Behavior, and Not a Person

Homosexuality in Great Britain Section Two: Legislation

Larry Houston — 2013-05-11T19:45:00Z

Legislation

This is the 2nd section in the History of Homosexuality in Great Britain. Legislation against homosexuality first became a function of the state with the Buggery Act in 1533. Prior to this it was the role of the church to regulate homosexuality and it was called sodomy. The next change came with the Offences Against the Person Act in 1828 and 1861. A further change and an important one came with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885, particularly Section 11. With this legislation acts of gross indencency between males whether committed in public or private was a misdemeanour and was liable to imprisonment for up two years. This change expanded the definition of a homosexual act while a the same time making it easier for the prosecution of homosexuality. A fourth piece of legislation, the Official Secrets Acts in 1889 indirectly dealt with homosexuality.

“Legislation against sodomy was in place and enforced well before the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed in 1885. The pre-existing legislation was based on the 1533 statue against sodomy ‘with mankind or beast' and had been modified in the course of the nineteenth century. In 1828 it was re-enacted in the Offenses Against the Person Act, a piece of legislation which covered murder, abortion, rape, and sex with girls under twelve. Further offenses were added to the Act in 1861 and sodomy was dealt with a new ‘unnatural offenses' subsection. The death penalty was replaced with imprisonment for between ten years and life, whilst attempted sodomy or ‘any decent assault upon any male person' carried a sentence of between three and ten years' imprisonment or up to two years with hard labour. When the Criminal Law Amendment Act was added to the statue books in 1885 these existing measures remained in place and section 11 - the so-called Labouchere Amendment – came as an ill-defined addendum.”(Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914, p.42)

“In England¸ from the reign of King Henry VIII to that of Queen Victoria, those convicted of the ‘abominable crime' of buggery or sodomy were liable to suffer death and in practice frequently did so. In 1861 (1889 in Scotland) the maximum penalty was changed to life imprisonment. By the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, homosexual acts of ‘gross indecency' not amounting to buggery, which had hitherto not been regarded as a crime at all, were made subject to a maximum of two years in imprisonment with hard labour.”(Hyde, The Other Love An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain, p.5)

“British legislation, on close examination, was archaic and highly ambivalent in respect to any kind of homosexual category. The Buggery Act of 1553 remained the basis for legislation until 1967. Also, the infamous Criminal Law Amendment of 1885 simply made all sex acts between all males criminal, rather than indicating any kind of special legal classification. In comparison, Continental states appeared to tolerate a burgeoning scientific discourse on the matter. Legislation in these states either allowed consensual sex between male adults, or had legislative arrangements that were more tolerant than Britain. Foe instance, France had decriminalized sex between consulting adult males with the implementation of the Codes Napoleon 1805. Also, the Codes Napoleon were adopted by Italy in 1889.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 27)

“There is little to suggest in the legal framework for prosecuting sex between men that the British legislature, in the late nineteenth century, purposively constructed through a law concept of a homosexual identity. Labouchere's amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885 did not, as historians have claimed, create a legal definition of a homosexual type that then, in turn, constructed notions of this type amongst the general public. The general public, or at least significant sections of urban dwellers demonstrated, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, a well-developed and tacit understanding of the guises and location of this sexuality. These males offended and threatened developing perceptions of what was required to attain full adult masculinity. The legislature perpetuated, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, an archaic, highly inefficient and ambivalent legal framework for prosecuting sex between males. The importance of protecting and bolstering masculinity as central to gender and class structures meant that it was not in the interests of the British state to enquire to deeply or to prosecute this crime efficiently. Even the legislation controlling males soliciting males in 1898 only classified the guilty as vagabonds and rogues, along with pimps, dossers, beggars and female prostitutes. Legal clarification and classification of sexuality between males would have revealed and publicized that this sexuality existed at all.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 115-116)

1. Buggery Act 1533

The Buggery Act of 1533, formally “An Acte for the punysshement of the vice of Buggerie” (25 Hen. 8 c. 6), was an Act of the Parliament of England that was passed during the reign of Henry VIII. It was the country's first civil sodomy law, such offences having previously been dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts. The Act defined buggery as an unnatural sexual act against the will of God and man. This was later defined by the courts to include only anal penetration and bestiality. The Act remained in force until its repeal in 1828. Buggery remained a capital offence in England and Wales until the enactment of the Offences against the Person Act 1861; the last execution for the crime took place in 1836.

“It was a short piece of legislation, which originated in the House of Lords, declaring the ‘detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast' to be a felony subject to the penalties of death and loss of property customarily suffered by felons, without the benefits of clergy, which meant that offenders in holy orders could not claim to be tried in ecclesiastical courts.”(Hyde, The Other Love An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain, p.39)

“Furthermore, the prevalence of homosexual conduct is attested by the fact that sodomy was regarded from early times as an ecclesiastical offence, although it did not become a felony and thus subject to ordinary criminal jurisdiction until the reign of Henry VIII.”(Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, p. 349)

“The Act (25 Henry VIII, c. 6) was repealed in 1547 by Edward VI, along with other legislation passed in his father's time, but it was re-enacted in 1562 (5 Elizabeth c. 17), when Parliament ordained that it was to be perpetual. It remained a capital offence until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the death penalty was abolished for this as for many other offences at the instigation of Sir Robert Peel, then Home Secretary.”(Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, p. 350)

“The Buggery Act remained the basis of legislation for prosecuting acts of anal sex between men until 1967. When sex between two men in private was decriminalised for men over 21, the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967 did not distinguish between anal sex and other forms of sexual contact between men. It is arguable that this legislation, in 1967, was the first English lawto distinguish a ‘class' of men who sex with other men. The 1967 legislation accommodated the sexual lifestyles of men who, as long as they conducted their various and consenting sexual acts in private and the sexual encounter numbered no more than two persons, would not be prosecuted.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 94)

“However, in the eighteen century the judiciay went by laws passed by the Tudor monarchs. In the first of these, a temporary measure passed in 1553, buggery with man or beast became a capital offense. This ruling was made perament in 1540. It was than refined during the reign of Edward VI, only to be repealed by Mary Tudor, along with other new legislation that had been passed by Henry VIII. Under Elizabeth I it was placed on the statue books again in 1562 where it stayed until 1861 when it was decided to replace the death penalty for convicted offenders with imprisonment for at least ten years, and possibly for life.”(Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century London, p. 31)

“As we have seen, sodomy had been made a civil offence in 1533 by Henry VIII, a law confirmed during the reign of Elizabeth I. Although the 1533 Act did not attempt to define what was meant by ‘buggery', later jurists attempted to specify what the act of sodomy actually described in law.”(Cocks, Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century, p. 32)

2. Offences Against the Person Act 1828, 1861

The Offences against the Person Act 1828 (also known as Lord Lansdowne's Act) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It consolidated provisions related to offences against the person (an expression which, in particular, includes offences of violence) from a number of earlier statutes into a single Act. It was one of a number of criminal law consolidation Acts known as Peel's Acts passed with the object of simplifying the law. Further changes were made to this legislation in 1861.

“In Sir Robert Peel's Offences Against the Person Act of 1828, the requirement of proof was disminished to evidence of penetration only, which resulted in an increase in convictions. Nonetheless, the retention of the capital charge meant that juries were still reluctant to convict for unnatural offenses, as men continued to be hanged until 1836 for sodomy and the charged remained a capital indictment until 1861.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 60)

“The Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, finally removed the capital charge for sodomy.” (Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 61)

“The 1861 Act had removed the capital indictment for sodomy, but retained the archaic Buggery Act of 1533 as the basis for legislation. The 1861 Act stipulated that sentences for convictions of sodomy should be life imprisonment with penal servitude. In addition, the Act stimulated the minimum sentence, which must be no less than ten years penal servitude.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 96)

“Until 1861 sodomy was punishable by death; in that year the penalty was reduced to penal servitude of between ten years and life; but less homosexual practices were not then illegal.” (Hichens, Oscar Wilde's Last Chance – The Dreyfus Connection, p. 34)

“The major legislative changes were in 1828, 1861, 1885 and 1889. The first of these changed the requirements of evidence in sodomy trials from penetration and emission in the body to penetration only. The 1861 Offences Against the Person Act formally abolished the death penalty for sodomy and introduced instead life sentences of penal servitude. It also formalized the maximum and minimum sentences for indecent assault by introducing a prison term of between two and ten years as the standard sentence. In 1885, Labouchere's amendment ostensibly introduced the new offence of ‘gross indecency', but did not enlarge the scope of the law any further. Neither did it affect sentencing practice in a noticeable fashion. The law regarding soliciting was changed in 1889, making it possible to prosecute someone for ‘importuning' a homosexual offence.”(Cocks, Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century, p.30-31)

3. The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885

The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 or "An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes" was the latest in a 25-year series of legislation in the United Kingdom beginning with the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 that raised the age of consent and delineated the penalties for sexual offences against women and minors. It also strengthened existing legislation against prostitution and recriminalised male homosexuality.

“The specific purpose of the Criminal Law Amendment Act had been effective prosecution of the prepetrators of the widely publicised scandal involving the prostitutionof young girls.” (Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 94)

“The Criminal Law Act, 1885, raised the age of female consent, while incorporating the notorious Labouchere Amendment altering the existing laws criminalizing buggery. The penalty of imprisonment for ten years to life, reduced from death (never imposed since the 1830s) in 1861, was lowered in 1885 to two years' hard labor, but applied to all consenting homosexual acts between adults in private creating a ‘blackmail charter'.”(Porter and Hall, The Facts of Life The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950, p. 224-225)

“In 1885, however, Parliament passed an act to protect women and young girls from being victimized and to suppress female brothels, and on to this was tacked at the last moment an amendment which made gross indecency between adult males a misdemeanour punishable by two years in prison hard labour. This was initiated by a radical Member of Parliament, Henry Labouchere, Old Etonian, nephew of a lord, who saw his main role in Parliament as being the exposure of fraud and scandal in high places. He was editor of a weekly paper, Truth, a nineteenth-century version of Private Eye, like which he was much involved in suits for libel. It was under his amendment that ten years later Wilde was to be convicted.” (Hichens, Oscar Wilde's Last Chance – The Dreyfus Connection, p. 34)

“Until the Act came into force, on 1 January 1886, the criminal law was not concerned with alleged indecencies between grown-up men committee in private. Everyone knew that such things took place, but the law only punished acts against public decency or conducted tending to the corruption of youth. The Bill in question, entitled, ‘A Bill to make further provision for the protection of women and girls, the suppression, of brothels and other purposes', was introduced and passed in the House of Lords without any reference to indecency between males. In the Commons, after a second reading without comment, it was referred to a committee of the whole House. In committee Mr Labouchere moved to insert into the Bill the clause which ultimately became section 11 of the Act, creating the new offence of indecency between male persons in public or private. Such conduct in public was, and always had been, punishable at common law. There was no discussion, except that one member asked the Speaker whether it was in order to introduce at that stage a clause dealing with a totally different class of offence to that against which the Bill was directed. The Speaker having ruled that anything could be introduced by leave of the House, the clause was agreed to without any further discussion, the only amendment moved being one by Sir Henry James with the object of increasing the maximum punishment from twelve to twenty-four months, which was also agreed to without discussion.” (Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, p. 12)

“As originally drafted this measure was designed in the words of its title ‘to make further provision for the protection of women and girls, the suppression of brothels and other purposes', and it was brought in by the Government as the direct result of a powerful press campaign carried on by the Liberal journalist W. T. Stead against juvenile prostitution and white slavery. Its principal provision was the raising of the ‘age of consent' for young girls from thirteen to sixteen. In its original form, as introduced in the House of Lords, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill made no mention of homosexuals acts, since it was not concerned with this subject at all. After going through all stages in the Lords, the bill went to the Commons, where it was referred to a committee of the whole house after passing its second reading. The committee stage was taken late at night on August 6, 1885, which was to prove a fateful date in the history of English criminal jurisprudence. Henry Labourchere, the Liberal-Radical M. P. and editor of the popular journal Truth, had put down an amendment on the order paper to insert the following new clause:

Any male purpose who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable, at the discretion of the court, to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding one year with or without hard labour.”

(Hyde, The Other Love An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain, p.134)

“Wilde was prosecuted to conviction under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, Section 11, which made homosexual acts between consenting males a criminal offence whether committed in public or in private, the section in question having been proposed by Henry Labouchere, editor of Truth, and agreed to in a thinly attended House in the small hours of an August morning on the eve of the parliamentary summer recess.” (Hyde, A Tangled Web Sex Scandals in British Politics and Society, p. 208)

“It was this Act which included the infamous Lebouchere Amendment. While sodomy had ceased to be a capital crime in 1861, though still penalized by life imprisonment, this Act broadened the definition of homosexual crime to include even consensual acts between adults in private, while reducing the penalty to two years (opposed to the higher sentence imposed on acts often legally defined as ‘attempted sodomy').” (Hall, Sexual cultures in Britain: some persisting themes, p.39 in Sexual Cultures in Europe National Histories editors Franz X. Eder, Lesley Hall and Gert Hekma.)

“With the passage of the Labouchere Amendment in Britain in 1885, private acts of ‘gross indecency ‘ between men became criminalized; while the unification of Germany in 1871 resulted in the adoption of the #152 formerly #143) of the Prussian Criminal Code throughout the German States, which, is paragraph #175 of the Imperial Criminal Code, banned ‘fornication [Unzucht] between male persons'.” (Ivory, The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style¸1850-1930, p.16)

“The ‘other purpose' was met by the ineffably awful clause XI, the ‘Labouchere amendment', which made illegal all types of sexual activity between males (not just sodomy, as hitherto), and irrespective of either age or consent. It is not clear whether this was a genuine attempt to deal with male prostitution, or a ‘Purity' measure, opportunistically and irrelevantly tacked on to the Bill, or whether it was Labouchere's way of trying to overturn a Bill he disliked by a ridiculously extravagant amendment. Whatever the intention, the effect of its enactment is clear: Britain ended up with a proscription going far beyond anything else in any other country at the time. Italy and the Netherlands actually abolished punishment for consenting adults in private in the late 1880s, while it took the advent of Hitler to make Germany follow the new British model.” (Hyam, Empire and Sexuality The British Experience, p. 65)

“Similarly, section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which criminalized all acts of gross indecency between men, has been seen not merely as a legislative event, but as a piece of legislation which shaped the conduct and understanding of male-male relationships for both external observers and the men involved. The law's public authority, writes Nancy Cott, ‘frames what people can envision for themselves and can conceivably demand'; state decree becomes more important to the way we envisage and experience intimacy and the putatively private world of the senses.”(Cook, Law, p. 65 in Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality editors H. G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook.)

“The Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, as we have seen, on the back of mass protest, section 11 of the act – which criminalized acts of gross indecency between men – was a last minute addition, made by the maverick Member of Parliament Henry Labouchere and introduced and passed in a chamber that was virtually empty. It was not the subject of government comment and was barely mentioned in press coverage of the act's passing. Neither did it significantly add to the available statues that could be deployed against men having sex with other men, all of which remained in force. The amendment was symptomatic of confusion rather than intentionality in the making of laws on sex in England, and raises the key question of whose will this law – but also other laws – enshrined.” (Cook, Law, p. 79 in Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality, edited by H. G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook.)

“A further change in the law followed in 1885, when the Liberal PM and journalist Henry Labouchere introduced a clause to the Criminal Law Amendment Act that year. Labouchere's amendment, as it came to be known, stated that ‘any male person, who, in public or private, commits . . . any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour' and punishable by up to two years in prison. What gross indecency actually meant in law was never specified in the legislation, but the courts seemed to have merely added it to existing offences and used it to describe consenting acts which fell short of sodomy. This is how it was applied in the trial of Oscar Wilde, at any rate.”(Cocks, Secrets, Crimes, and Diseases, 1800-1914, p. 112 in A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages, editor Matt Cook.)

“Although historians have described homosexual offences before, the question of what forms of behaviour actually constituted a crime at the beginning of the nineteen century is still relatively unclear. This lack of clarity is partly of the consequence of the retrospective interpretations of those, like the Liberal MP Henry Labouchere, who took it upon themselves to change the law and thereby reinvigorate public morals. On 6 August 1885, Labouchere moved his now notorious amendment outlawing acts of ‘gross indecency' between men both in private and in public. He justified his clause by arguing that before 1885, ‘the law was insufficient to deal with it, because the offence had to be proved by an accessory, and many other offences very much of the same nature were not regarded as crimes at all'. He had therefore provided the means by which ‘Parliament armed the guardians of public morality with full powers to deal with this offence.”(Cocks, Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century, p.17)

“In spite of Labouchere's claims, it is now clear that his efforts did not change the law in a dramatic fashion.”(Cocks, Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century, p.17)

“As we have seen, Labouchere's amendment in 1885 did not revolutionise the law or move its focus from sexual acts to particular ‘homosexual' types of people as had been frequently claimed.”(Cocks, Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century, p.31)

“Weeks, Cohen and others regard changes in British legislation, particularly the 1855 Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, as the classification and categorization of a homosexual ‘species' in legal arrangements. Nevertheless, as Montgomery-Hyde's work highlights, the sixteenth-century Buggery Act remained the basis for legislation in proscribing sex between men until its repeal in 1967. Alternations to this legislation in the nineteenth century certainly widened its scope to establish in law that all sexual acts between men were criminal. But the legislation that criminalized sex between men in the period in question never, in essence, distinguished between bestiality, heterosexual sodomy or homosexual sex. This ambivalence in the legal definitions up to 1967 defiles the medico-legal analysis of a purposive, legislative categorization of the homosexual.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 52)

“However, there is little or no sense of historical agency in Weeks' or Cohen's studies that would offer an insight to the highly incidental nature of the inclusion of Clause 11 in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. There is also little sense of the actions of individuals in policy making in the Home Office, the government department that had the responsibility for interpreting and implementing the changes in legislation. Cohen and Weeks present both the legislature and the Home Office as monolithic and faceless engines of purposive intent in the control of sex between men. This chapter, instead, analyses the conflict, chaos and ambivalence that existed amongst ministers and administrators at the Home Office in the late nineteenth century, in respect to control and punishment of sex between men.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 87)

“In many respects, the inclusion of Clause 11 in the Criminal law Amendment Act of 1885 cannot be viewed as a purposive attempt by the state to construct a pejorative homosexual ‘type' through legislation. However, historians such as Cohen and Weeks emphasise the effects of this legislation, once implemented, on broader perceptions of a homosexual identity. Undoubtedly, the inclusion of Clause 11 did have some cultural effects.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 93)

“The introduction of Clause 11 in 1885 did ensure a catch-all of sexual acts between males. However, in 1885, British legislation did not create a specific legal category of a legal ‘class' or type of men who would have sex with other men. Instead, legislation criminalized, through the Buggery laws and Clause 11 in combination, a cascade of sexual acts perpetrated by any man, ranging from anal penetration of other males (and bestiality and the anal penetration of women) to mutual masturbation between males.” (Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 97)

“In addition, ‘all male homosexuals' were not, in any respect, defined as ‘a class' in any legal arrangements following Labouchere's Amendment.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 112)

“Clause 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act was not, as historians often claim, a revolution in jurisprudence. Nor did it replace or supersede the Buggery laws as the basis of legislation. There was little in the legal framework to suggest that the legislature purposively constructed a homosexual category. Indeed, it is remarkable how little British legislation altered in this respect. Even the addition of Clause 11, without debate, to the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885 did not, as historians claim, create a legal definition of a homosexual type that then, in turn, constructed notions of this type to amongst the public.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 216)

4. Official Secrets Acts 1889

This legislation dealt indirectly with homosexuality in Great Britain. This act allowed for keeping information from being publicly disclosed for 100 years. It was used to keep government information closed mainly foreign and military secrets, but also any information chosen by the government. This included information about trials of homosexual related offenses.

