries.
There wasn’t any reference to zarzuela in this thread before mine, what I want to know is if a form of theater that most people reading this had never previously heard of can be considered mainstream or not.
That’s certainly one interpretation. I don’t think it is a slam-dunk though.
Isn’t the ‘easiest interpretation’ of I Kings 15:5 that David was basically a good king, with the notable exception of one major scandal?
It is, in short, hyperbole.
Particularly as the text depicts him doing stuff that, while it may be suitable for a king, isn’t exactly within the ambit of Judaic morality (counseling revenge murder, acting as a mercenary for the Philistines, etc.).
I think it is odd to take it literally that he’d never breached any other commandment, particularly as, to give it such an interpretation requires a lot of “convoluted explaining” of the sort you appear to argue against in the first paragraph.
This is a bit of circular reasoning, is it not? You are rejecting the “they had a relationship of the sort that we would today call gay” explanation on the basis that such relationships are never depicted positively in the “culture”, the only evidence for which we have being this text. If you are wrong, there is “evidence” that the relationship has on occasion been depicted positively - in this very story.
Another approach, given the dearth of actual evidence of what Israeli culture was like circa 1000 BCE, is to examine the matter cross-culturally. In many Med. cultures, what was found culturally obnoxious was not homosexual relations per se, but rather male effeminacy. Evidence for this can be seen in the Leviticus prohibitions: they prohibit men lying with men as if they were women; they do not prohibit female homosexuality at all. Their concerns were those of the authors, rooted in an ancient culture, and not those of modern-day Orthodox Jews, who do not resemble that culture very much (if at all).
I’m not one who thinks David was wholly mythological. I think the story of his life was heavily mythologized, but based on actual events: part of the evidence for this is archaeological, as the Tel Dan Stele refers to a “house of David”; but part is based on the fact his life doesn’t follow that of a sanitized and conventional hero - he does lots of things as a hero and king that you would not expect of a purely mythical character created to advance a religious example - that whole Uriah the Hittite business being one; the ‘get rid of my enemies’ instructions being another (that smacks of realism all right) … and perhaps his relationship with Jonathan is a third.
Malthus:
No, it’s not. The negative attitude in the Bible about homosexuality is not merely inferred from stories, but is laid down in the Biblical code of laws (in Leviticus, as I’m sure you know). It’s not circular to say that if a story says person X was righteous, and said righteousness has a definition outside that story, then the activities described in the story can be assumed to be conforming to that external definition of righteousness, even if some might find a degree of ambiguity in the language.
Ah, but the issue is interpreting what is meant by the language in Leviticus, is it not?
I note there are at least two interpretations:
(1) The literal view: that the prohibition in Leviticus 20:13 concerns a man having sex with a man “as with a woman” and that only. Everything that a man does with another man that is not having sex with a man “as with a woman” isn’t prohibited.
So, for example, a man having a romantic relationship with another man, including certain forms of sexual contact = not prohibited.
Evidence for this interpretation? To this day, even Orthodox Jews do not hold that homosexuality is per se prohibited - for example, female homosexuality does not fall within the ambit of this particular prohibition (though it is by definition lascivious behavior, as women cannot marry other women). They generalize to male homosexuality - but no further.
The “literal” interpretation is fully consistent with David & Jonathan having some sort of romantic, even sexual, relationship - minus the “having sex like a woman” part - without Biblical censure.
(2) The generalization view: a man sleeping with a man like a woman = homosexuality of any sort is prohibited, at least between men.
If this interpretation is correct, then David and Jonathan could not have any sort of homosexual relationship, even a purely romantic one, without incurring Biblical censure.
My point is that the Biblical evidence is too thin to definitively choose one interpretation over another from purely Biblical sources (I am discounting the ‘oral Torah’ here). Any modern interpretation - whether by Orthodox Jews, or Gay Activists, or anyone else - is going to be based on other sources they bring to the issue.
The quoted material in Jragon’s post reminded me of a novel that I don’t think has been mentioned yet, Radclyffe Halls’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness. I attempted to read it as a teenager but abandoned it pretty quickly because it was IMHO very, very dated and very, very boring. However, I believe it is often considered the first English-language novel with a lesbian protagonist.
From my modern perspective Stephen (her parents wanted a boy) seemed perhaps more transgender than homosexual – see the Wikipedia entry on “sexual inversion” for more on late 19th/early 20th century views on this subject – but is definitely some flavor of LGBT. Unlike the earlier Carmilla, there’s really no coding or room for interpretation here; Stephen is unambiguously romantically and sexually attracted to women and self-identifies as an “invert”.
How explicitly lesbian was Hall’s The Unlit Lamp?
Maurice was written in 1913, but never published until 1971.
Regiment of Women by “Clemence Dane” (Winifred Ashton) was published in 1917.
If you count gay pornography, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain; or, The Recollections of a Mary-Ann, with Short Essays on Sodomy and Tribadism by an anonymous author who went by the pseudonym Jack Saul, was published in 1881. Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal is attributed to Oscar Wilde; it was published in 1893.
Haven’t read it, but Hall’s Wikipedia entry says The Well of Loneliness was “the only one of her eight novels to have overt lesbian themes” and The Unlit Lamp apparently didn’t attract the same sort of controversy as The Well of Loneliness.
Heck, if you count pornography then there are Greek vase paintings from thousands of years ago explicitly depicting homosexual acts.
If we’re considering just English language works, homosexual acts between both men and women appear in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (aka Fanny Hill), first published in 1748. No cite, but I’ve heard that the brief description of two men having sex in the novel is the earliest known in English literature. The Wikipedia article mentions that this scene was once considered a later addition, but it has since been shown to have been present in the first edition.
I haven’t read Monte Cristo in about three decades, so I’m assuming I read the bowdlerized version; but that one did have Louise d’ Armilly declare that Eugénie Danglars was “running away with her”, which in Dumas’ time meant “eloping”. Eugénie dresses as a man to do so, donning them in a fashion that suggests familiarity with men’s clothing. Later the two women are caught sharing a bed in an inn; and if I remember rightly - I may not be - it’s explicitly stated that the room had two beds.
It’s not exactly a sympathetic portrayal - Louise comes across as a bit of an airhead, and Eugénie as something of a jerk - but it’s not hostile, either.