“Home Offices dossiers of sentencing policies for bestiality and sodomy between men were some of the first to be closed using the Official Secrets Acts in 1889,along with foreign and military secrets. These dossiers contain materials on this issue relating to the late 1880s and were closed in 1889 using the one hundred year closure rule, the most stringent tool secrecy available to government. Another series of dossiers, containing material about prosecution of sex between men relating to the late 1870s, 1880s and the 1890s, but compiled between 1892 and 1898, were finally closed using the one hundred year rule in 1889. These dossiers, containing invaluable insights into late Victorian official attitudes towards the matter of sex between men, only became available in for view in 1989. The secrecy surrounding this material is indicative of the imperative to keep the discussion of sexuality between men out of the public domain, utilizing the rarely implemented one hundred year rule. The late Victorian administrations largely succeeded in this aim, as the bulk of this historically important material does not even appear, even in recent historiography.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 91)

Bibliography

Brady, Sean. Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britian, 1861-1913. Palgrave Macmillan. Basingstoke, England & New York, 2005.

Cocks, H. G. Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century. I.B. Tauris Publishers. London and New York, 2003.

Cocks, H. G. and Matt Houlbrook editors. Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality. Palgrave MacMillian. New York, 2006.

Cook, Matt. Law. p.64-86 in Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality, edited by H. G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook.

Cook, Matt. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, and Cape Town, 2003.

Cook, Matt editor. A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages. Greenwood World Publishing. Oxford/Westport Connecticut, 2007.

Eder, Franz X., Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma editors. Sexual Cultures in Europe Natural histories. Manchester University Press. Manchester and New York, 1999.

Goldsmith, Netta Murray. The Worst of Crimes Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century London. Ashgate. Aldershot, Brookfield, USA, Singapore & Sydney, 1998.

Hichens, Mark. Oscar Wilde's Last Chance – The Dreyfus Connection. The Pentland Press. Edinburgh, Cambridge, Durham, USA, 1999.

Hyde, H Montgomery. The Trials of Oscar Wilde. Dover Publications, INC. New York, 1962.

Hyde, H Montgomery. The Other Love An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain. Heineman. London, 1970.

Hyde, H Montgomery. A Tangled Web Sex Scandals in British Politics and Society. Constable. London, 1986.

Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality The British Experience. Manchester University Press. Manchester and New York, 1992.

Ivory, Yvonne. The Homosexual Revial of Renaissance Style. Palgrave Macmillan. Basingstoke England and New York, 2009.

Porter, Roy and Lesley Hall. The Facts of Life The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950. Yale University Press. New Haven and London, 1995.

Homosexuality in Ancient Greece Section 2

Larry Houston — 2013-05-11T17:22:00Z

erastes and eromenos

In a pederastic relationship there were two partners, the older one was called the erastes and the younger was the eromenos. The relationship was to end when the younger one was around 18 years of age, when he started growing facial hair. While the relationship begin about the time the younger one started puberty. After the relationship ended the younger, eromenos, was expected to marry, and then he could then become the erastes to a younger partner. The relationship was based a mutual liking of both partners towards one another. Ideally, more importantly the older, erastes, was always to have the best interest of the younger, eromenos, in mind. Thus this was not a sexual relationship, but one of educating and training the younger by the older to be a successful adult male in Greek society.

“In Athens, the adult man socialized the boy into adult male society and the adolescent expressed his gratitude by granting his erasted (favor” (kharis), sexual license, even intercrural intercourse. Only the erastes was meant to experience Love (eros); the eromenos should experience “friendship” (philia; but see Johns 1982: 101; DeVires 1997; Halperin 1997: 45-54).” (Younger, Sex in the Ancient World From A to Z, p. 92)

“The erastes, adult male lover, would offer gifts, such as the apple (with its erotic significance) or a rooster, or more extravagantly, a horse or chariot to his young male beloved, the eromenos. In vessels probably intended for symposia, painters depicted sex between men and youths as “intercrural” intercourse, the man's penis inserted between the boy's thighs'. It would have been shameful for the boy to submit to anal sex. This behavior continued in classical fifth- and fourth- century Athens, but it had to be carefully modulated. A man gained honor by aggressively pursuing and conquering a boy, but if the boy surrendered for money, than he would lose honor. It was shameful for a father or guardian to prostitute his own son, and if he did so, the boy had no obligation to support him in his old age.” (Clark, Desire A History of European Sexuality, p. 23)

“Furthermore, it is only the desire to play the active role that is regarded as “natural”. The younger male yields to the older's importunities out of admiration, compassion, or gratitude but is expected to feel neither desire or enjoyment.” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 139)

“It is important to remember that the erastes/eromenos relationship was an idealized model for sexual contact between males and that the realities of passions may have more closely resembled the lusty comedies of Aristophanes. It is probably erroneous to assume that intracrural intercourse the exclusive form of intimacy between males among the ancient Greeks.” (Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 9)

“Among ancient Greeks, sexual contact between males of the same social group was scrupulously concerned with status and was played out according to rules that assured neither party was degraded or open to accusations of licentiousness. The idealized sexual partnership between men consisted of an active older and a passive younger partner. While the older took pleasure in the sexual act, the younger partner was not expected to. The two roles were distinguished by having different labels; the older partner was called the erastes and the younger the eromenos.” (Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 8)

“Though youths were taught to resist, they were also taught that it was acceptable to yield to the worthy eremenos. They could take it for granted that their taking on the roles of erastes and later eromenos would be acceptable to their fathers and uncles-as long as they followed the rules for playing those roles, played their assigned role within the highly stylized pursuit-and-flight pattern” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 139)

“The eromenos, clearly, is not represented as a victim or a person who passively submits. He is, instead, a person whose dignity is emphasized not only in the literature but also in vase iconography, and he participates actively in the exchange which is at the foundation of the erotic relationship.”( Lear and Cantarella, Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty Boys Were Their Gods, p.192)

“To conclude on this point: the minimum age is around twelve or thirteen years of age, but the sanction that applies to those who don't respect that are entirely social” (Lear and Cantarella, Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty Boys Were Their Gods, p. 5)

“The age of a beloved boy seems always to have been between 12 and twenty.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.68)

“There remains the problem of the maximum age: at what age I it become inappropriate to continue to be a “beloved?” Strato indicates a precise age: seventeen. But he was not referring to a legally established age; he was referring to the age at which the boy ceased to be desirable because he lost his attractions. At seventeen, more or less, his body assumed the characteristics of an adult male, the most obvious of which was the hair that grew on his face, his thighs, and his chest. At this point, no one would court him any more: he had ceased to be a pais kalos (beautiful boy). (Lear and Cantarella, Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty Boys Were Their Gods, p. 6)

“As a rule the first sign of down on the chin of the beloved deprived him of his lover.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.68)

“As a rule the lover in these associations was a mature man less than forty years of age.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.68)

“When discussing the Greek love of boys, one thing especially must not be forgotten: that it is never a question of boys (as we mostly use the word), that is, of children of tender age, but always of boys who are sexually mature, that is, who have reached the age of puberty.” (Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, p.416)

“Paiderastia, the eroticized socialization of an adolescent boy into Greek male society by an adult man (contrast Roman boy-love), especially in the sixth and fifth century BCE (Aristophanes; Homoeroticism; Sexual Attitudes). The adolescent (11-18) was the eromenos (beloved, or paidika, “kid”); the man (late 20s-early 30s) was the erastes (lover) perhaps the boy's maternal uncle (Bremmer 1983; Iolaus).” (Younger, Sex in the Ancient World From A to Z, p. 91)

“The relationship would continue from its inception when the boy was young (eleven years old, Straton) to the time when he begins to get facial hair (Plutarch, Erotikos 770b-c) and is inducted into the military, at age eighteen.” (Younger, Sex in the Ancient World From A to Z, p. 92)

“However much the Greeks at all times approved of the relation between man and youth that rested upon mutual liking, they in the same manner rejected it if the boy sold himself for money.” (Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, p.437)

“As we have seen in chapter 4, the most celebrated variety of homoeroticism was a traditional social construct long before the Classical period began. It was something men of the better class did together apart from women of the better class. As often in sexual relationships, there was an understood distinction of roles; the older partner, the initiator and aggressor, the active “lover,” or erastes, dominated the younger, passive, modest eromenos. The role of the erastes was to comport himself with moderation and restraint, whereas the young eromenos was to display no sexual desire of his own, reciprocating his lover's eros with simple goodwill, philia. If he accepted a lover's attention he was perceived to “grafify” (kharizesthai) his suitor out of gratitude (kharis) rather than sexual desire, but the gratitude was less for love of gives (never for money) than for the older man's time and attention. In return for being “gratified” through intercrural sex (as in fig. 5.12), the older man would introduce the younger boy to adult society and social skills; through this means the eromenos would take his place in the male world of wellborn aristocrats, the “beautiful and good” kalokagathoi. For the adolescent boy, it was both an education in the customs of his class and a rite passage to privileged society.” (Garrison, Sexual Culture in Ancient Greece, p.157)

“They were tied together in a pact equally compelling for both. It was the obligation of the erastes always to be an outstanding and impeccable example to the boy. He should not commit any deed that would shame the boy. His total responsibility to the boy made him dependent on the boy in ways far beyond the purely erotic. He was judged by the development and conduct of the boy. Even in regards to the bodily aspect of the relationship the boy could assert himself against his tutor.” (Vanggard, Phallos A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 88)

“The relationship between erastes and eromenos was seen as having an educational and moral function, to be apart the youth's initiation into full manhood. Therefore, it was a disgrace not to be wooed -although also a shame to yield to easily. The lover became responsible for the youth's development and honor. Because the more mature partner was assumed to be motivated by true regard his beloved's well-being, and because what was wanted was love and consent not simply sexual satisfaction, rape, fraud, or intimidation were disallowed (indeed proof of coercion was grounds for banishment). The two shared fame and shame.” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 139)

“The relationship rarely continued (Male Homosexuality). Both partners were expected to marry, the erastes soon after his paiderastic relationship ceased. The eromenos thus could be the erastes of another eromenos (Peisistratos).” (Younger, Sex in the Ancient World From A to Z, p. 92)

Greek Philosophers

A review of the surviving historical written records from the three greatest philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle will show that they regarded homosexual conduct as intrinsically immoral. Therefore they would have rejected the “idea of a modern gay identity”.

“All three of the greatest Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, regarded homosexual conduct intrinsically immoral. All three rejected the linchpin of modern “gay” ideology and lifestyle.

At the heart of the Platonic-Aristotelian and later ancient philosophical rejections of all homosexual conduct, and thus of the modern “gay” ideology, are three fundamental theses: (1) The commitment of a man and a woman to each other in the sexual union of marriage is intrinsically good and reasonable, and is incompatible with sexual relations outside of marriage. (2) Homosexual acts are radically and peculiarly non-martial, and for that reason intrinsically unreasonable and unnatural. (3) Furthermore, according to Plato, if not Aristolte, homosexual acts have a special similarity to solitary masturbation, and both types of radically non-martial act are manifestly unworthy of the human being and immoral.” (Finnis, “Law, Morality, and Sexual Orientation”, p.33)

“Philosophers such as Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle expressed this attitude in a more radical form, and consequently were only prepared to accept pederastic relationships in their nonsexual form. Thus they attempted at least theoretically to put an end to the ancient tendency to sexually abuse boys and youths.” (Detel, Translated by David Wigg-Wolf. Foucault and Classical Antiquity Power, Ethics and Knowledge, p. 135)

Plato

“But Plato at least understood the myth to finger Liaus as the inventor of homosexuality. In the Laws, the Athenian Stranger, tacking the difficult problem of regulating sexual passion, “the cause of myriad evils both for the individual and whole states,” says that “following nature” legislators should make the law as was “before Liaus,” when sex with men and youths as though they were women (a reference no doubt to sodomy) was forbidden on the model of animals, which Plato mistakenly believed restricted sex to procreation. Plato sees the state of nature as one where homosexuality does not exist, sex between males thus being an unnatural invocation whose origin is Laius. This would be consistent with Peisandros, who calls Laius's passion a “lawless eros”, “lawless in the sense of “contrary to natural law,” an interpretation supported by another epithet Peisandros uses, atheniton, which means “lawless” in the sense of “contrary to established customs,” the unwritten laws handed down by the gods before history, not those legislated by men. Nor is Plato's view of homosexuality as “unnatural” merely a consequence of his old age. In the earlier Phadrus, one of the great encomia to pederasty, he likewise calls same-sex gratification “lawless” and criticizies the lesser soul that cannot see the form of beauty in a handsome boy and so “is not ashamed to pursue pleasure against nature.”

Homosexuality, then, to the Greeks is a historical invocation, a result of the depraved human imagination and vulnerability to pleasure.” (Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.102)

“The pederastic milieu of the gymnasium, where young men exercised naked, was considered a Spartan invention, along with the innovation of rubbing olive oil on the body before exercising, to protect the skin but also no doubt to increase the athlete's erotic allure. Plato's Athenian Stranger indulges these culture stereotypes when he holds the Dorians responsible for “corrupt[ing] the pleasures of sex which are according to nature, not just for men but for beasts”. Again Plato see homosexuality as a historical phenomenon, an “enormity” arising out of the “inability to control a pleasure defined as “against nature” because it is its own end rather than serving the goal of procreation. Later in the Laws he again condemns homosexuality, along with adultery and heterosexual sodomy, on the grounds of being “not according to nature” because it does not lead to procreation.” (Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.103)

“ Plato's distaste for homosexuality is shared by his contemporary Xenophen, a great admirer of the Spartans who is anxious to resolve them of their traditional responsibility for legitimizing homosexuality. The mythical lawgiver of Sparta, Lcyurgus, Xenophon tells us, forbade physical intimacy between the boy and his admirer, categorizing homosexuality with other crimes like incest. Like Plato, Xenophon considers sexual relations between men a depravity that all right-thinking men should abhor as much as they would incest.” (Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.103)

Aristotle

“Although Aristotle, as we saw, implies the Dorians invented homosexuality, elsewhere he recognizes that homosexuals can be born as well as made. Either way, though, they are a deviation from the norm. While discussing the Nichomachean Ethics why some unpleasant or disgusting practices are pleasurable, he says that some “diseased things” result from “nature” or “habit,” and he instances pulling out one's hair, nailbiting, eating coals or earth, and “sex between males.” The latter, he notes, often results from childhood sexual abuse. Such persons are no more “unrestrained” in their sexual behavior, than a woman, whether they are made that way by nature or the “disease” of habit. Despite Aristotle's tolerant and objective tone, homosexuality is still characterized as a “disease” (nosematodie), a compulsive, unpleasant, and destructive behavior akin to manias like eating dirt or chewing one's fingernails. Even pederasty, that supposedly accepted institution of the city-state, is here seen as possibly contributing to what Aristotle considers a morbid condition. Today's kinaidos is yesterday's eromenos or “boy-favorite.” (Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.104)

“The Aristotelian corpus offers other evidence for the belief that homosexuality results from a physiological deformity brought about by either nature or habit. A bizarre passage from the Problems explains why a man would find pleasure in being anally penetrated-obviously in the Greek mind a disturbing anomaly, needing some explanation. Starting from the assumption that every form of excretion has a region in the body from which it is secreted, the write explains that the passive homosexual, due to some damage to the ducts that take semen to the testicles and penis, is “unnaturally constituted” and so has semen collect in his anus. This damage could be a result of an inborn deformity or childhood sexual abuse. The collected fluid caused by desire, a desire that cannot be gratified because there is no way to discharged the accumulated semen. Hence the catamite seeks out anal intercourse in order to relieve the swelling. The writer goes on to note that boys subjected to anal intercourse will become habituated to it, thus associating pleasure with the act. Environment and childhood experience play a major role in creating the passive homosexual by deforming the body.” (Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.104-105)

Physiognomy

“The pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomy similarly describes the effects of passive homosexuality on the body: The effeminate man is drooping-eyed, knock=kneed, his head hanging on one shoulder, his hands carried upturned and flabby. He wriggles his loins as he walks, or tries not to, and he looks furtively. Both these passages, like the ones in Plato, see homosexuality as a deformed condition brought about by a natural disorder or by habit-something, in short, “abnormal,” not quite the practice “accepted by and fully integrated into society” that some modern scholars believe it to be.” (Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.105)

Greek Laws

Also there are written records of legal provisions regulating various forms of homoerotic behavior. These legal provisions may be may be grouped into three categories. The first group has been mentioned before, legal provisions surrounding male prostitution. The male lost the right to address the Assembly and to participate in other areas of civil life if he engaged in homosexual intercourse for gain. These legal provisions against male prostitution also applied to pederasty. A second group addressed laws relating to education and courtship. General provisions concerning sexual assault comprised the third group of laws that may apply to all sexual behavior, whether it was heterosexual or homosexual in nature.

Concerning pederasty itself, numerous laws addressed it, and in various ways throughout Greece. Because it was mostly limited to the ruling class and therefore for the most part socially acceptable in practical terms the laws were rarely enforced. Except in cases where within the ruling class they were used to gain political advantage in disputes.

“But in Greece, though pederasty was forbidden by law in most cities, it had become so fashionable that no one troubled to conceal it. On the contrary, such tendencies were respected and even approved.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.63)

“We are clearly in a different realm from the romantic pursuit of young men in their teens by young men in their twenties known as paederasty, an activity well illustrated on Athenian vases of the late sixth and early fifth centuries B.C.E. and portrayed in Plato's dialogues as an experience sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes delicious, but always of general interest and approval. In paederasty, as Dover, Golden, and Foucault have carefully demonstrated, a variety of conventions combined to protect the junior partner from the stigma of effeminacy, of being a kinaidos. (Winkler, “Laying Now the Law: The Oversight of Men's Sexual Behavior in Classical Athens”. p. 186 in Before Sexuality The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World editors David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin)

“As Dover has aptly observed (1978, 88 f.), the same kind of two-faced morality must have governed homosexual seduction that controls heterosexual relations in most societies; pursuit and seduction are sanctioned, the yielding to seduction is not. Athens went to great lengths to protect its handsome young sons from men preying on their beauty; stringent measures were built into the legal system to prevent boys from falling into prostitution. However since love gifts and social favors were part of the pederastic pattern, it must have been difficult to determine exactly at which point prostitution began.” (Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece, p. 296

“All the same, at Athens, a whole body of laws existed for the purpose of restraining the spread of pederasty. This legislation probably dated back to the time of Solon. It aimed among many other things at keeping male lovers out the schools and exercising arenas so far as possible. (See Aeschines, Against Timarchus, 9-11.) But laws can do very little to suppress widely disseminated and inveterate habits.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.67)

“The available evidence points to a certain Athenian nervousness regarding all types of homosexual encounters. Solon's laws concerning homosexuality, for which our chief source is Aeschines' speech Against Timarchus, attempted to regulate its practice and to protect Athenian citizens from sexual abuses: slaves could not indulge in homosexuality willingly or unwillingly or frequent the palaestras; free persons could not be prostituted or violated; and fathers were encouraged to protect their sons from seduction by employing guardians to watch out for their best interests, at least until they reached an age at which they could make intelligent decisions regarding the conduct of their lives.” (Henderson, The Maculate Muse, p.204-205)

“From Aeschines' speech it is possible to perceive something of the code of behavior that surrounded the carrying out of such affairs. Love affairs between men and boys or between grown men could, depending on the circumstances, be licentious and depraved or noble and chaste. If a man conducted the affair high-mindedly, without any kind of payment and out of proper regard for his lover's beauty and -----, then no one could blame him for satisfying his desires. But if a man prostituted himself for payment or made a habit of surrendering his body or pursuing young men for purely sensual purposes, than he could legitimately be called to account for lewdness.” (Henderson, The Maculate Muse, p.205)

“An important turning-point is indicated by the name of Solon (Aeschine, Tim., 138; Charicles, ii, 262 ff.), who, himself a homosexual, issues important laws for the regulation of paederasty, providing in the first place, especially, that a slave might not have connection with a free-born boy. This shows two things: first, that paedophilla was recognized in Athens by the legislator, and secondly that the legislator did not consider the feeling of superiority of the free born to be diminished by intimate relations with a slaves. Further, laws were issued (Aeschines, Tim., 13-15) which were intended to protect free-born youths from abuse during their minority. Another law deprived those of their civic rights who incited free boys to offer their charms for sale professionally; for prostitution has nothing to do with paedophilla, of which we are speaking here, and in which we must rather think always only of a voluntary relationship that is based upon mutual affection.” (Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, p. 452-453) “Solon, the famous lawgiver and chief archon at Athens in 594/3 B.C., is alleged to have instituted two pieces of moral legislation in Athens pertaining to homosexuality in the gymnasium. The first prohibits slaves from activities of the gymnasium and from having freeborn slaves as lovers:” (Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, p. 212)

“A second “Solonian” law, this probably dating to the late fifth century, prescribes hours for opening and closing schools and palaestrae to discourage homosexual liaisons from taking place there in the dark or without the presence of the proper supervisors:” (Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, p. 213)

“The Athenians themselves were not unaware of these ambiguities and contradictions. To begin with: according to the Xenophon, Greeks were well aware of that laws and customs regarding pederasty varied widely between different states. Some prohibited it outright, others explicitly permitted it. In the Symposium Plato put into the mouth of Pausanias an econcomium of love which explicitly addresses the conflicts within Athenian norms and customs pertaining to pederasty. Whereas for the rest of Greece these laws and customs are clear and well defined, explains Pausanias, those of Sparta are “poikilos”-intricate, complicated, subtle. He comments that Athenian legislation in this are is admirable, but difficult to understand; the difficulty consists in the simultaneous approbation and censure which social norms and legal rules attach to the pursuit of a pederastic courtship.” (Cohen, Law, Society and Homosexuality in Classical Athens, p. 152 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey)

“The legal provisions regulating various forms of homoerotic behaviour may be grouped in three categories: laws relating to prostitution; laws relating to education and courtship; and finally, general provision concerning sexual assault. These are only categories of convenience, however, and there can be considerable overlap between them. The laws concerning male prostitution may be considered first. One statue partially disenfranchised any Athenian citizen who prostituted himself, whether as a boy or as an adult; he lost his right to address the Assembly and to participate in other important areas of civic life. Secondly, if a boy was hired out for sexual services by his father, brother, uncle or guardian, they were subject to a public action, as was the man who hired him. Thirdly, a general statue prohibit procuring and applied any free-born child or woman.” (Cohen, Law, Society and Homosexuality in Classical Athens, p. 153 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey)

“The second category of laws pertained to education and set out a series of detailed prohibitions designed, among other things, to protect schoolboys from erotic attentions of older males. These laws regulated all the contacts which boys had with adult males during the period at school, and provided for an appointment of public officials to ensure that proper order was maintained. According to Aeschines, the law forbade the schools to open before sunrise or to stay open after dark, and strictly regulated who might enter and under what circumstances. Finally, another law prohibited slaves from courting free boys.” (Cohen, Law, Society and Homosexuality in Classical Athens, p. 153-154 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey)

“The third kind of statutory prohibition is rather more problematical than the first two and has received scant attention in regard to regulation of homoerotic conduct. Here I referto the law of hubris (outrage or abuse). Current scholarship on pederasty commonly asserts that there was no law prohibiting an Athenian male from consummating a sexual relationship with a free boy without using force or payment. This point is usually adduced as the cornerstone of the standard interpretation. This interpretation ignores, however, a series of questions concerning the legal context of pederastic sexuality which, to my knowledge has never been asked. Did the Athenian law acknowledge an age of consent in its conceptualization of sexual assault and seduction? If the consent of the boy was not a bar to prosecution, did any consummated sexual relationship with a boy fulfill the required elements of the offence? Did Athenian law have some notion equivalent to statutory rape in modern legal systems, where consent is the crucial issue in definition of rape offenses? An affirmative answer to any of these questions would require one to reassess the standard view that the active role in pederastic relationships was absolutely free from any taint of disapprobation. (Cohen, Law, Society and Homosexuality in Classical Athens, p. 154 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey)

“The set of legal norms embodied in these statues reflects a social order which encompassed a profound ambivalence and anxiety in regard to male-male sexuality; a social order which recognized the existence and persistence of such behaviour, but was deeply concerned about the dangers which it represented. The chief of these dangers was the corruption of the future of the polis, represented by the male, participated in sexual intercourse with men were believed to have pros children of citizen families. Boys who, under certain circumstances participated in sexual intercourse with men were believed to have acted for gain and to have adopted a submissive role which disqualified them as potential citizens. Likewise, adult citizens who prostituted themselves were subject to the same civic disabilities and opprobrium. These laws represented one of the severest sanctions which such a society could impose, and they reflect the level of concern for the preservation of the citizen body.” (Cohen, Law, Society and Homosexuality in Classical Athens, p. 156-157 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey)

“Scholars usually do not refer to hubris in connection with pederasty because they believe hubris to require violent insult and outrage. They have not paid sufficient attention, however, to the way in which the law of hubris may have provided for the principle criminal penalties for rape. But although rape is often characterized as hubris, so is seduction. Euphiletus, foe example, refers to the hubris which the lover of his wife has committed against him (Lysias 1.4, 17, 25) and an oration of Demosthenes involves a prosecution for hubris (hubreos graphe) brought by a son on account of the seduction of his mother.

Such contexts perfectly match Aristotle's definition of hubris as any behaviors which dishonors and shames the victim for the pleasure or gratification of the offender (Rhetoric 1387b). Indeed, it is in this connection that Aeschines introduced the law of hubris into the catalogue of statutes which he enumerated as regulating paederasty in Athens in the fourth century B.C. In fact, when he first refers to the law of hubris he characterizes it as the statute which includes all such conduct in one summary prohibition: “If anyone conmmits hubris against a child or man or woman or anyone free or slave . . .” (Aeschines 1, 15). Accordingly, Athenian sources qualify both rape and seduction of women and children as acts of hubris, for both violate the sexual integrity and honor of the family.” (Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and Society The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens, p.178-179)

“The violation of a free boy was hubris, or wanton disregard of the rights of another, and could lead to the death penalty. Apparently fathers scolded and schoolmates teased boys who had lovers. But we do not know how often these relationships were sexual; they might have been twilight moments, frequently occurring yet rarely acknowledged.” (Clark, Desire A History of European Sexuality, p. 23)

We can now in conclusion say homoerotic behavior in ancient Greece and our modern western culture has much more in common and for the most part it is in agreement. There is great confusion and disagreement. The whole idea of the societal acceptance and legalization of homosexual behavior is the agenda and focus of homosexuals themselves and those on the liberal political left. Attempting to bring about the acceptance and change, the social and legal tolerance of homosexuality by a minority upon the majority. When viewed in the context of the defining marriage to allow same-sex marriage, and voting by the general population homosexual behavior is not approved.

Though one important difference when comparing homosexuality between ancient Greece and our modern western culture is that of concerning the physical sexual component in ancient Greek pederasty, today sex between adult males and adolescent boys is illegal and socially not acceptable in our modern western society.

Bibliography

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Cantarella, Eva. Translated by CormacO Cuilleanain. Bisexuality in the Ancient World. Yale University Press. New Haven & London, 1992.

Clark, Anna. Desire A History of European Sexuality. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. New York and London, 2008.

Cohen, David. Law, Society and Homosexuality in Classical Athens. p. 151-166 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey.

Cohen, David. Law, Sexuality, and Society The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, England, 1991.

Davidson, James N. Courtesans & Fishcakes The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. St. Martin's Press. New York, 1998.

Detel, Wolfgang. Translated by David Wigg-Wolf. Foucault and Classical Antiquity Power, Ethics and Knowledge. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Dover, K. J. Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior, p. 114-125 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey.

Downing, Christine. Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love. Continuum Publishing Company. New York, 1989.

Finnis, John. “Law, Morality, and “Sexual Orientation””, p.31- 42 in Same Sex Debating the Ethics, Science and Culture of Homosexuality, editor John Corvino. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Lanham, Maryland, 1997.

Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece. Greenwood Press Publishers. Westport, Connecticut, 1973.

Golden, Mark and Peter Toohey. Editors. Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome. Edinburgh University Press. Edinburgh, 2003.

Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other essays on Greek Love. Routledge. New York and London, 1990.

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Garrison, Daniel H. Sexual Culture in Ancient Greece. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman OK, 2000.

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Golden, Mark and Peter Toohey. Editors. Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome. Edinburgh University Press. Edinburgh, 2003.

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Keuls, Eva C. The Reign of the Phallus Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece. University of California Press. Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London, 1985.

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Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Translated by David Macey. Our Dark Side A History of Perversion. Polity. Malden, MA and Cambridge, UK, 2009.

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Before Homosexuality: Sodomy

Larry Houston — 2013-05-11T15:13:00Z

Before Homosexuality: Sodomy

Same-sex sexual acts have a history; today they are called “homosexuality”. Before ‘homosexuality” they were called “sodomy”. In England during the reign of King Henry VIII “sodomy” became a civil offense with the passage of the buggery Act of 1533. In Germany in the late 1860s the transition from a religious model to a medical model for same-sex sexual acts begin. It was at this time the term “homosexual” itself was coined.

“What sodomy and buggery represented – and homosexuality was only part of these – was rather the disorder of sexual relations that, in principle at least could break out anywhere.” (Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, p. 25)

“Before the eighteen century, then, it was conceivable that any man or woman might engage in the unnatural act of sodomy, as part of a more generalized “bisexual” behavior. Sodomites were not fundamentally different from anyone else. They were simply sinners who engaged in a particular vice, like gamblers, drunks, adulterers, and the like.” (Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 12)

“In the older sense, sodomy surpassed all other crimes; in its sinfulness it also included all of them: from blasphemy, sedition, and witchcraft, to the demonic. It was, as many extracts declare, the crime without a name; language was incapable of sufficiently expressing the horror of it. The category was a repository for many items, yet in the eighteenth century a highly specific portrait of an individual, and of a group, was increasingly displacing an undiscriminating, demonic generalization.” (McCormick editor, Secret Sexualities A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing, p. 118)

“Sodomy surpassed all other crimes. In its sinfulness it also included all of them, blasphemy, sedition, witchcraft, the demonic: it is yet without a Name: What shall it then be called? There are not Words in our Language to expressive enough of the Horror of it.' The foregoing suggests, however, a degree of insecurity about the range of the activity, and what it ought to be called. It was terrible in its sublimity, but unnamed in its sublimation. What was changing was that a specific kind of portrait of an individual was taking over from a theological category of generalized evil.” (McCormick, editor Sexual Outcasts 1750-1850 Volume II Sodomy, p. 5)

“For several hundreds of years, the institutions of the majority considered homosexuality something a person did and called it sodomy, buggery, or a crime against nature. During the nineteenth century, a conceptual shift occurred, and a few individuals began to talk about homosexuality as something a person was. A new vocabulary was invented for these persons. Urning, invert-homosexual.” (Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 248)

“Homosexuality, and by implication homosexuals, have been placed outside prevailing social structures as defined by most theological, legal, and medical models. In Western culture, homosexual activity was first categorized as a sin. With the rise of materialism and the decline of religion, it became a transgression against the social, not the moral order: a crime.” (Bronski, Culture Clash The Making of Gay Sensibility, p. 8-9).

“There is, however, a crucial distinction between traditional concepts of sodomy and modern concepts of homosexuality. The former was seen as a potentiality in all sinful nature, unless severely execrated and judicially punished (it is striking, for example, that death penalties for many crimes were abolished in the 1820s, but not for sodomy). Contemporary social sciences have treated homosexuality as the characteristic of a particular type of person, a type whose specific characteristics (such as inability to whistle, penchant for the color green, adoration of mother or father, age of sexual maturation, "promiscuity") are exhaustively detailed in many twentieth-century textbooks.” (Weeks, Movements of Affirmation: Sexual Meanings and Homosexual Identities. p. 71 in Passion and Power Sexuality in History editors Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons with Robert A. Padgug)

Before Homosexuality: Sodomy

Sodomy/sodomite were the words used to define and describe same-sex sexual acts or behavior before the concept of homosexuality/homosexual. Sodomy was at first a generally specific act, a sexual one, which became more broadly used as an ecclesiastical offence, a category covering a wide range of transgressive acts that was any activity that challenged the ‘Nature' of the church-state authority. Many authors have claimed that the model of sodomy as a sinful act was replaced by a model of the sodomite as a sexual identity in the eighteen century. Traditional male sodomy was the anal penetration of a young boy by an adult man; the new sodomites were men of equal age. The traditional sodomite seduced both women and boys, and was considered to be masculine. The new sodomites had an exclusive interest in their own sex, and were considered to be effeminate The English monarchy in a struggle with the Papacy of the Roman Catholic Church created their own state religion, the Church of England and also started taking legal, secular jurisdiction of individuals and their behavior. Sodomy came under secular state control in 1533 through the Buggery Act of 1533.

“Sodomy was a religious issue and a criminal problem.” (Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400-1800, p. 200)

“Clearly when we come across a writer using the words ‘sodomy' or ‘buggery' in relation to homosexuality we do the words less than justice if we simply disregard their other meanings. The one word was used because the one concept was intended, and this was a broader concept than simply homosexuality. The notion underlying these passages was not homosexuality but a more general notion: debauchery; and debauchery was a temptation to which all, in principle at least were subject.” (Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, p. 16

“Because of the historical silence surrounding the subject of homosexuality, it is not all that easy to determine what was being punished in the past. One thing is clear, however: The words “sodomy” and “sodomite” had dual meanings. On one hand sodomy referred to unspecified sexual relations between males, and on the other hand it meant a particular mode of sexuality, usually anal sex. Understanding the dual nature of sodomy is an important antidote to the false assumption made by so many scholars that there was only one meaning, a relational one.” (Gilbert, Conceptions of Homosexuality and Sodomy in Western History, p. 61-62 in Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality edited by Salvatore J. Licata, PhD and Robert P.Petersen.)

“There was also a more narrow use of the term sodomy. This was its application almost wholly to sex between males. Even here there were possibilities for confusion and national variations. In some countries, all genital contact between males might be considered sodomitical. In other places, it was necessary to prove anal penetration and ejaculation for a successful prosecution. Again through, practice differed from legal definitions. The reality was sodomy (or buggery) was most often used to refer to any genital contact between individuals of the same sex (though lesbianism was extremely rare and only seems to have been included as an after-thought). Most of the other crimes technically under the rubric of sodomy had more specific terms (e.g. bestiality, masturbation) which were used more frequently.” (Naphy, Sex Crimes From Renaissance to Enlightenment, p. 104)

Sodomy: What one does: Behavior

“ ‘Sodomy' as defined by religion and law included a range of condemned practices, ‘a way to encompass a multiple of sins with a minimum of signs' as one critic has cleverly expressed it.” (Phillips and Reay. Sex Before Sexuality A Premodern History, p. 61)

“Despite the term's enduring flexibility, from the twelfth century ‘sodomy' was increasingly associated with sex acts between men.”(Phillips and Reay. Sex Before Sexuality A Premodern History, p. 62)

“Initially, sodomy was a theological construct, serving only intermittently to refer to a clear variety of sexual activity or to bring into focus the behaviour of a particular kind of person.” (Mills, “Male-Male Love and Sex in the Middle Ages, 1000-1500, p. 14 in A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages editor Matt Cook)

“ ‘Sodomy' was a massively meaningful category in medieval culture, but partly to the extent that it was not clearly defined – it was not consistently or inevitably associated with a distinct configuration of sexual partners, or even with a particular kind of sexual act.” (Cook, A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages, p. 23)

“In general usage, ‘sodomy' was not an exact term and did not merely refer to a specific sexual act. Rather, it described the whole range of homosexual behavior, sexual or otherwise, which belonged, as one Regency pamphlet put it, to ‘the ancient lechers of Sodom and Gomorrah. This Biblical idiom was as commonplace in the nineteenth century as it had been in the previous ones. It implied that ‘sodomites' shared both the practices and the fate of the inhabitants of that mythical city and that ‘sodomy' represented all that was terrible, nameless and immoral about them.” (Cocks, Secrets, Crimes, and Diseases, 1800-1914, p. 111 in A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages, editor Matt Cook.)

“Sodomy was the name, taken from the Bible, for an unmentionable sin that was defined as any lustful act which could not result in procreation within marriage. From the thirteen century, it was not only a sin, but also a capital crime. Sodomy included extramarital heterosexuality, non-vaginal sexual acts, all forms of same-sex behaviour, bestiality, masturbation and so forth. The best-known examples of persecution of sodomy were directed against males having anal sex with other males.” (Hekma, Same-sex relations among men in Europe, 1700-1990, p.79 in Sexual Cultures in Europe Themes in Sexuality editors Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma)

“The early Church punished sodomy much like other sins, with long penances. But what they understood as sodomy did not map into our present day division between heterosexual and homosexual. The definition of sodomy rested on the distinction between natural and unnatural acts. For clerics, the distinction was between sex for procreation within marriage, an unfortunate necessity, and sex that was not for procreation, which could include oral or anal sex between a man and a woman, or a man and a man.” (Clark, A History of European Sexuality, p. 73-74)

“Sexual acts not geared toward procreation were commonly referred to as sodomy. In addition to homosexual intercourse, this term might cover anal contact between man and woman, coritus interruptus, bestiality, and even sexual intercourse between Christians and non-Christians (Greenberg 1988, 274-275; Gilbert 1985).” (Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature Kraft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identities, p. 21)

“Sodomy was an act, defined either as any sexual act outside of marriage, which did not lead to procreation or as anal penetration, with males, females, or beasts. It had nothing to do with sexual identities.” (Eder, Hall, and Hekma, Sexual Cultures in Europe Natural Histories, p.11)

“The classical age with which we are concerned did not recognize the word “homosexuality” but did recognize the legal notion of sodomy-an act of varied anal contact or penetration of a man, woman, or beast.” (Delon, The Priest, the Philosopher, and Homosexuality in Enlightenment. p. 122 in Tis Nature's Fault Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment editor Robert Purks Maccubbin.

“Furthermore, the prevalence of homosexual conduct is attested by the fact that sodomy was regarded from early times as an ecclesiastical offence, although it did not become a felony and thus subject to ordinary criminal jurisdiction until the reign of Henry VIII.” (Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, p. 349)

“The strictures against sodomy in the early modern period applied to nonvaginal penetration of any kind, though in practice the juridical consequences of marital, bestial, and same-sex sodomy often differed dramatically. By the second half of the eighteen century, I would argue, same-sex eroticism had begun to serve as the focal point of social anxieties formerly invested in a broader definition of sodomy.” (Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 61)

“In the early modern phase (here roughly before 1688), the term sodomy covered any activity that challenged the ‘Nature' of the church-state authority. The logic of sodomy's deviation from the feudal order was precise but the category covered a wide range of transgressive acts: witchcraft, usury, political dissent, nonconformity, any kind of nonreproductive, non-matrimonial sexuality, and exogamous social relations, for example with Jews or Muslims (Bredbeck, pp. 2-23). By the late eighteen –century, ‘sodomy', more or less, narrowed to mean a male-male erotics typified by anal penetration (buggery).” (Shapiro, “Of Mollies: Class and same-Sex Sexualities in the Eighteen Century, p. 159 in In a Queer Place Sexuality and Belonging in British and European Contexts, editors Kate Chedgzoy, Emma Francis, and Murray Pratt.)

“Theoretically, sodomy was a fairly general term for most types of crimes that were deemed to be ‘against nature'. In effect, this meant sexual relations that were non-procreative. By the middle ages, most jurist and theologians had subdivided sodomy into four general categories: sex between men, sex with animals, non-procreative sex between men and women, and masturbation. However, in practice even procreative sex could be considered unnatural if it was any position other than the missionary (face-to-face, man on top, woman on her back). (Naphy, Sex Crimes From Renaissance to Enlightenment, p. 103-104)

Sodomite: Who one is: a Person

“Although the legal and religious definition of sodomy referred only to certain sexual acts, especially anal intercourse, of which anyone, in theory, was regarded as being capable, within urban subculture in Britain, France, and the Netherlands, a more specific sodomitical role evolved as early as the first half of the eighteenth century.” (Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature Kraft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identities, p. 241)

“Homosexuals had always existed in England, though the word ‘homosexual' was not current until the nineteenth century. They were called sodomites, a term which emphasized the biblical injunction against them because it reminded everyone of God's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.” (Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century London, p.5-6)

“The sodomite of the traditional European culture which existed between the 12th and 17th centuries had been a man who had sex with both boys and women.” (Trumbach, “Gender and the homosexual Role in Modern Western Culture: The 18th and 19th Centuries Compared, in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality by Dennis Altman, p.153)

“Sodomy, again, followed a traditional pattern of periods of toleration interspersed with vicious persecution and moral panics. The change during the eighteen century, from the image of the foppish but still, even hyper-, masculine bisexual libertine to that of the effeminate sodomite, was influenced by the hardening of categories already mentioned, concurrent with the emergence of a visible homosexual subculture in large cities such as London.” (Hall, Sexual cultures in Britain: some persisting themes, p. 33 in Sexual Cultures in Europe National Histories edited by Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall and Gert Kekma.)

“Previously, to be sexually daring meant having sex with just about anyone (especially, women and adolescent males). By the middle of the eighteenth century, ‘men' only desired women. The sodomite became a ‘creature' who only desired men and became known as a ‘molly', a word that had originally meant ‘whore'.” (Naphy, Sex Crimes From Renaissance to Enlightenment, p. 105)

“There has been a spirited discussion on the history of sodomy, especially concerning the eighteen century, to explain the rise of the prosecutions and changes in representations. Many authors have claimed that the model of sodomy as a sinful act was replaced by a model of the sodomite as a sexual identity at that time. Traditional male sodomy was the anal penetration of a young boy by an adult man; the new sodomites were men of equal age. The traditional sodomite seduced both women and boys, and was considered to be masculine. The new sodomites had an exclusive interest in their own sex, and were considered to be effeminate. As the ‘fop', the promiscuous womanizer, had been the example of the feminine man before 1700, the sodomite replaced him as deviant in gender and sexual roles. A concept of sexual identity replaced a concept of unbridled lust and unmentionable sin. In the major cities of north-western Europe, this sexual identity expressed itself in subcultures with their own meeting places, languages, customs, and so forth. The ‘model' of the queen as a sexual identity, it is argued, took over from the model of sodomy as sexual act.” (Hekma, Same-sex relations among men in Europe, 1700-1990, p.80 in Sexual Cultures in Europe Themes in Sexuality editors Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma)

Buggery Act of 1533: Secular State Control

The Buggery Act of 1533, formally An Act for the punysshement of the vice of Buggerie (25 Hen. 8 c. 6), was an Act of the Parliament of England that was passed during the reign of Henry VIII. It was the country's first civil sodomy law, such offences having previously been dealt with by the eccleiastical courts. The Act defined buggery as an unnatural sexual act against the will of God and man. This was later defined by the courts to include only anal penetration and bestality.

“As we have seen, sodomy had been made a civil offence in 1533 by Henry VIII, a law confirmed during the reign of Elizabeth I. Although the 1533 Act did not attempt to define what was meant by ‘buggery', later jurists attempted to specify what the act of sodomy actually described in law.” (Cocks, Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century, p. 32)

“It was a short piece of legislation, which originated in the House of Lords, declaring the ‘detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast' to be a felony subject to the penalties of death and loss of property customarily suffered by felons, without the benefits of clergy, which meant that offenders in holy orders could not claim to be tried in ecclesiastical courts.” (Hyde, The Other Love An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain, p.39)

“The Act (25 Henry VIII, c. 6) was repealed in 1547 by Edward VI, along with other legislation passed in his father's time, but it was re-enacted in 1562 (5 Elizabeth c. 17), when Parliament ordained that it was to be perpetual. It remained a capital offence until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the death penalty was abolished for this as for many other offences at the instigation of Sir Robert Peel, then Home Secretary.” (Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, p. 350)

“The Buggery Act remained the basis of legislation for prosecuting acts of anal sex between men until 1967. When sex between two men in private was decriminalised for men over 21, the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967 did not distinguish between anal sex and other forms of sexual contact between men. It is arguable that this legislation, in 1967, was the first English law to distinguish a ‘class' of men who sex with other men. The 1967 legislation accommodated the sexual lifestyles of men who, as long as they conducted their various and consenting sexual acts in private and the sexual encounter numbered no more than two persons, would not be prosecuted.” (Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 94)

Sodomy/Sodomite Becomes Homosexuality/Homosexual

“The state does not create homosexuality, yet it does seek to construct its significance, regulate and control it and indeed all sexuality, though most vehemently male homosexuality. Male homosexual practices have occurred across all centuries in all societies¸ yet the male homosexual identity and more particularity the gay man and the gay community are a more recent phenomenon.” (Edwards, Erotics and Politics Gay male sexuality, masculinity and feminism, p.15)

“Although the foundations for change were laid in the eighteenth century, the transition from the religious model to the medical model of homosexuality occurred mainly during the nineteenth and took firm hold during the first half of the twentieth century. It has been argued that “one of the casual factors for the change was the attempt of certain elements in the medical to bolster traditional attitudes toward sex-attitudes that were being challenged by new rationalism of the period.”” (Hubert, The “Third Sex” Theory of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs p. 103 in Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality edited by Salvatore J. Licata, PhD and Robert P. Petersen.)

“In his recent book, The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault makes some distinctions that are important for historians of homosexuality. Foucault correctly notes that such terms such as “homosexuality” and “homosexual” are modern, originating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This linguistic development stemmed not from some arbitrary desire to find a new word to replace the earlier ones, but rather from the recent creation by society of a new class of deviants. Suddenly there were “homosexuals”-a group of males who because of heredity or childhood training chose to seek sexual partners from members of their own sex. The sodomite had been someone who sinned by performing a deviant social act. The homosexual was not a sinner in the old religious sense but someone with an identifiable lifestyle revolving around the choice of sexual partners of the same sex. The distinction is important, for it marks the beginning of the treatment of a segment of the population as a race apart.” (Gilbert, Conceptions of Homosexuality and Sodomy in Western History, p. 61 in Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality edited by Salvatore J. Licata, PhD and Robert P.Petersen.)

Bibliography Altman, Dennis, Carole Vance, Martha Vicinus, Jeffrey Weeks and others. Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? GMP Publishers. London, 1989.

Brady, Sean. Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britian, 1861-1913. Palgrave Macmillan. Basingstoke, England & New York, 2005.

Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. Columbia University Press. New York, 1995.

Bronski, Michael. Culture Clash The Making of Gay Sensibility. South End Press. Boston, 1984.

Chedgzoy, Kate, Emma Francis, and Murray Pratt editors. In a Queer Place Sexuality and Belonging in British and European Contexts. Ashgate. Aldershot, Hampshire, England and Burlington, VT, 2002.

Clark, Anna. Desire A History of European Sexuality. Routledge. New York and London, 2008.

Cocks, H G. Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century. I.B. Tauris Publishers. London and New York, 2003.

Cook, Matt editor. A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages. Greenwood World Publishing. Oxford/Westport Connecticut, 2007.

Crawford, Katherine. European Sexualities, 1400-1800. Cambridge University Press. New York, 2007.

Delon, Michael, translated by Nelly Stephane. The Priest, the Philosopher, and Homosexuality in Enlightenment. p. 122-131 in Tis Nature's Fault Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment editor Robert Purks Maccubbin.

Eder, Franz X., Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma editors. Sexual Cultures in Europe Natural Histories. Manchester University Press. Manchester and New York, 1999.

Eder, Franz X., Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma editors. Sexual Cultures in Europe Themes in sexuality. Manchester University Press. Manchester and New York, 1999.

Edwards, Tim. Erotics and Politics Gay male sexuality, masculinity and feminism. Routledge. London and New York, 1994.

Hyde, H Montgomery. The Trials of Oscar Wilde. Dover Publications, INC. New York, 1962.

Hyde, H Montgomery. The Other Love An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain. Heineman. London, 1970.

Licata, PhD Salvatore J. and Robert P.Petersen. Editors. Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality. The Haworth Press, Inc. and Stein and Day/Publishers. New York, 1985.

Maccubbin, Robert Purks Editor. Tis Nature's Fault Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney, 1985.

McCormick, Ian Editor. Secret Sexualities A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing. Routledge. London and New York, 1997.

McCormick, Ian Editor. Sexual Outcasts 1750-1850 Volume II Sodomy. Routledge. London and New York, 2000.

Merrick, Jeffrey and Bryant T. Ragan JR. Editors. Homosexuality in Modern France. Oxford University Press. Oxford and New York, 1996.

Mondimore, Francis Mark. A Natural History of Homosexuality. The John Hopkins University Press. Baltimore and London, 1996.

Naphy, William. Sex Crimes From Renaissance to Enlightenment. Tempus. Great Britain, 2004.

Oosterhuis, Harry. Stepchildren of Nature: Kraft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity. Univernisty of Chicago Press. Chicago, 2000.

Phillips, Kim M. and Barry Reay. Sex Before Sexuality A Premodern History. Polity Press. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, 2011.

Peiss, Kathy and Christina Simmons with Robert A. Padgug. Passion and Power Sexuality in History. Temple University Press. Philadelphia, 1989.

Weeks, Jeffrey. Movements of Affirmation: Sexual Meanings and Homosexual Identities. p. 70 to 86 in Passion and Power Sexuality in History editors Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons with Robert A. Padgug.

Homosexuality in Ancient Greece Section 1

Larry Houston — 2013-05-11T15:07:00Z

Homosexuality in Ancient Greece

Although this article is included in the section of age-structured homosexuality, its scope is broader in that it addresses more than Greek pederasty. It discusses Greek sexuality in general, adult homosexual, and compares our modern western society to that of ancient Greece.

What, then, can we conclude about homosexuality in the modern American culture if one only listens to those on the political left, from those on the political right, or from the various court cases? One may find a fourth view when the issue of homosexuality is on a ballot up for vote. Two contradictory outcomes have been the result depending on whether the question has been an issue of discrimination or the definition of marriage. In an overwhelming majority of times when the vote has been to change the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples the results have been not to change the historical definition of marriage of one man and one woman. There have been more favorable outcomes when the question is discrimination against homosexuals. So then our modern American culture view of homosexuality is very similar to that of ancient Greece as seen in the following quotes by historians David Cohen and Bruce Thornton.

“What, then, is one to conclude about a culture whose laws expressed a deep-rooted anxiety about pederasty while not altogether forbidding it? A culture in which attitudes and values ranged from the differing modes of approbation represented in Plato's Symposium to the stark realism of Aristophanes and the judgment of Aristotle that homosexuality is a diseased or morbid state acquired by habit and comparable to biting fingernails or habitually eating earth or ashes? A culture is not a homogeneous unity; there was no one "Athenian attitude" towards homoeroticism. The widely differing attitudes and conflicting norms and practices which have been discussed above represent the disagreements, contradictions and anxieties which make up the patterned chaos of a complex culture. They should not be rationalized away. To make them over into a neatly coherent and internally consistent system would only serve to diminish our understanding of the "many-hued" nature of Athenian homosexuality.” (Cohen, Law, Society and Homosexuality in Classical Athens, p. 21)

“What, then, is one to conclude about a culture whose laws expressed a deep rooted anxiety about pederasty while not altogether forbidding it. A culture in which attitudes and values range from the differing modes of approbation represented in Plato's Symposium to the stark realism of Aristophanes and the judgment of Aristotle, that in a man, the capacity to feel pleasure in a passive sexual role is a diseased or morbid state, acquired by habit, and comparable to biting fingernails or habitually eating earth or ashes. A culture is not a homogeneous unity; there was no one “Athenian attitude” towards homoeroticism. The widely differing attitudes and conflicting norms and practices which have been discussed above represent the disagreements, contradictions, and anxieties which make up the patterned chaos of a complex culture. They should not be rationalized away. To make them over into a nearly coherent and internally consistent system would only serve to diminish our understanding of the “many-hued” nature of Athenian homosexuality.” (Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and Society The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens, p. 201-202).

“First, most of the writing on ancient sexuality these days grinds the evidence in the mill of an “advocacy agenda” supported by some fashionable theory that says more about the crisis of Western rationalism than it does about ancient Greece. Thus we are told that the Greeks saw nothing inherently wrong with sodomy between males as long as certain “protocols” of age, social status, and position were honored, an interpretation maintained despite the abundance of evidence, detailed below in Chapter 4, that the Greeks-including pederastic apologists like Plato-were horrified and disgusted by the idea of male being anal ling penetrated by another male and called such behavior “against nature.” One purpose here is to get back to what the Greeks actually say without burying it in polysyllabic sludge.” (Thornton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p. xiii)

“There can be no doubt that the development of homosexuality was connected with the rise of the gymnnasis and arenas in which boys practised the five exercises of the pentathlon, which comprised wrestling, the foot-race, leaping, throwing the discus and hurling the javelin. Others were boxing and the pancration, a mixture of fist-fighting and wrestling. The competitors were always naked and watched by admiring spectators.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.65)

“One thing is certain: homosexuality was associated in the Greek mind with the separation of the sexes, military ethos, male nudity, physical culture, and gymnasis. The education of boys consisted of physical training as much as scholarship and the arts, and it took place in the gmnasia. The word comes from gymnos, which means naked. Boys spend a great part of the day racing and wrestling there, naked or lightly clad.” (Karlen, Sexuality and Homosexuality A New View, p.31-32)

“Once one looks beyond the literary apologists for homosexuality in ancient Greece, one finds a widespread attitude of mockery and disgust. Homosexual behavior was probably often practice with shame, false bravado or secrecy.” (Karlen, Sexuality and Homosexuality A New View, p.35)

“The point of all of this is not to prove that homosexuality is vicious or pernicious, but that in ancient Greece homosexuality was considered a deviation; it was given positive value only by a minority of homosexuals, bisexuals and apologists. Neither did its presence in Greece have any relationship to social, artistic or political health. The fact that homosexuality was a factor in the lives of great men only speaks for its prevalence among the leisured, literate elite from which artists and statesmen came. A permissive or positive view of homosexuality must find other grounds than the myth that made everything Greek praiseworthy.” (Karlen, Sexuality and Homosexuality A New View, p. 38)

Sex was viewed as directional, and having two roles active and passive

While this article is written to discuss the homosexuality, specifically Greek pederasty, a discussion of how the Greek's saw sexuality must be understood. In our modern understanding of sexuality, except in cases of abuse such as rape, the partners are equals. But this was not the case in ancient Greece. First there was a fundamental inequity in favor of the free male in relationship to boys, women and slaves. Secondly this resulted in sex having a directional quality, with an anatomic imperative, again in favor of the free male. Sex was something he did to someone else and what he used to do it with, his male sex organ, the penis. Thirdly, sex had active/passive roles, one partner was the penetrator and the second partner was penetrated. Thus the ancient Greeks may be seen as having a greater acceptance for bisexuality.

“For the ancients, many historians agree, sexuality was not a separate realm of experience, the core of private life; instead it was directly linked to social power and status. People were judged by public behavior, for which there were clear roles; marriage, for instance, was a duty that bore no necessary relationship to erotic satisfaction. Socially powerful males (citizens) enjoyed sexual access to almost all other members of the society (including, in Greece, enslaved males, younger free males, foreigners, and women of all classes).” (Clausen, Beyond Gay or Straight, p. 51)

“First, the expression of sexuality was centered on a fundamental inequity, not only in male-female relationships, but also between male partners in a homosexual relationship.” (King, “Sowing the Field: Greek and Roman Sexology, p. 29 in Sexual Knowledge Sexual Science: The History of the Attitudes in Sexuality editors Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich)

“ In Greece the sexual relationship was assumed to be a power relationship, where one participant is dominate and the other inferior. On one side stands the free adult male; on the other, women, slaves, and boys. Sexual roles are isomorphic with social roles; indeed, sexual behavior is seen as a reflection of social relationship not as itself the dominant theme. Thus it is important for us to remember that for the Greeks it was one's role, not one's gender, that was salient. Sexual objects come in two different kinds – not male and female but active and passive.” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p.135-136)

“In the late twentieth century it became fashionable to assume that penile penetration expressed the power of the penetrator and subordination of the penetrated (Foucault 1976/80-1984/6; Keuls 1985; Parker 1992). Many studies then concluded, rightly I feel, that men had sexual access to all those beneath them in society (unmarried females, non-citizen males, slaves; Richlin 1992: xviii; Sutton 1992; 5); only proper women and citizen males were off limits.” (Younger, Sex in the Ancient World From A to Z, p. xiv)

“Although sexual pleasure and marriage were not necessarily linked, sexuality and domination most certainly were. Far from being a mutual experience, sexual activity always had a directional quality for the Greeks. Sex was something one “did” to someone, and anatomic imperative dictated that it was a man (or more precisely the penis) that did the doing.” (Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 7)

“In both Greece and Rome, as the most recent studies have correctly argued, the fundamental opposition between different types of sexual behaviour was not the heterosex/homosexual contrast, but the active/passive contrast, the former category – activity – being characteristic of the adult male, while the latter – passivity – was reserved for women and boys.” (Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, p. x)

“The ancient world, both Greek and Roman, did not base its classification on gender, but on a completely different axis, that of active versus passive. This has one immediate and important consequence, which we must face in the beginning. Simply put, there was no such emic, cultural abstraction as “homosexuality” in the ancient world. The fact that a man had sex with other men did not determine his sexual category. Equally, it must be emphasized, there was no such concept as “heterosexuality”. The application of these terms to the ancient world is anachronistic and can lead to serious misunderstandings. By the fifth time one has made the qualification, “The passive homosexual was not rejected for his homosexuality but for his passivity,” it ought to become clear that we are talking not about “homosexuality” but about passivity.” (Parker, The Teratogenic Grid, p.47-48 in Roman Sexualities editors Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner)

“As we remarked earlier, the Greeks showed a pronounced tendency to attach greatest importance to (indeed, to glorify) the sexual instinct itself rather than the particular object; consequently they were much freer than modern men to vary sexual objects on their relative merits. Greek culture, unlike modern cultures, imposed on adult males no limitations as to the choice of sexual objects per se, and the only “perversions” remarked by the comic poets (reflecting, we may be sure, community opinion) are cases in which sexual acts other than vaginal intercourse, otherwise perfectly acceptable, are pursed to excess (see Cratin. 152, for example) or practiced in an inappropriate setting.” (Henderson, The Maculate Muse, p.205)

“The third, closely related, feature is the importance of penetration; the main distinction in all sexual encounters, heter- or homosexual, was presented as being between penetrator and penetrated.” (King, “Sowing the Field: Greek and Roman Sexology” p.30 in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of the Attitudes to Sexuality editors Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich p. 30)

“The Greeks associated sexual desire closely with other human appetites – the desire for food, drink, and sleep – and saw all these appetites as entailing the same moral problem, the problem of avoiding excess.” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p.134)

“The Greek sexual ethic emphasized not what one did but how one did it; it involved not an index of particular forbidden acts but an inculcation to act with moderation.” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p.135)

Homosexuality in Ancient Greece

“The ancient Greek and Latin languages have no word that can be translated as homosexual, largely because these societies did not have the same sexual categories that we do. Our concepts and categories of sexual expression are based on the genders of the two partners involved: heterosexuality when the partners are of the opposite sex, and homosexuality when the partner are of the same sex. In other times and among other peoples, this way of thinking about people simply doesn't seem to apply-anthropologists, historians, and sociologists have described many cultures in which same-sex eroticism occupies a very different place than it does in our own.” (Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 3-4)

“Ancient Greece is often cited as an example of a civilization in which homosexuality was accepted as normal, even encouraged. This is not quite true. All males were expected to make love to women, to marry, and to sire a family, whether or they had a male lover or not. Moreover, love and sex between adult males was thought to be a bit ridiculous. The norm was for an adult male to have a relationship that lasted several years with an adolescent boy. When the boy reached maturity, he, then, was also expected to take a young lover.” (Goode, Deviant Behavior, p.193-194)

“Homosexuality was a universally recognized sexual option throughout the ancient world, particularly in Dorian areas, where it seems to have had a religious, ethical, and legal sanction and to have been more a part of man's everyday public life than was the case in Athens.” (Henderson, The Maculate Muse, p.204)

“The second feature is more applicable to classical Greece culture. Male homosexual activity was, to some extent, seen as normal, but only if it was kept within certain clearly defined social parameters. Relationships between equals in age were frown upon. In classical Athens, homosexual relationships ideally had some features of an initiation rite, between a young, beardless boy and an older mentor. However, even such relationships were hedged round with etiquette regarding the process of courtship and the giving and receiving of gifts and other signals, while a ‘deep-rooted anxiety' about pederasty was expressed in classical Athenian law. Aristotle argues that any enjoyment of what he saw as the subordinate, defeated role of the passive partner in a homoerotic relationship was unnatural; on Athenian vase-paintings, the passive partner is never showed with an erection. The Athenian figure of the kinaidos, the man who actually enjoys the passive role, is presented as a ‘scare-figure', both socially and sexually deviant.” (King, “Sowing the Field: Greek and Roman Sexology” p. 30 in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of the Attitudes to Sexuality editors Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich)

“The model of classical Athenian homosexual culture that continues to be the most influential is firmly based on that put forward by Sir Kenneth Dover in his 1978 book, Greek Homosexuality The views he developed there reached an audience beyond that of classical scholarship when they were taken up (in somewhat misunderstood form) by Michel Foucault in his 1984 book, L'usage des plaisirs (translated in 1985 as The Use of Pleasure). The model might be summarized in the following terms. Male homosexual acts normally took place between an erastes (lover), a young man, ideally a bachelor, and an eromenos (beloved), a beardless, adolescent boy between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Both would belong to the elite. The erastes would court the eromenos with such things as hunting gifts and, if successful, consummate his desire through anal sex. As the boy turned to manhood in the period between the ages of eighteen and twenty—the transitional period of life associated with service as an ephebe (a border-guard)—he would himself cease to be a passive partner and pursue other boys in turn. Later on, by around the age of thirty, he would give up homosexual activity altogether in favor of marriage. The role of the erastes was one of dominance, the role of the eromenos one of subjection, and they participated in a zero-sum game of social advantage and disadvantage. As a result, the pursued boy was in a morally precarious situation, but he could retain his honor so long as he was extremely discriminating in his acceptance of a lover, took extravagant gifts for his favors but money on no account, and did not make any show of enjoying the anal sex. The lover would use his dominant position to give the boy valuable help, material or ethical, in becoming a full adult member of the community, as is reflected in Plato's Symposium. So far as the Athenians were concerned, only an extremely deviant grown man would put himself in the role of the eromenos, and those who did, whether as prostitutes (as Timarchus was alleged to have been in a well-known speech of Aeschines) or as kinaidoi (men who simply enjoyed and sought to receive anal sex, were conceptualized as effeminate and reviled, and at Athens the former group was deprived of at least some citizen rights.” (Gilbert, Conceptions of Homosexuality and Sodomy in Western History, p. 37-38 in A Cultural History of Sexuality Volume I In The Classical World editors Mark Golden, and Peter Toohey Editors)

“Both of these explanations of homosexuality-as either an “unnatural” perversion of sex or an excessive expression of its essential nature-can be found in ancient Greek literary remains. Choosing one of the two to the exclusion of the other, which is often the practice among modern scholars, oversimplifies the complexity of attitudes attested in the evidence.” Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.101)

“The ambiguity and complexity of Greek attitudes toward homosexuality can be seen first in the various speculations about its origins, which oscillate between the poles of culture and nature. Whatever its source, though, habitual, passive homosexuality is clearly considered an aberration, a disorder linked to violence and disease, even the supposedly accepted institution of pederasty.” (Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p. 101-102)

“Whether the origins of homosexuality are to be found in nature or history, though, it clearly is problematic, even in its presumably accepted forms of pederasty, a phenomenon needing to be accounted for mythically in the crime of Laius.” (Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p. 103)

“One of our difficulties when reading about ancient Greece is that the most common manifestation of homosexuality in the evidence concerns pederasty, the quasi-ritualized, transient, physical and emotional relationship between an older male and a youth, an activity we view as criminal. Very little, if any, evidence from ancient Greece survives that shows adult males (or females) as “couples” involved in an ongoing, reciprocal sexual and emotional relationship in which sex with women (or men) is moot and the age difference is no more significant than it is in heterosexual relationships. Thus the evidence from ancient Greece involves either man-youth homosexuality (the idealized social relationship we will discuss in Chapter 8), or more precisely defined passive homosexual or kinaidos, the adult male who perversely enjoys being penetrated by other males and who has sex with women only because of societal pressure. These two categories, as we will see, are not as mutually exclusive as they might appear, which accounts for the anxiety tingeing even the most enthusiastic ancient celebrators of pederasty.” Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.100

“In the first place it appears extremely likely that homosexuality of any kind was confined to prosperous and aristocratic levels of ancient society. The masses of peasants and artisans were probably scarcely affected by habits of this kind, which seem to have been associated with a sort of snobbery.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.62)

“In Athens, for a boy to have a homosexual relationship with an adult was considered not only acceptable, but also, under certain conditions, socially approved.” (Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, p. 17)

“By the time Athens entered period of her greatest power in 480 B.C., male homosexual practices were undoubtedly common and socially tolerated, but were they sanctioned? The age of pederastic innocence was over and a certain anxiety about the subject can be traced in art and literature. The misgivings expressed over male homosexuality usually concerned either homosexual prostitution or the possibility of homoerotic relations between peers.” (Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece, p. 287)

“The above outline of the homosexual ethos in Athens shows that it underwent a fundamental change between the Archaic and the Classical ages. The archetypal homosexual relationship was that between a childlike or prepubescent boy and a mature man. The contact had strong paternal overtones, and it involved affectionate response from the child partner and mild sexual response from the pubescent partner. The original image of the ideal “beloved” did not include any feminine traits. In general, the sexual approach was frontal and the copulation intracrural.

The period when this pattern took shape was the Archaic age of Athens, before the greatest flowering of Attic culture. During the fifth and fourth centuries this patterned became compromised and led to male prostitution by citizens and to adult male love affairs; both of these practices were consistently stigmatized as socially unacceptable. Anal sex, generally associated with obscenity and coarse behavior, were the common form these discredited types of homosexual contact.” (Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece, p.298-299)

“This was especially so if the youth allowed himself to be penetrated, an act considered unworthy of a man and a free citizen, and one which could threaten his citizenship.” (Bishop and Osthelder, Sexualia From Prehistory to Cyberspace, p.208)

“The situation was totally different in the case of grown equals, however. Whereas the Dorian boy would attain manhood through his submission, the grown man who submitted to another man would lose his manliness and become effeminate, exposed to shame and scorn.” (Vanggard, Phallos A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 89)

“Regardless of actual behavior patterns, anal copulation between two males was equated with sex between two adults, not between a mature man and a young boy, and it was obviously not approved” (Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece, p. 291)

“Homosexuality, then, to the Greeks is a historical innovation, a result of the depraved human imagination and vulnerability to pleasure.” Thornton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.102)

“Already in 1964 Dover sounded the themes of his later publications: the centrality of Athenian law-court speeches; due attention to painted pottery; distinctions of genre, context, class, between beliefs and behaviors; the tendentious use of terms of personal abuse (such as “prostitute”) in political propaganda; and above all, the contrast between the older, active erastes and his passive junior partner in a homosexual pair, the eromenos. These Dover saw as essentially two stages in the social development of a Greek citizen rather than as life-long identities.” (Golden and Toohey, editors, Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, p. 6-7)

Kinaidos

In ancient Greece there is one particular adult male who is identified with homosexual behavior. The Greeks had a name for this individual, “kinaidos'. This individual was the one who took the passive receptive role in the male homosexual behavior of anal intercourse.

In doing so by being willing to take the passive, submissive role he was seen as unworthy to be a free man, and more like a male prostitute. As a result forfeited his right as a citizen to hold office. The man who would allow himself to be anally penetrated it was thought would also subject himself to the abuse of alcohol, eating, money, or power.

“Of those who surrendered to desires, none provoked more extreme outrage than the class of sexual degenerates known variously as katapugons or kinaidoi, the latter term apparently succeeding to the semantic field of the former some time around the beginning of the fourth century.” (Davidson, Courtesans & Fishcakes The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, p. 167)

“Another male image, the kinaidos, was totally negative. This was the man who was represented as acting in an effeminate fashion, by implication taking the passive role in sex because he could not control his appetites. The male prostitute or kinaidos was very different from our modern notion of the homosexual. The male prostitute was not expelled from society because, like the female prostitute, he provided a sexual service, albeit a shameful one. A man was not seen as born a kinaidos or male prostitute-it was a role he acquired.” (Clark, Desire A History of European Sexuality, p. 22)

“What we find is the kinaidos as emblem of unrestrained compulsive sexual appetite, of surrender to the chaos of natural passion that threatens civilized order, a traitor to his sex, a particularity offensive manifestation of eros's power over the masculine mind that is responsible for creating and maintaining that order in the face of nature's chaos.” Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.101)

“But in nearly every genre of Greek literature the kinaidos's appetite is sterile, useless, good only for pleasure, rendering the male prone to other appetites, for money or power, that also threaten culture and its discriminating categories, particularly if he is a citizen responsible in some measure for the political functioning of the city.” (Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.101)

“The situation was totally different in the case of grown equals, however. Whereas the Dorian boy would attain manhood through his submission, the grown man who submitted to another man would lose his manliness and become effeminate, exposed to shame and scorn.” (Vanggard, Phallos A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 89)

“Once we have accepted the universality of homosexual relations in Greek society as a fact, it surprises us to learn that if a man had at any time in his life prostituted himself to another man for money he was debarred from exercising his political rights.” (Dover, Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior, p.122-123 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey.)

“In so far as the “passive partner” in a homosexual act takes upon himself the role of a woman, he was open to the suspicion, like the male prostitute, that he abjured his prescribed role as a future solider and defender of the community.” (Dover, Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior, p.125 in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, editors Mark Golden and Peter Toohey.

“As a rule, the only sexual practice attacked as a demeaning perversity is passive anal sex by men¸ the “wide-asses” (euryproktoi) who willingly submit to another man's assertiveness. In this society, any form of submissiveness was considered unworthy of a free man. While all understood that a woman is naturally to be penetrated by a man, it was considered only for a slave or male prostitute to submit in this way to another male.” (Garrison, Sexual Culture in Ancient Greece, p.161)

“A man who enjoys playing the receptive partner is derogated as a prostitute and as having forfeited his right as a citizen to hold office. The assumption is that a man who would willingly make himself available would do anything! Only slaves, women, and foreigners would willingly choose to be treated as objects” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 139)

“Whether created by history or nature, childhood sexual abuse or deformed seminal ducts, the man who enjoys anal penetration by another man is an aberration, a volatile locus of potential social disorder that like the woman he resemble must be dealt with.” (Thorton, Eros The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, p.105)

“The protocols explain why. Since sexual activity is symbolic of (or constructed as) zero-sum competition and the restless conjunction of win, the kinaidos is a man who desires to lose. Contrary to all social junctions prescribing the necessity of men to exercise their desires in a way that shows mastery over self and others, the kinaidos simply and directly desires to be mastered.” (Winkler, “Laying Now the Law: The Oversight of Men's Sexual Behavior in Classical Athens”. p. 186 in Before Sexuality The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World editors David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin)

Pederasty

After discussing how the Greek's viewed sex in general, and specifically homosexuality, along with the ‘kinaidos', the man who is the passive receptive partner in anal intercourse we now will discuss the Greek practice of pederastry,' the love of boys'. Ideally pederasty did not have a sexual component, but was a rite of passage and an educational mode for an adult male (not a biological father) to take on the role of mentor for a young male entering puberty, growing and maturing into an adult male, who as a free male citizen was to be a political leader in the Greek city-state. Pederasty served the role for the moral and political formation of young men. More importantly it was not a private affair between two individuals but was a public affair for the benefit of all.

“The ancient Greeks, as is widely known, had a custom which they called paiderastia, or pederasty, consisting of erotic relations between adult men and adolescent boys.” (Lear and Cantarella, Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty Boys were their gods, p. xv.)

“The word pederasty is derived from the Greek paiderasteia, literally meaning the love of boys. In English pederasty has come to signify almost exclusively the practice of sexual inversion. But in Greek literature paiderasteia is used to refer to both to pure, disinterested affection and to physical homosexual relations.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.62)

“In the Greek language the word “paederasty” had not this ugly sound it has for us to-day, since it was regarded simply as an expression for one variety of love, and had no sort of defamatory meaning attached to it.” (Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, p.413)

“I hope that sufficient documentary evidence has been given to show that paiderasty was cultivated by heterosexually normal men in ancient Greece, where it did not presuppose an inversely homosexual type of personality. It was not considered a transgression, to be tolerated, nor was it felt to betoken to any laxity in moral standards; it was a natural part of the life-style of the best of men, reflected in the stories of the gods and heroes of the people.” (Vanggard, Phallos A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 32)

“In Ancient Greece, homosexuality was described as pederasty, and was an integral part of life of the polis because it was a culture that allowed the norm to function. It therefore did not preclude relations with women, which was based on the reproductive order, and was based upon the division between an active principle and passive principle: a free man and a slave, a boy and a mature man and so on. Its function was, in other words, initiatory. Only the men had the right to practice pederasty, and the hierarchy precluded any equality between the partners. But a homosexual who refused to have anything to do with women was regarded as abnormal because he infringed the rules of the polis and the family institution.” (Roudinesco, Our Dark Side A History of Perversion, p. 33)

“As we have seen, Greek pederasty fundamentally differed in form and function from modern sexuality. Admittedly, the Greek situation offered great opportunities to those males whose sexual interest mainly concerned other males, but this preference had to be limited to boys and, moreover, the passive and active roles in these relationships were sharply defined. In addition, this preference had to be propagated with moderation, without completely excluding the opposite sex. At the same time, the aspect of initiation into the adult world illuminates an even more important difference between Greek pederasty and modern ways of homosexuality. Whereas modern homosexuals often occupy a marginal position in society and are regularly considered to be effeminate, in Greece it was pederasty that provided access to the world of the socially elite; it was only the pederastic relationship that made the boy into a real man. The Greeks, then, certainly knew of ‘Greek love' and their interest in boys was never purely platonic, but they did not, in any sense, invent homosexuality!” (Bremmer, Greek pederasty and modern homosexuality, p. 11) in From Sappho to De Sade, Jan Bremmer editor.)

“This shows that not only writers but also painters are aware of the fact that in order to maintain its proper character, pederasty has rules.” (Lear and Cantarella, Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty Boys Were Their Gods, p. 192)

“Paiderasty served the highest goal – education (paideia). Eros was the medium of paideia, uniting tutor and pupil. The boy submitted and let himself be taken in the possession of the man.” (Vanggard, Phallos A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 87)

“But it was only after the formation of the city that the Greeks took to loving other men, and more particularly boys? Male homosexuality in Greece, in fact – or at least its most socially and culturally significant forms – was, in practice, pederasty, and was extremely widespread. The problem if its ‘origins' remains open.” (Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, p. 4)

“In Athens, homosexuality (which as we know was really pederasty, in the sense the sexual relationship between and adult and a young boy) held an important position in the moral and political formation of young men, who learned from their adult lovers the virtues of a citizen.” (Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, p. viii)

“Such pederasty was supposed to transmit manly virtues of mind and body from nobleman to young lover (Vangaard, 1972).” (Karlen, “Homosexuality in History,” p.79 in Homosexual Behavior: A Modern Reappraisal, editor Judd Marmor)

“While for the Dorians the purpose of the love relationship was the development of a warrior, for the Athenians it was the vehicle through which males were educated in the values, beliefs and manners important to the Athenians, and through which the young man was introduced into adult male society. The relationship served a socializing function, whereby the youth, as companion to an older man, learned how to comport himself in society, how to enjoy the pleasures of life, and how to bring self-control and moderation to the enjoyment of those pleasures. With the guidance of his mentor/lover, the boy began cultivation of what were to the Greeks the all-important virtues of courage, temperance, justice and wisdom. Though the boy received a basic education in such areas as reading and writing from a tutor, or in later times a primary school which he would attend until his early teens, it was through his relationship with his lover that he acquired knowledge and experience in the world of the Athenian citizen, became conversant in politics, civic virtues and philosophy, and acquire an appreciation of the arts. This educational emphasis reflected the Athenian view that civic strength rested not just on military might, but on a citizenry composed of educated and virtuous men.” (Neil, The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies, p.163)

“For instance, in ancient Greece, homosexual relationships between older men and younger men were commonly accepted as pedagogic. Within the context of an erotic relation, the older man taught the younger one military, intellectual, and political skills. The older men, however, were also often husbands and fathers. Neither sexual relationship excluded the other. Thus, although ancient Greek society recognized male homosexual activity, the men in these relationships rarely defined themselves as primarily “homosexual.” (Escoffier, American Homo: Community and Perversity, p. 37)

“So these love relationships were not private erotic enterprises. They took place openly before the eyes of the public, were regarded as of great importance by the state, and were supervised by its responsible authorities.” (Vanggard, Phallos A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 39)

“They were tied together in a pact equally compelling for both. It was the obligation of the erastes always to be an outstanding and impeccable example to the boy. He should not commit any deed that would shame the boy. His total responsibility to the boy made him dependent on the boy in ways far beyond the purely erotic. He was judged by the development and conduct of the boy. Even in regards to the bodily aspect of the relationship the boy could assert himself against his tutor.” (Vanggard, Phallos A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 88)

“Many scholars have written much about early paiderastra-since Homer does not mention it, some scholars argue that it must be an innovation of the later Iron Age. Scholars than looked for causes (population control [Percy 1996], or a byproduct of athletic nudity [Scanlon 2002]. Paiderastra, however, is not homosexuality; it is a coming-of-age rite, and as such it has anthropological parallels that situate it in a stage of state-formation, at the tribal level. In that case, paiderastria should originate in the Bronze Age (Cantarella, 1992; 5), and I myself would put its development no later than the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1900- 1600 BCE).” (Younger, Sex in the Ancient World From A to Z, p. xv)

“The practice born in the Greek gymnasium to which Cicero refers to is not homosexuality but paiderastia, the courtship of free youths by older males, and the central issue was status rather than gender.” (Williams, Roman Homosexuality Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, p.64)

“The abundant surviving literature composed by the ancients in praise of pederasty always assumes it to be an affair of minds, not bodies, a pure, ‘Platonic' love, as still call it today, from which carnality is excluded. It was declared that Eros in such cases would not tolerate the presence of his mother Aphrodite. For Eos, as we have already suggested, symbolized the passion of the soul, and Aphrodite fleshly unions, whether homosexual or not.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.67)

“Instead the homosexual connection favored by the Greeks was not so much homoerotic as pederastic; the archetypal relationship was between a mature man at the height of his sexual power and need and a young, erotically underdeveloped boy just before puberty. The standard Greek nomenclature gives the older, aggressive partner the title of the “lover” (erastes) and the young, passive male that of the “beloved” (eromenos).” (Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece, p.275)

“The model of socially validated homosexuality was paiderastia (following Thorkil Vanggaard I will use this form to avoid identifying the Greek practice with the associations “pederasty” has in our world), the love of an older man for a youth (By older man here we mean mostly men in their twenties, while youths were adolescents.) The context was the gymnasium, where youths went to exercise (and display) their physical gifts, and the older men went to watch, appreciate and select. The arena was an upper-class one paiderastia was essentially an aspect of the paideia, the training for citizenship of aristocratic youths. (That same-sex love tended to be mocked in comedy, an art form that attracted the masse may indicate it played a less focal role in their lives.” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 137)

“As is well known, to define it simply as a “homosexual relationship” (as was customary in the past) would be to falsify reality, attributing to the Greeks a concept which did not exist in their world. Today, it is generally accepted among scholars that an adult man in ancient Greece could with, little or no risk of social disapproval, express sexual desire for another male, so as long as the desired male was an adolescent (pais), whom the adult loved within the context of the socially codified and positively valued relationship which we call pederastic. This kind of relationship took place, then, between and “active” adult and a “passive” boy, though by “activity” and “passivity”- this is an important aspect of the question-the Greeks understood not necessarily and not only sexual roles, but also and above all intellectual and moral roles.” (Lear and Cantarella, Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty Boys Were Their Gods, p. 1-2)

“To facilitate the understanding of the Hellenic love of boys, it will be as well to say something about the Greek ideal of beauty. The most fundamental difference between ancient and modern culture is that ancient is throughout male and that the woman only comes into the scheme of the Greek man as mother of his children and as manager of household matters. Antiquity treated the man, and the man only, as the focus of all intellectual life. This explains why the bringing up and development of girls was neglected in a way we can hardly understand; but boys, on the other hand, were supposed to continue their education much later than is usual with us. The most peculiar custom, according to our ideas, was that every man attracted to him some boy or youth and, in the intimacy of daily life, acted as his counselor, guardian, and friend, and prompted him in all manly virtues. It was especially in the Doric states that this custom prevailed, and it was recognized so much as a matter of course by the State that it was considered a violation of duty by the man, if he did not draw one younger to him, and a disgrace to the boy if he was not honoured by the friendship of a man. The senior was responsible for the manner of life of his young comrade, and shared with him blame and praise.” (Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, p.418)

“It is beyond dispute, therefore, shocking as the fact may appear, that ‘homosexuality contributed to the formation of the moral ideal which underlies the whole practice of Greek education. The desire in the older lover to assert himself in the presence of the younger, to dazzle him, and the reciprocal desire of the latter to appear worthy of his senior's affection necessarily reinforced in both persons that love of glory which always appealed to the competitive spirit of mankind. Love-affairs accordingly provided the finest opportunities for noble rivalry. From another point of view the ideal of comradeship in battle reflects the entire system of ethics implied in chivalry, which is founded on the sentiment of honour.” (H.-I.Marrou, Histoire de l' Education dans l' Antiquite, pp. 58-59)

“ But the apprenticeship to courage and the love of honour and glory, important as they were to the Greeks, comprised only a part of Greek education. For lovers claimed that they participated actively in all the moral and intellectual development of their loved ones.” (Flacelliere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.87)

“Basic to the understanding of the nature, meaning, and importance of paiderasty is the following: Firstly, the age difference between the erastes and his eromenos was always considerable. The eraste was a grown man, the eromenos still an immature boy or youth.” (Vanggard, Phallos A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p.43)

“Secondly, as has been demonstrated, an ethical basis was essential for the Dorian relationship.” (Vanggard, Phallos A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 43)

“Thirdly, the homosexuality of the paidersty relationship had nothing to do with effeminacy. On the contrary, among the Dorians the obvious aim of education was manliness in its most pronounced forms. Refinement in the manner of dressing and in regards to food, house, furniture, or other circumstances of daily life was looked upon with contempt. Contemporary as well as later sources agree in stressing that it was among the warlike Dorians in particular that paidersty flourished.” (Vanggard, Phallos A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 44)

“Fourthly, Dorian paiderasty was something entirely different from homosexuality in the usual sense in which we use the term, as inversion (see definition on page 17). We have repeatedly pointed out that ordinary men regularly cultivated paiderasty and active heterosexuality at the same time. Men who stuck exclusively to boys and did not marry were punished, scorned, and ridiculed by the Spartan authorities, and treated disrespectfully by the young men.” (Vanggard, Phallos A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, p. 44)

“From the point of view of many older male lovers, boys and girls were equally desirable, but elite girls were secluded at home, while boys went to school and exercised nude at the gymnasium. Teenage male youths were seen as the most beautiful objects of desire, muscular yet, still hairless, smooth-skinned, with the small, delicate penises adult Greek men regarded as erotic. Since they were young they did not have the status of adult males and could be seen as somewhat feminine. When boys reached the age where they began to sprout beards and public hair, when their skin grew coarse they seemed much less desirable; they acquired the status of citizens, and might pursue their own young male lovers before they married.” (Clark, Desire A History of European Sexuality, p. 23)

“If we are to draw conclusions from what has been said as to the ethics of Greek love of boys, the following emerges as an undeniable fact: The Greek love of boys is a peculiarity of character, based upon an aesthetic and religious foundation. Its object is, with the assistance of the State, to arrive at the power to maintain the same and at the fountain-head of civic and personal virtue. It is not hostile to marriage, but supplements it as an important factor in education.” (Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, p.445)

“Although the Greeks believed that the same desire attracted one to whatever was desirable, they nonetheless thought this desire entailed particular problems when it arose in a relationship between two males of distinct age cohorts, one of whom had not received yet achieved the status of adult citizen. The disparity was what gave the relationship its value-and what made it morally problematical. An elaborate ritualization of appropriate conduct on the part of both participates was designed to give such relationships a “beautiful” form, one that would honor the youth's ambiguous status. As not yet a free adult male, he was an appropriate object of masculine desire; as already potentially a free citizen, his future subjectively must be honored. The active role can only be played by the older partner, but the younger partner must be treated as free to accept or reject his suitor. Thus the Greeks believed that the relationship should be designed so as to provide an opportunity for the younger to begin to learn the self-mastery that would be expected of him as an adult. The older man's desire was seen as unproblematic; what was difficult was how to live that desire in such a way that its object might in turn become a subject.” (Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, p. 138)

“The truth is that pederasty is a vice encouraged by abnormal social conditions, such as life in military camps or purely masculine communities. Society was essentially masculine in the classical period of Greek civilisation, even outside of Sparta. Homosexuality in fact develops wherever men and women live separate lives and differences in education and refinement between the sexes militate against normal sexual attraction. The more uncompromising such separation and diversity become, more widespread homosexuality will be.” (Flaceleitere, Love in Ancient Greece, p.215-216)

Behavior and Not a Person

Larry Houston — 2013-03-15T06:00:00Z

Articles on banap.net were first published in 2005. Now in 2012 banap.net is undergoing a major revision with new information and new articles. Two things will not change; the articles will still come from a historic perspective. More importantly it will continue the emphasis that it is “Homosexuality, What one does” and not “Homosexual, who one is”. This major revision is a new section “Homosexuality in History”. The articles will be about homosexuality in different countries, cultures and societies. Also new is the perspective, of seeing homosexuality as different “models” and not different “types” of homosexuality. In a second section, there will be four articles, each showing a different model of homosexuality. Homosexuality as a “Sin”; as a “Crime”; as a “Disease” and now today as a “Political Identity”. Emphasizing that over time how homosexuality is viewed has changed. Significant is the fact, that historically though homosexuality has enjoyed somewhat varying degrees of tolerance, all cultures and societies have never accepted homosexuality.

The updated banap.net will have two major sections banap 1 and banap 2. Three sections from the original banap.net web page will continue to be accessible from the updated banap.net web page. These sections are the extensive Bibilography, the important section Overcoming Homosexuality and the section HIV/AIDS that is significant in discussing homosexuality.

Banap 1 will contain the original information and sections “Inventing a Homosexual”, “Identifying a Homosexual” and “Same-Sex Marriage”. Banap 2 will have two sections, “Homosexuality in History” and “Homosexuality as a: ” that contain the new articles and information.

“In short, the gay lifestyle - if such a chaos can, after all, legitimately be called a lifestyle - it just doesn't work: it doesn't serve the two functions for which all social framework evolve: to constrain people's natural impulses to behave badly and to meet their natural needs. While it's impossible to provide an exhaustive analytic list of all the root causes and aggravants of this failure, we can asseverate at least some of the major causes. Many have been dissected, above, as elements of the Ten Misbehaviors; it only remains to discuss the failure of the gay community to provide a viable alternative to the heterosexual family.” (Kirk and Madsen, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of the Gay's in the 90s, p.363)

The authors of this book published in 1989 self-identify as gay. Kirk graduated from Harvard University in 1980. Madsen has taught on the faculty of Harvard University. He is a public-communications expert, designed commercial advertising for Madsen Avenue, and guided strategy for the Positive Images Campaign. This campaign was the first national gay advertising effort in American. The following quote from the introduction of their book along with the title of the book perhaps gives a very strong indication of the authors' belief in a homosexual agenda. Perhaps this may be their motivation for writing the book.

“The campaign we outline in this book, though complex, depends centrally upon a program of unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long-established principles of psychology and advertising.” (Kirk and Madsen, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of the Gay's in the 90s, p.xxvi)

These two quotes are just a sampling of many others written in books and articles published by those who advocate for homosexuality or self-identify as gay that may be read on this web site. Larry Houston who is writing the articles on this web site self-identifies as a former homosexual.

His story may be read in the section, Larry's story. This section also includes an article about Larry facing discrimination at Harvard University for being an ex-gay. In the section Overcoming Homosexuality are articles helpful not only to those struggling with homosexuality but also to anyone who desires a better understanding about homosexuality.

The parameters of a discussion of homosexuality are best framed in the following way. Who one is, a homosexual or what one does, homosexuality. The support is strongest for the latter. The two quotes below are by a man who self-identifies as gay. John D'Emilio is a university professor, author, and a gay historian. He too agrees that it is “homosexuality, what one does”. Homosexuality is an illegitimate attempt to meet the legitimate need for intimacy in same-sex relationships.

“There is another historical myth that enjoys nearly universal acceptance in the gay movement, the myth of the “eternal homosexual.” The argument runs something like this: Gay men and lesbians always were and always will be. We are everywhere; not just now, but throughout history, in all societies and all periods. This myth served a positive political function in the first years of gay liberation. In the early 1970s, when we battled an ideology that either denied our existence or defined us as psychopathic individuals or freaks of nature, it was empowering to assert that “we are everywhere.” But in recent years it has confined us as surely as the most homophobic medical theories, and locked our movement in place. Here I wish to challenge this myth. I want to argue that gay men and lesbians have not always existed. Instead they are a product of history, and have come into existence in a specific historical era. Their emergence is associated with the relations of capitalism; it has been the historical development of capitalism-more specifically, its free-labor system-that has allowed a large numbers of men and women in the late twentieth century to call themselves gay, to see themselves as part of a community of similar men and women, to organize politically on the basis of that identity.” (D'Emilio, Making Trouble Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University, p.5)

“I have argued that lesbian and gay identity and communities are historically created, as a result of a process of capitalist development that has spanned many generations. A corollary of this argument is that we are not a fixed social minority composed for all time of a certain percentage of the population. There are more of us than one hundred years ago, more of us than forty years ago. And there may very well be more gay men and lesbians in the future. Claims made by gays and nongays that sexual orientation is fixed at an early age, that large numbers of visible gay men and lesbians in society, the media, and the schools will have no influence on the sexual identities of the young are wrong. Capitalism has created the material conditions for homosexual desire to express itself as a central component of some individuals' lives; now, our political movements are changing consciousness, creating the ideological conditions that make it easier for people to make that choice.” (D'Emilio, Making Trouble Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University, p.12)

HIV/AIDS as a section will remain accessible from the banap.net homepage. HIV/AIDS is a significant consequence of homosexual behavior, no matter the spin or sugar coating that is put on it. It should be noted that you read in the official statistical reporting of HIV/AIDS of the term MSM (men who have sex with men). Glaringly absent are the terms, homosexual or gay, words that have possible connotations to one's identity. The following is the most current and up to date information that is available online from the Centers for Disease Control of the United States Department of Government. This information is only through the year 2009.

“Overall, CDC's new incidence estimates continue to show that Gay and bisexual men remain the population most heavily affected by HIV in the United States. CDC estimates MSM represent approximately 2% of the US population, but accounted for more than 50% of all new HIV infections annually from 2006 to 2009 –56% in 2006 (27,000), 58% in 2007 (32,300), 56% in 2008 (26,900) and 61% (29,300) in 2009.”

(Source: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/incidence.htm. Accessed on Sept. 9, 2012)

“Gay, Bisexual, and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM) of all races and ethnicities remain the population most severely affected by HIV. CDC estimates that MSM account for just 2% of the U.S. population, but accounted for 61% of all new HIV infections in 2009. MSM accounted for 49% of people living with HIV infection in 2008 (the most recent year national prevalence data are available).

In 2009, white MSM continued to account for the largest number of new HIV infections of any group in the U.S. (11,400), followed closely by black MSM (10,800).”

(Source: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/us.htm Accessed on Sept 2012)

Here is the most recent information from the CDC website. HIV/AIDS information has been updated for the years from 2008 to 2011. One transmission category has continued to increase, male to male sexual contact, while all other transmission categories decreased This information has been accessed online March 15, 2013

“MSM represents two percent of the U.S. population but 62 percent of all HIV diagnoses are attributed to male-to-male sexual behavior.”(Source: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/ehap/resources/direct/022813/index.htm

“From 2008 through 2011, the annual estimated number and the estimated rate of diagnoses of HIV infection in the United States remained stable (Table 1a). In 2011, the estimated rate was 15.8.” (Source: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/surveillance/resources/reports/2011report/index.htm#cover. PDF file was downloaded of the actual report, “Diagnoses of HIV Infection in the United States and Dependent Areas”, 2011 Vol. 23, p.6)

“Transmission category: From 2008 through 2011, among adult and adolescent males, the annual number of diagnosed HIV infections attributed to male-to-male sexual contact increased. The numbers of infections attributed to injection drug use, to male-to-male sexual contact and injection drug use, and to heterosexual contact decreased. Among adult and adolescent females, the numbers of infections attributed to injection drug use and to heterosexual contact decreased. In 2011, diagnosed infections attributed to male-to-male sexual contact (65%, including male-to-male sexual contact and injection drug use) and those attributed to heterosexual contact (27%) accounted for approximately 92% of diagnosed HIV infections in the United States.” (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/surveillance/resources/reports/2011report/index.htm#cover. PDF file was downloaded of the actual report, “Diagnoses of HIV Infection in the United States and Dependent Areas”, 2011 Vol. 23, p.7)

Thank you for visiting banap.net. This web site is regularly being revised and updated. Plans are being made to publish this information in a book form. banap.net is a resource for those seeking a greater understanding of homosexuality. Homosexuality is an illegitimate attempt to meet the legitimate need for intimacy in same-sex relationships.

Homosexuality as a Sin

Larry Houston — 2013-03-04T23:16:42Z

Homosexuality as a Sin

Same-sex sexual acts have a history; today they are called “homosexuality”. Before ‘homosexuality” they were called “sodomy”. In England during the reign of King Henry VIII “sodomy” became a civil offense with the passage of the buggery Act of 1533. Many authors have claimed that the model of sodomy as a sinful act was replaced by a model of the sodomite as a sexual identity in the eighteen century. In Germany in the late 1860s the transition from a religious model to a medical model for same-sex sexual acts begin. It was at this time the term “homosexual” itself was coined.

“Citing a few biblical references, theologians censured sodomy as one of the most heinous sins, whether committed by men or women. . . . In theological discourse this offense was closely tied to religious heterodoxy. One of the most common slang words for sodomite, bougre (bugger), was derived, in fact, from the twelfth-century Bulgarians, who were viewed as both heretics and deviants. The association between heresy and sodomy proved long lasting.” (Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 8-9)

“Initially, sodomy was a theological construct, serving only intermittently to refer to a clear variety of sexual activity or to bring into focus the behaviour of a particular kind of person.” (Mills, “Male-Male Love and Sex in the Middle Ages, 1000-1500, p. 14 in A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages editor Matt Cook)

“Furthermore, the prevalence of homosexual conduct is attested by the fact that sodomy was regarded from early times as an ecclesiastical offence, although it did not become a felony and thus subject to ordinary criminal jurisdiction until the reign of Henry VIII.” (Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, p. 349)

“In general usage, ‘sodomy' was not an exact term and did not merely refer to a specific sexual act. Rather, it described the whole range of homosexual behavior, sexual or otherwise, which belonged, as one Regency pamphlet put it, to ‘the ancient lechers of Sodom and Gomorrah. This Biblical idiom was as commonplace in the nineteenth century as it had been in the previous ones. It implied that ‘sodomites' shared both the practices and the fate of the inhabitants of that mythical city and that ‘sodomy' represented all that was terrible, nameless and immoral about them.” (Cocks, Secrets, Crimes, and Diseases, 1800-1914, p. 111 in A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages, editor Matt Cook.)

“Sodomy was the name, taken from the Bible, for an unmentionable sin that was defined as any lustful act which could not result in procreation within marriage. From the thirteen century, it was not only a sin, but also a capital crime. Sodomy included extramarital heterosexuality, non-vaginal sexual acts, all forms of same-sex behaviour, bestiality, masturbation and so forth. The best-known examples of persecution of sodomy were directed against males having anal sex with other males.” (Hekma, Same-sex relations among men in Europe, 1700-1990, p.79 in Sexual Cultures in Europe Themes in Sexuality editors Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma)

“Before the eighteen century, then, it was conceivable that any man or woman might engage in the unnatural act of sodomy, as part of a more generalized “bisexual” behavior. Sodomites were not fundamentally different from anyone else. They were simply sinners who engaged in a particular vice, like gamblers, drunks, adulterers, and the like.” (Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 12)

“The early Church punished sodomy much like other sins, with long penances. But what they understood as sodomy did not map into our present day division between heterosexual and homosexual. The definition of sodomy rested on the distinction between natural and unnatural acts. For clerics, the distinction was between sex for procreation within marriage, an unfortunate necessity, and sex that was not for procreation, which could include oral or anal sex between a man and a woman, or a man and a man.” (Clark, A History of European Sexuality, p. 73-74)

“Sexual acts not geared toward procreation were commonly referred to as sodomy. In addition to homosexual intercourse, this term might cover anal contact between man and woman, coritus interruptus, bestiality, and even sexual intercourse between Christians and non-Christians (Greenberg 1988, 274-275; Gilbert 1985).” (Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature Kraft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identities, p. 21)

“Sodomy was an act, defined either as any sexual act outside of marriage, which did not lead to procreation or as anal penetration, with males, females, or beasts. It had nothing to do with sexual identities.” (Eder, Hall, and Hekma, Sexual Cultures in Europe Natural Histories, p.11)

“The attitudinal shift described by Proust neatly illustrates the nineteenth-century replacement of predominantly Christian taxonomies of sexual sin with biological and psychological based primarily on congenital, psychiatric and legal conceptions of the modern subject.” (Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature 1850-1930, p. 2)

“Homosexuality, and by implication homosexuals, have been placed outside prevailing social structures as defined by most theological, legal, and medical models. In Western culture, homosexual activity was first categorized as a sin. With the rise of materialism and the decline of religion, it became a transgression against the social, not the moral order: a crime.” (Bronski, Culture Clash The Making of Gay Sensibility, p. 8-9).

Bibliography

Bronski, Michael. Culture Clash The Making of Gay Sensibility. South End Press. Boston, 1984.

Clark, Anna. Desire A History of European Sexuality. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. New York and London, 2008.

Cook, Matt editor. A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages. Greenwood World Publishing. Oxford/Westport Connecticut, 2007.

Eder, Franz X., Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma editors. Sexual Cultures in Europe Themes in sexuality. Manchester University Press. Manchester and New York, 1999.

Eder, Franz X., Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma editors. Sexual Cultures in Europe Natural histories. Manchester University Press. Manchester and New York, 1999.

Merrick, Jeffrey and Bryant T. Ragan, JR. editors. Homosexuality in Modern France. Oxford University Press. Oxford & New York, 1996.

Oosterhuis, Harry. Stepchildren of Nature: Kraft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity. Univernisty of Chicago Press. Chicago, 2000.

Schaffner, Anna Katharina. Modernism and Perversion Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature 1850-1930. Palgrave Macmillan. Great Britain, 2012.

Homosexuality in Great Britain: Section 3: Scandals

Larry Houston — 2013-03-04T03:08:30Z

Homosexuality in Great Britain: Scandals

This is the third sections in “Homosexuality in Great Britain”. The time period being covered is when the concept of the “modern homosexual identity” was coming into existence. What was scandalous then, today could still be considered scandalous. What was apart of the “homosexual culture” then is still apart of the “homosexual culture” today, “cross-dressing” and sexual relations between adults and adolescents. Today the term is “transgender”, a concept that only now in the “2nd generation of the modern homosexual movement” is being advocated for as a “normal gender/sexual identity”. How quickly will follow the advocating for sex between adults and adolescents as being “normal sexual behavior”? One only needs to study history and specifically here speaking of homosexuality read a book published in 1989, After the Ball How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of gays in the ‘90s, by two self-identified homosexuals.

When you're very different, and people hate you for it, this is what you do: first you get your foot in the door, by being as similar as possible; then, only then-when your one little difference is finally accepted-can you start dragging in your other peculiarities one by one. You hammer the wedge narrow end first. As the saying goes, Allow the camel's nose beneath your tent, and his whole body will soon follow.”(Kirk and Madsen, After the Ball How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ‘90s, p. 146)

Scandals

“In these lines, Wilde ventriloquizes Lady Bracknell in order to allude, obliquely and across gender, to a then notorious transvestite/ homosexual scandal, in which two men Frederick Park (aka “Fanny”) and Ernest Boulton (aka “Stella”) were arrested in drag in front of the Strand Theatre and later prosecuted for “conspiracy to commit a felony”-the felony being of course sodomy. Argued before Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, the case Regina v. Boulton and others opened on 9 May 1871, lasted for six days, aroused immense public interest, including extensive newspaper coverage, and resulted, thanks to paucity of evidence, in acquittal. Along with the “Cleveland Street Scandal” of 1889, the Boulton and Park case was Victorian England's most prominent homosexual “discursive event” prior to the Wilde trails of 1895.”(Craft, Another Kind of Love male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920, p. 122

“The Cleveland Street scandal exposed the sexual exploitation in a West End male brothel of young telegraph messenger lads, one whom was under 16 years of age. The exposure of this scandal undoubtedly gained momentum in all the newspapers because of the connection between the male brothel and some of its clients, who were of the highest social and political standing. But the attraction for the press was, initially, the corrupting of telegraph boys by their elders.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913, p. 96)

“The three infamous Wilde trials five years later ran from 3 April to 25 May 1895. The first was a libel action taken by Wilde against the Marquis of Queensberry, who had left a card with the words ‘posing as a sodomite [sic]' for Wilde at his club, the Albemarle. During the trial Queensberry and his team set out to substantiate their plea of justification, prompting Wilde to withdraw. As a result of the revelations in the libel case Wilde was arrested, along with Alfred Taylor, one of his associates, and charged under the Labouchere Amendment. The two men were tried together between 29 April and 1 May, but the jury could not agree on a verdict and the judged ordered a retrial. This time Wilde and Taylor were tried separately, with Taylor's case heard first. The Solicitor General, Sir Frank Lockwood, took up the case for the prosecution and the two men were found guilty and sentenced to the maximum term of two years' imprisonment with hard labour.”(Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914, p. 51)

“One of the consistent themes during Wilde's trials was the youthfulness of his sexual partners, almost all of whom were under the age of twenty-one and some were around sixteen or seventeen.”(Robins, Oscar Wilde The Great Drama of His Life How His Tragedy Reflected His Personality, p. 129)

1. 1871 Stella and Fanny

“Historians have tended to assume that no one knew of or saw sodomy in the mid-nineteenth-century city and that, as a result, no one knew what to make of cross-dressers like Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park. The trial of these ‘female impersonators', and their subsequent acquittal on the charge of conspiring to commit sodomy, is now one of the central parts of any history of male homosexuality and is justly one of the most famous criminal trials of the nineteenth century. In April 1870, Ernest Boulton and Federick Park, dressed in women's clothes and in character as ‘Stella' and “Fanny', were arrested as they left the Strand theatre. It emerged at the committal hearings that they had been in the habit of attending fancy dress balls in fashionable hotels and walking the West End in female attire, under the gaze of police, since at least 1867. They had even attended the 1869 Varsity boat race in women's clothes. It was soon revealed that Boulton had been living with a penurious aristocrat named Lord Arthur Clinton, who was the son of the fourth Duke of Newcastle, a former government minister.”(Cocks, Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century, p.105)

“One of the most sensational trials of the century involved two of the most famous cross-dressers in Victorian Britain. Federick Park and Ernest Boulton were from respectable backgrounds, Park being the son of a judge and Boulton the son of a suburban clerk, but both were shown to have lived at the centre of a group of men who dressed, and in some cases, lived, as women. Their alleged crime was ‘conspiring' with others, both known and unknown, to commit sodomy.”(Cocks, Secrets, Crimes, and Diseases, 1800-1914, p. 121 in A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages, editor Matt Cook.)

“The great homosexual scandal of the mid-Victoria period involved another Member of Parliament, thirty-year-old Lord Arthur Clinton, third son of the fifth Duke of Newcastle who sat for Newark in the House of Commons. Living in the same lodgings as Lord Arthur were two young men, Ernest Boulton, aged twenty-two, the son of a London stockbroker, and his inseparable companion, Frederick William Park, aged twenty-three, whose father was a Master in the Court of Common Please. Boulton and Park were both transvestite homosexuals, who liked to play female parts in amateur theatricals and frequently appeared in public dressed as women, rouged and painted, in low cut dresses. Bouton, familiarly known as ‘Stella', was an effeminate looking youth, extremely musical and the possessor of a fine soprano voice. A servant in the lodgings deposed that she thought Boulton was Lord Arthur's wife and certainly his lordship did nothing to dispel this idea; on the contrary the evidence showed that he had visiting cards printed in the name of ‘Lady Arthur Clinton' and a seal engraved with the name ‘Stella”. Park, who was known as Fanny, was also on terms of intimacy with Lord Arthur, as appeared in some of his letters which the police seized.”(Montogomery, A Tangled Web Sex Scandals in British Politics and Society, p. 83-84)

“The ‘Stella and Fanny' trail has preoccupied the attentions of all historians of British homosexuality. However, most historians have, almost invariably, tended to concentrate on the last of the trials of Regina v. Boulton and Others in Westminster Hall in April and May of 1871. The ambivalence in definitions of sodomy and apparent confusion amongst authorities about the existence of sexuality between men in the Westminster Hall trial has led most historians since Weeks to conclude that there was little understanding of sex and sexuality between men in British society at this time. This argument fits neatly, in chronological terms¸ into arguments for the medico-legal construction of the homosexual towards the end of the century. However, the most recent study of the ‘Stella and Fanny' trials by Charles Upchurch, strongly criticises the emphasis of studies by Neil Bartlett, Weeks, Sinfield and ‘innumerable other works . . . [which] rarely move beyond the sensationalism of the 1871 newspaper reporting'.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861-1913, p. 68-69)

2. 1889 Cleveland Street scandal

“In the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889-1890 the police and the courts faced criticism for their handling of suspects, as will be shown later, and there was a lengthy exchange in parliament about the case which drew attention to an apparent increase in homosexual activity in the city.”(Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914, p. 47)

“The Cleveland Street scandal was a protracted affair, involving three trails and heated exchanges in parliament. It began in July of 1889 when Charles Swinscow, a fifteen-year-old telegraph boy working from the General Post Office headquarters in St Martin-le-Grand, admitted being paid for sex with men at 19 Cleveland Street, just north of Oxford Street. Charles Hammond the proprietor of the Cleveland Street house fled abroad once he had been implicated by Swinscow, but his accomplice Charles Veck and the supposed ringleader at the GPO, Henry Newlove were tried at the Old Bailey on 18 September 1889, under the Labouchere Amendment. They were sentenced to nine and four months with hard labor respectively, but the case went unreported.”(Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914, p. 50)

“The Cleveland Street scandal exposed the sexual exploitation in a West End male brothel of young telegraph messenger lads, one whom was under 16years of age. The exposure of this scandal undoubtedly gained momentum in all the newspapers because o the connection between the male brothel and some of its clients, who were of the highest social and political standing. But the attraction for the press was, initially, the corrupting of telegraph boys by their elders.”(Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913, p. 96)

“The affair began on 4 July 1884, when a Post Office messenger named Charles Swinscow was found to be in possession of more money than he could have earned legitimately. He was questioned and admitted that he had received the money as payment for having sex with men at Number 19 Cleveland Street, off Tottenham Court Road. Another messenger named Alfred Newlove had induced Sinscow and at least two others to go to the house with him for the same reason. The house was run by a man named Charles Hammond, assisted by the self-styled ‘Reverend' George Veck, and its clients according to the Telegraph boys were army officers, businessmen and aristocrats. On 7 July Newlove was arrested. Attempts were also made to arrest Hammond but he had already escaped to France and eventually ended up in Seattle. The house at Number 19was found by the police to be closed.”(Cocks, Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century, p.145)

“Five years later, similar charges of cover-up and vices in high places rocked the Tory government and its supporters in England. The affair began in the unlikely environment of the postal sorting office at Mount Pleasant in central London. This office, in London¸ sent out an army of youthful, uniformed messengers to deliver telegrams throughout the city, By the 1800s, these youths, some as young as 14, were notorious for the fact that their principal sideline was prostitution. When one of them, Charles Swinscow, was discovered to have the suspiciously large sum of eighteen schillings in his possession, alarm bells began to ring. On being questioned about the money, Swinscow admitted that another Telegraph boy named Alfred Newlove had persuaded him to go to a house in Cleveland street, just north of Soho, in order to have sex with men for money. The house, at number 19, was run by two men, Charles Hammond and the self-styled ‘Reverend' George Veck. Its clients, according to Swinscow, were army officers, businessmen and aristocrats, among them Lord Euston and Lord Arthur Somerset, the latter an enquerry to the Prince of Wales and the son of the Duke of Beaufort. That was not all, as some of the boys hinted that Prince Albert Victor, known as ‘Eddy' the son of the Prince of Wales and second in line to the throne, was also one of Hammond's customers.”(Cocks, Secrets, Crimes, and Diseases, 1800-1914, p. 131-132 in A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages, editor Matt Cook.)

“Once a man began to dabble, he discovered speedily that there were brothels where men and boys could be hired. This thriving underground world burst onto a rapt public when arrests were made at a whorehouse at 19 Cleveland Street in July 1989. The police stumbled onto the establishment in a kind of haphazard, pell-mell manner. It all started with the investigation into thefts at the central post office. A nineteen-year-old telegraph messenger boy, Charles Swinscow, was questioned by the police because he was spending more money than he could possibly earn as a messenger (these were the days before credit cards). Swinscow admitted quite openly that he and a number of other boys (including the wonderfully named Ernest Thickbroom) had been recruited by Harry Newlove(!), a former messenger, to perform all manner of sex acts with middle- and upper-class men at Cleveland Street. Most of these boys had started in on this life with some sexual fun in the lavatory at the central post office, with Newlove.”(Lutz, Pleasure Bound Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism, p. 178-179)

“Dubbed “the Cleveland Street Affair” after the small West End street where, at number 19, a male brothel proffering young postal employees to an upper-class and often titled male clientele became the center of a controversy that not only implicated severally highly placed men (including Prince Albert Victor, second in line to the throne) in a web of-to use the Public Prosecutor's words-“unnatural lust,” but also put both the state prosecution and the public newspaper coverage themselves on trial. The circumstances of “the affair” are rather complex: on 4 July 1989, while pursuing an investigation of a small theft from the Central Telegraph Office, the police interrogated a fifteen-year messenger boy named Charles Swinscow who appeared to have more money in his possession than his meager salary could account for. Under questioning Swinscow revealed that he had earned the money by going to bed with “gentleman” at the house in Cleveland Street run by a man called Charles Hammond. He also volunteered that he new of at least two other telegraph boys who had pursued similar outside employment and noted that they had all been introduced to the practice by another messenger, Henry Newlove(!). These revelations led to a further investigation culminating in the prosecution of Newlove and an older man, George Veck, for procuring boys to “commit diverse acts of grow indecency with another [male] person. The third man, Charles Hammond was also indicted but fled the country to avoid persecution.”(Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities, 121-122)

“Towards the middle of the eighties a male brothel was opened by a certain Charles Hammond in a house at 19 Cleveland Street, off Tottenham Court Road. It was soon doing highly successful business, its patrons including various aristocratic and well-to-do homosexuals, including, so it was rumoured, a member of the British royal family. (The suspected royalty was the twenty-five year old Prince Eddy, later Duke of Clarence, eldest son of the Prince of Wales.) A particular speciality of the house in Cleveland Street was telegraph boys¸ who were willing to go to bed with the customers¸ besides delivering telegraphs, for which in those days they only earned a few shillings a week. There was also more than a hint of blackmail about the place. The police got on to Hammond's trail after being called by in by the postal authorities to investigate the disappearance of some money from the General Post Office in the summer of 1889. Suspicion fell on one of the telegraph boys, who was observed to have more money to spend than his modest weekly earnings permitted. The boy was questioned by the police and under interrogation confessed that he had got money from Hammond, and that he was not the only one to receive payment for obliging Hammond's customers. Other lads were questioned in turn, among them one called Algernon Alleys, who had received a number of comprising letters from a certain ‘Mr. Brown'.”(Hyde, The other Love, p. 123-124)

“Hammond was thus indicted along with Newlove and Veck on thirteen counts of procuring six boys-Wright, Swinscow, Thickbroom¸ Perkins, Barber and Allies-‘to commit divers acts of gross indecency with another person' between 20 December 1888 and 25 March 18889. There were also counts charging conspiracy to commit the same offense. In addition Veck was specifically charged with committing acts of gross indecency with Allies and Barber, contrary to section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, and Newlove with similar acts with Swinscow as well as attempted buggery of Wright.”(Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal, p.47)

“Newlove and Veck were tried, on 18 September, for procuring the Telegraph boys and attempting to commit sodomy and were respectively sentenced to four and nine months imprisonment.”(Cocks, Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century, p.145)

“At the end of August, in an attempt to collect corroborating evidence against Somerset, the police went to interview another boy named in the enquiry, Algernon Allies, who was living with his family at Sudbury in Suffolk. Unfortunately for them, Allies had been tipped off about their visit and had destroyed a number in incriminating letters.” (Cocks, Nameless Offences Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century, p.145)

Charles Hammond 34 years old. He was a professional male prostitute, blackmailer and brothel-keeper. Hammond was married to a French prostitute known as “Madame Caroline, by whom he had two sons. Occupied the house at 19 Cleveland Street from the latter part of 1888 until his flight to Paris on 6 July 1889 and then to American in October 1889 and settled in Seattle. He fled to Paris and then to America with a boy named Ames.

George Daniel Veck 39 years old. Veck was an ex-Post Office employee who posed as a clergyman and lived with Hammond at 19 Cleveland Street. He was sentenced to 9 months hard labor under Clause 11 in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885.

Algernon Edward Allies 18 years old. Allies lived and worked as a waiter at the Marlbough Club and was dismissed for stealing. Allies then lived at 19 Cleveland Street with Hammond before moving home with his parents. He was befriended by Lord Arthur Somerset at the Marlbough Club where Somerset was a member and given money for support by him for sexual favors, which Allies reported to the police. Allies was under police protection for several months. “He was a good-looking curly-haired youth of twenty who had been out of a job for the past six months or so during that time had been living at home with his parents. Before that he had been employed as a house boy in the Marlborough Club, where he had attracted the attention of Lord Arthur Somerset. He had also stolen some money from the club premises as a result of which he was arrested and charged with theft. He appealed to Lord Arthur for help, and instead of being sent to prison, he was bound over, Lord Arthur going surety for his good behaviour.” (Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal, p. 35-36)

George Barber: “But there was a boy there aged seventeen who gave his name as George Barber and described himself as as Veck's ‘Private Secretary'” (Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal, p.34) George and Veck lived together after Veck had left 19 Cleveland Street. Veck also passed him off as his son.

Henry Horace Newlove 17 years old. Newlove worked as a clerk in the GPO Secretary's office. He initiated and committed sexual acts with Swinscow and Wright in a basement lavatory in the General Post Office.

Telegraph boys: 1) William Meech Perkins. Telegraph boy at the General Post Office, procured by Newlove for Hammond, suspended from duty and dismissed in December of 1889. 2) Charles Thomas Swinscow 15 years old. Telegraph boy at the General Post Office, swore information against Lord Arthur Somerset, suspended from duty and dismissed in December of 1889. 3) Charle Ernst Thickbroom 17 years old. Telegraph boy at the General Post Office, swore information against Lord Arthur Somerset, suspended from duty and dismissed in December of 1889. 4) George Alma Wright 17 years old. Telegraph boy at the General Post Office, procured by Newlove for Hammond, suspended from duty and dismissed in December of 1889.

Lord Arthur Somerset: Lord Arthur was a Major in the Royal Horse Guards and superintendent of the Prince of Wale's stables and known familiarly as ‘Podge'. H e was the 3rd son of the 8th Duke of Beaufort. Somerset left England permanently, 18 October 1889, resigning his commission and appointment in the Prince of Wale's household prior to the issue of a warrant for his arrest. He eventually settled at Hyeres on the French Riviera, where he died and was buried.

3. 1895 Oscar Wilde trials

“Four days after the first night, on 18th February, he drove with a witness to the Albemarle Club in Dover Street, of which Oscar was a member, and left his card with the Hall Porter to be handed to Oscar. On the card he wrote the words: “To Oscar Wilde, posing as a sodomite [sic].” It transpired later that the offending word, whether because of its mis-spelling, or because he was unfamiliar with it, did not convey any meaning to the Hall porter; the circumstances were, however, so unusual, that he put it in an envelope, addressed it to ‘Oscar Wilde, Esq.' And stuck it in the letter-rack in the hall. And it was there Oscar received it ten days later, on his return from visiting friends in the country. Here it was that he made the fatal mistake that ruined him. He should have torn up the card, dismissed the incident from his mind and let Queensbury brood on in his fury.”(Holland, Oscar Wilde and His World. P. 102)

“The three infamous Wilde trials five years later ran from 3 April to 25 May 1895. The first was a libel action taken by Wilde against the Marquis of Queensberry, who had left a card with the words ‘posing as a sodomite [sic]' for Wilde at his club, the Albemarle. During the trial Queensberry and his team set out to substantiate their plea of justification, prompting Wilde to withdraw. As a result of the revelations in the libel case Wilde was arrested, along with Alfred Taylor, one of his associates, and charged under the Labouchere Amendment. The two men were tried together between 29 April and 1 May, but the jury could not agree on a verdict and the judged ordered a retrial. This time Wilde and Taylor were tried separately, with Taylor's case heard first. The Solicitor General, Sir Frank Lockwood, took up the case for the prosecution and the two men were found guilty and sentenced to the maximum term of two years' imprisonment with hard labour.”(Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914, p. 51)

“Wilde was prosecuted to conviction under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, Section 11, which made homosexual acts between consenting males a criminal offence whether committed in public or in private, the section in question having been proposed by Henry Labouchere, editor of Truth, and agreed to in a thinly attended House in the small hours of an August morning on the eve of the parliamentary summer recess.” (Hyde, A Tangled Web Sex Scandals in British Politics and Society, p. 208)

“It is likely that Wilde first became a practicing homosexual in 1886 as the result of his meeting Robert Ross; the latter subsequently admitted to Frank Harris that he was ‘the first boy Oscar ever had', and there seems to be no reason to doubt this statement, confirmed by a similar admission to Arthur Ransome, for whose well-known ‘critical study' of Wilde Ross supplied considerable information.”(Hyde, The other Love, p. 141)

1st trial: Wilde vs Queensberry

“The cause of Oscar Wilde's first dramatic appearance at the Old Bailey was the friendship he had formed with Lord Alfred Douglas, third son of the eighth Marquess of Queensbury. The father objected to this association on his son's part, and after numerous attempts to break it up, Lord Queensbury finally resorted to a characteristically vulgar and offensive action which was calculated to bring the issue to a head. On the afternoon of 18th February 1895 he called at Wilde's club in London and left with the porter a card in which he had written some defamatory words. Wilde was handed the card on his next visit to the club, and, having taken legal advice, he embarked on the course which was eventually to land him in prison and his friend in exile.”(Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, p.62)

“The case of Oscar Wilde versus the Marquess of Queensbury opened at the Old Bailey on 3 April 1895. As might be expected a suit between a world-famous dramatist and a notorious and highly eccentric sportsman who was also a lord attracted a great attention, and the court was full to overflowing, although there were no ladies present.” (Hichens, Oscar Wilde's Last Chance – The Dreyfus Connection, p. 49)

“On 3rd April the case of Regina v. the Marquess of Queensbury was opened at the Old Bailey before Mr Justice Henn Collins and lasted three days, at the end of which Sir Edward Clarke, seeing the hopelessness of the position, withdrew from the case and a formal verdict of ‘Not Guilty' was returned in Queensbury favour. From that point the real debacle began.”(Holland, Oscar Wilde and His World, p. 105)

“On hearing them, Humphreys before taking the case asked if there was any truth in Queensberry's libelous accusation. Oscar said there was not; a warrant was obtained; and on March 2 Queensberry was arrested, and charged at the Marlborough Street Police Court with criminal libel. The case was then adjourned for a week.” (Kronenberger, Oscar Wilde, p.143)

“The judge insisted on a straightforward verdict of guilty or not guilty: Carson, Clarke, and the judge all agreed on a not-guilty verdict for Queensberry, which the judge directed the jury to bring in.”(Kronenberger, Oscar Wilde, p.154)

“Finally Carson, with the coolness of a poker player, produced his trump card; he said he would call as witnessed the boys who had been procured for Wilde. Oscar was thereby forced on the defensive and Carson had the upper hand. ‘What enjoyment was it to you to entertain grooms and coachmen?' ‘The pleasure for me was being with those who are young, bright, happy, careless and free. I do not like the sensible and I do not like the old.” From this moment he was no longer believed when he posed as the champion of youth. Besides he had just shocked the Victorians by something far more important than his attachment to Lord Alfred, he had transgressed the social code: a gentleman does not sit at the same table with people of lower orders, he can give them tips, but not cigarette-cases, He had betrayed his class and for that he would not be forgiven.”(Jullian, Oscar Wilde, p. 321)

2nd trial: Regenia v. Wilde and Taylor on 22 counts of gross indecency

“The country had in effect allowed Oscar to leave and he had not done so. Now it was to visit upon him all the wrath of the English in one of the ‘periodical fits of morality' which Macaulay had found so ridiculous in Byron's time seventy years earlier.” (Morely, Oscar Wilde, p. 119-120)

“Schematically, the judicial process can be chronicled as follows: After his initial arrest (5 April) and subsequent formal indictment (25 April) for committing acts of gross indecency and conspiring to commit such acts along with Alfred Taylor-an unemployed gentleman of Wilde's acquaintance who had recently run through a small inheritance, arrested on 6 April, and additionally charged with procuring young men for Wilde- the two defendants were remanded to police custody without bail until the indecisive conclusion of the first prosecution on 1 May.”(Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities, 175-176)

“The following morning, 6 April, Wilde was charged at Bow Street with offences under what became known as the ‘blackmailer's charter' namely Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, ‘for the protection of minors' – it having been established in court that some of the ‘panthers' were less than 18.”(Morely, Oscar Wilde, p. 119)

“On April 6, Oscar appeared in police court to be charged under a section of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which involved offenses against male persons.”(Kronenberger, Oscar Wilde, p.161)

“When it opened Oscar and Alfred Taylor were linked together under a single indictment of twenty-five counts that involved gross decency, conspiracy, and misconducts with young men.”(Kronenberger, Oscar Wilde, p.163)

“Wilde and Taylor were charged under a single indictment containing twenty-five counts and alleging: (a) the commission of acts of gross indecency by both men contrary to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, section 11; and (b) conspiracy to procure the commission of such acts by Wilde. There was a further charge against Taylor of having acted as a procurer for Wilde. The first nine counts of the indictment referred to misconduct with the two Parker brothers; the next three to Federick Atkins; two more incidents at the Savoy Hotel; two to the young man Sidney Mavor; three to charges of conspiracy; five to the blackmailer Alfred Wood; and the last to Wilde's conduct in regard to Edward Shelly. In regard to Taylor, the most series counts in the indictment charged him with attempting to commit the felony of sodomy with both the Parkers. To all these counts the prisoners pleaded not guilty.”(Hyde, Oscar Wilde A Biography, p. 234)

“Oscar's trial started on 26th April and lasted five days, at the end of which the jury disagreed and a verdict of ‘Not Guilty' was returned on certain counts. So the whole wretched business had to be gone through again, about three weeks later.”(Holland, Oscar Wilde and His World, p. 105)

“Clarke made an eloquent closing speech asking for ‘ a renowned and accomplished man of letters' (happily he had not seen the one to Bosie) to be freed of any connection with the ‘perjurer and blackmailers' trying to ruin his reputation, and the jury was sent out; but (and this remains some tribute to Clarke's skills as an advocate) they failed to agree on a verdict.”(Morely, Oscar Wilde, p. 125)

“The trial lasted five days. Sir Edward Clarke protested that the charge of conspiracy was unfair, for, should it be maintained, the two defendants who sat together in the dock, could not be called as witnesses. This the judge ruled against, but Clarke obtained an acquittal on the charge itself.”(Kronenberger, Oscar Wilde, p.163-164)

“The Hellenist's discourse alone was a scaffold strained to its limits by the task of supporting the imaginary of criminalized and pathologized late-nineteenth-century homosexuals becomes clear if we return to Wilde's speech from the dock about ‘the love that dare not speak its name' and place it in its immediate context-the final day of Wilde's first trial on 22 counts of gross indecency. The speech is made at the end of three days of unrelenting testimony regarding Wilde's sexual encounters with young men. Witnesses have described his proclivities graphically; how he had anal intercourse with them, fondled their genitalia, tried have them perform fellatio on him, or enjoyed having them-in the words of Charles Parker-‘[toss] him off', and hotel workers have described the ‘peculiar' stains left on the sheets in Wilde's rooms. Nineteen people have helped the prosecution argue its case that Wilde indulged regularly in ‘abominable traffic', ‘sodomy', ‘filthy practices' and vice.'”(Ivory, The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style¸1850-1930, p.16)

“Before the jury retired to consider their verdict, Mr Justice Charles put four questions to them which he then wrote down and handed to the foreman”

1. Do you think that Wilde committed indecent acts with Edward Shelley and Alfred Wood and with a person or persons unknown at the Savoy Hotel, or with Charles Parker? 2. Did Taylor procure or attempt to procure the commission of these acts or any of them. 3. Did Wilde and Taylor or either of them attempt to get Atkins to commit indecencies? 4. Did Taylor commit indecent acts with Charles Parker or William Parker?

The jury then withdrew, and at the foreman's request the judge ordered that they should be provided with a reasonable amount of food and drink to sustain them during their deliberations. It was just after half-past one when they filed out into the jury room. They returned to court at a quarter-past five, having sent a message to the judge that they had arrived at a negative finding in regard to the third question above, but they disagreed about the remainder.” (Hyde, Oscar Wilde A Biography, p. 266)

“But after not quite four hours the jury returned to the courtroom, having found it impossible to agree.”(Kronenberger, Oscar Wilde, p.166)

“Before they left the box, the jury returned a formal verdict of “Not guilty” on the counts relating to Atkins, and also on those concerning Mavor, which had been struck out of the indictment on the judge's directions for lack of evidence, as well as the conspiracy counts, which had been withdrawn by the prosecution. This disposed of nine counts in all, out of a total of twenty-five in the indictment which the prisons had to answer.”(Hyde, Oscar Wilde A Biography, p. 267)

3rd trial The second criminal trial against Wilde

“The second trial opened on May 20 at the Old Bailey.” (Kronenberger, Oscar Wilde, p.170)

“Standing in the dock on May 22, Oscar pleaded Not Guilty to the charges against him, which was now reduced to acts of gross indecency with three men who were named and two who were unknown”(Kronenberger, Oscar Wilde, p.171)

“Wilde entered the dock at the Old Bailey to stand trial for the second time on 22 May 1895. There were certain notable differences from the previous occasion. The counts relating to Aktins and Mavor had likewise disappeared, and with them the testimony of these youths-Atkins, because he had perjured himself in the witness box, and Mavor, because he had persisted in denying that any indecencies had ever taken place between himself and Wilde. Nevertheless, the accused still had a formidable series of eight accounts to meet. Four of these charged him with committing acts of gross indecency with Charles Parker at the Savoy Hotel, St. James' Place, and elsewhere; two counts charged him with committing similar offences with unknown persons in the Savoy Hotel; one count related to alleged indecency with Wood in Tite Street; and the final count concerned Shelly.”(Hyde, Oscar Wilde A Biography, p. 277)

“Wilde entered the dock at Old Bailey to stand trial for the second time on 22 May 1895. There were certain noticeable differences from the previous occasion. The defendant no longer had to meet any charges of conspiracy. The counts relating to Atkins and Mayor had likewise disappeared from the indictment, and with the testimony of these two youths – Atkins, because he had perjured himself in the witness box, and Mayor, because he had persisted in denying that any indecencies had ever taken place between himself and Wilde. Nevertheless, the accused still had a formable series of eight counts to meet. Four of these charged him with committing acts of gross indecency with Charles Parker at the savory Hotel, St James's Place, and elsewhere; two counts charged him with committing similar offences with unknown persons in the Savory Hotel; one count related to alleged indecency with wood in Tite Street; and the final count concerned Shelley.”(Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, p. 233-234)

“There had been twenty-five counts against the two prisoners when they were tried jointly. In the second trial, which began on 20 May before Mr Justice Wills and in which the prisoners were tried separately, the counts against Taylor were reduced to fourteen and those against Wilde to eight, this being due mainly to the dropping of the conspiracy counts by the prosecution.”(Hyde, Lord Alfred Douglas A Biography, p. 87-88)

“But very soon after this they returned to deliver their verdict: Oscar was found guilty of the seven charges against him in the indictment.”(Kronenberger, Oscar Wilde, p.173)

“The second trial started on 20th May at the Old Bailey before Mr Justice Wills and a jury of 12 men. It was dreary repetition of the first trial and dragged on for 6 days. The judge was obviously against Oscar from the very start and he summed up dead against him. The jury bought in a verdict of guilty, and the learned judged addressed Oscar Wilde with such venom as has seldom been heard in a British Court of Law:

‘. . . It is no use for me to address you. People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame . . . I shall be expected to pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment it is totally inadequate for such a case as this. The sentence of this Court is that you be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for two years.'”(Holland, Oscar Wilde and His World, p. 109)

Bibliography

Harris, Frank. Oscar Wilde. Michigan State University Press. 1959.

Hichens, Mark. Oscar Wilde's Last Chance – The Dreyfus Connection. The Pentland Press. Edinburgh, Cambridge, Durham, USA, 1999.

Holland Vyvyan. Oscar Wilde and His World. Charles Scribner's Sons. New York, 1960.

Hyde, H Montgomery. The Trials of Oscar Wilde. Dover Publications, INC. New York, 1962.

Hyde, H Montgomery. The Other Love An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain. Heineman. London, 1970.

Hyde, H Montgomery. Oscar Wilde A Biography. Farrar, Staus and Giroux. New York, 1975.

Hyde, H Montgomery. The Cleveland Street Scandal. W. H. Allen. London, 1976.

Hyde, H Montgomery. Lord Alfred Douglas A Biography. Methuen. London, 1984.

Hyde, H Montgomery. A Tangled Web Sex Scandals in British Politics and Society. Constable. London, 1986.

Jullian, Philippe. Translated by Violet Wyndham. Oscar Wilde. The Viking Press. New York, 1969.

Kronenberger, Louis. Oscar Wilde. Little, Brown and Company. London and Toronto, 1976.

Morley, Sheridan. Oscar Wilde. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. New York, 1976.

Robins, Ashley H. Oscar Wilde The Great Drama of His Life How His Tragedy Reflected His Personality. Sussex Academic Press. Brighton, Portland and Toronto, 2011.

Winwar, Frances. Oscar Wilde and the Yellow' Nineties. Harper and brothers Publishers. New York and London, 1940.

Homosexuality in France

Larry Houston — 2013-02-18T21:30:00Z

Homosexuality in France

“The fear of effeminacy, sexual perversions, and homosexuality was common throughout western Europe in the decades prior to 1914. This widespread public concern was certainly stimulated by growing military tensions, a number of prominent homosexual scandals, and the multiple strains put on sex roles by the social and political emancipation of women. These influences produce in Germany and England the same kind of antihomosexual animus that existed in France, blunting the impetus of fledgling homosexual rights movements, and encouraging defensive denials by homosexuals and their defenders that homosexuality was incompatible with manliness or constituted a threat to national security.” (Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, p.125)

In “Homosexuality in History” a modern western European focus will come from the nations of France, Great Britain and Germany. The emphasis will be on the time period from the late middle years to the nineteen-century to World War II. In this section the nation of France will be discussed. Of the three nations the most interesting thing is that in France there was no law against homosexuality beginning in 1810. The majority of the information about homosexuality in France is from Robert A Nye, Horning Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History Emeritus European Intellectual History Department of History at Orgeon State University.

“It is important to note that the late nineteenth-century medical conception of homosexuality was constructed in France without the benefit of the word homosexual. Claude Courouve has shown that the word (homosexualitat) was neologism coined by a German-speaking doctor, K.M. Benkert in 1869. The term circulated in German medical circles for a number of years and did not become current in French as homosexualite until the late 1890s.Until that time, and many years afterward, French doctors discussed male same-sex love in ways that built on older words or medical models. Before coining the word invert in 1882, the two favored words were pederasty and sodomy. Pederasty seems to have been regularly used to refer to the seduction of boys by adult males, and was a staple term of forensic medicine, but by the end of the century was used occasionally in connection with adult homosexuality, provoking objections from etymological purists like Andre Gide. Sodomy had an imprecise and old-fashioned biblical quality that made it more popular in literature than science. Once invert began to be applied to adult males, sodomy was used more exclusively to refer to bestiality. The term uranist or urning, coined by the German jurist Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs in the early 1860s never caught on in French, nor did the concept of the “third sex,” which was popular among German sex reformers.” (Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, p. 108)

“Long before the eighteen century, the French words pederast (literally, an adult male who has sex with boys) and sodomite (strictly speaking, a man who engages in buggery [anal intercourse]) had lost their etymological precision and in common parlance referred broadly to any male who had sexual relations of any kind with another male of any age.” (Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 80-81)

“To what extent was the discussion of homosexuality in France culturally specific? In many ways it parallels that elsewhere in Europe. It was subject to similar underlying forces, such as the purity movement, the fear of decadence; demographic concerns were, however, stronger in France. Enquiries into its aetiology took on a similar shape, with analogous divide between those who emphasized environmental factors. For France, as elsewhere, the historian is concerned for to describe modes of categorization of the homosexual and here France, by the beginnings of the Third Republic¸ was in many ways more sophisticated than England, yet proved remarkably provincial in its neglect of more scientific and subtle modes of analysis undertaken in Austria and Germany. If there was a culturally specific content to the debate in France, it lay in the absence of any criminal charge for homosexual acts in private, in contrast to England and Germany.” (Copley, Sexual Moralities in France 1780-1980, p.135)

“Eighteen-century law and public opinion remained largely intolerant of “unnatural” acts, whether insubordination within marriage, masturbation, or sodomy.” (Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 58)

“It exemplifies a persistent and deep antipathy toward unconventional sexuality in nineteenth-century France. The legislators of the Constitutional Assembly decriminalized sodomy in 1791, but this change did not make it socially acceptable.”(Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 95)

“As we have seen, until 1894 French medical writers on inversion had stressed several points: inversion was a variety of degenerate insanity characterized by hysterical gender-crossing; it was a form of primitive nervous activity; it was frequently criminal.” (Rosario, The Erotic Imagination French Histories of Perversity, p. 100)

“Throughout the nineteenth century the French were committed to organicist and neurogential theories of sexuality. To certain extend they remained attached to such biological conceptualizations of gender and sexuality.” (Rosario, The Erotic Imagination French Histories of Perversity, p. 166)

“Robert Nye claims that in France – to the extent there was any coherent paradigm explaining homosexual difference – doctors were wedded to the idea that homosexuality was a form of libidinal weakness. Moreover, the French tended to attribute homosexual desire to anatomical anomalies rather than psychic states, even when they insisted the anomaly was “acquired” – that is, consciously chosen or a product of circumstances like gender-segregated environments.” Dean, The Frail Social Body Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France, p.139)

“Indeed, I wish to advance a stronger point still: that French psychiatrists and sexologists were encouraged by the domestic environment to represent the sexual perversions, especially homosexuality, in a unique and particularly unsympathetic way. When French sexology is contrasted with sexology elsewhere in Europe, notable differences emerge that help explain why French work in this field made only a marginal contribution to modern concepts of sexual enlightenment and tolerance. As I have argued with the case of sexual identity, bourgeois ideals of masculine honor were similarly influential in shaping the nature as well as the social response to the perversions, in this instance through the projection of keenly felt masculine anxieties onto the bodies and minds of men who engaged in unconventional sexual behavior.” (Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, p. 100)

“I wish to contend here that this process of medicalizing and pathologizing sexual identity was more widely and deeply developed in France than elsewhere in Europe in the years around the turn of the century. The model of perversions that French doctors favored, particularly as it applied to homosexuality, differed in important aspects from ones adopted elsewhere, and was considerably less generous in its judgments.” (Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, p.102-103)

“But there are signs that the French, who produced a huge body of writing on sex and sexuality, were out of step with the main stream of the new field.” (Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, p.103)

“Medical language and reasoning played an important part though not exclusive role in shaping this public discourse in France, as it did elsewhere in Europe and America. It is my view that the case for the distinctiveness of the French outlook on sexual deviance may be most readily demonstrated by examining this medical language and reasoning in detail. In arguing thusly, I do not wish to be misunderstood to be attributing to doctors or to medical discourse a sovereign power to shape the norms of society. It seems clear enough that the professional status and public mission of medical science gave its practitioners unique leverage on the subject of sexual aberration, but my aim here is to demonstrate, as I have already suggested, that medicalization of sexual deviance, particularly male homosexuality, took different forms in France than elsewhere in Europe and placed its emphasis on different things.” (Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, p. 108)

France lacked a homosexual reform movement and homosexual militancy

France due to no specific legal prohibition of there was no homosexual reform movement advocating for homosexuality nor did homosexuals themselves organize into advocacy groups. In France the model presented was an individualistic model, less assertive and centered on exceptional figures. Another difference was that discussions of homosexuality in France tended to be confined to the literary sphere, which was considered to be a private sphere, unlike that of political writings.

“The difference between France and Germany was not only the absence in France of a reform movement on the Hirschfeld model, but also that medical experts, while prolix in discussing homosexuality, did not provide the rich body of case histories that gave homosexuals a voice even if distorted by the interpretations of the doctors who published them.”(Jackson, Living in Arcadia Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS, p. 26)

“Besides, homosexual militancy did not really take hold in England and France before the Second World War. Liberation took different forms in those two countries. In England, attempts were made to form homosexual organizations, but they were only a sidebar to the "cult of homosexuality" which characterized the period. And finally, compared to the democratic and militant German models, France presented an individualistic model, less assertive and centered on exceptional figures.”(Tamagne, A History of Homosexuality in Europe Berlin, London, Paris 1919-1939 Volume I, p. 81)

“Unlike Germany and England, France did not experience the formation of homosexuals movements in this time period. Perhaps the tolerant legal context accounts for their reticence with regards to associations-there was no repressive laws on the books that required a concerted fight; but French individualism also played a role. The communal approach, more typical for the Anglo-Saxon or Germanic countries, was not part of the French make up. Asserting homosexual rights was thus left to a few key figures, who personally identified with the homosexual cause.”(Tamagne, A History of Homosexuality in Europe Berlin, London, Paris 1919-1939 Volume I, p. 123)

“Also, while France did have an organized homosexual subculture, there was no militancy and French homosexuals remained determinedly individualistic. That is certainly due to the more favorable social climate than in the neighboring countries, but it also had to do with a certain political immaturity. Discussion on homosexuality remained confines to the literary sphere, consideration to be a private sphere – unlike that of political writing or social lampoons.”(Tamagne, A History of Homosexuality in Europe Berlin, London, Paris 1919-1939 Volume I, p. 143)

“Already in the inner-war period, there were many ways of affirming oneself as a homosexual or lesbian – as a militant protestor, as in Germany, through subversive integration, as in England, or via sensual individualism, as in France.” (Tamagne, A History of Homosexuality in Europe Berlin, London, Paris 1919-1939 Volume I, p. 144)

Laws

Even though in France there was no legal prohibition of homosexuality, it was still not socially acceptable. Two ways in which the French law regulated homosexuality were statues that condemned “public offenses against decency” and which made it a crime to “corrupt young people”.

“In the new Penal Code, approved by the Constituent Assembly in September 1791, there was no reference to Ancient Regime laws on sodomy, and this lack of any mention of ‘crimes against nature' might be read as tolerance of homosexuality.” (Copley, Sexual Moralities in France 1780-1980, p. 24)

“In the autumn of 1791 the French Constituent Assembly promulgated a new penal code abolishing the criminalization of “sodomy,” a decision confirmed by the Napoleonic Penal Code of 1810. Since 1791 same-sex relations between adults have been illegal in France. The significance of the decriminalization of sodomy should not be overemphasized. The issue was never specifically debated by the assembly, and the decision was probably a fortuitous consequence of the general project to secularize the legal code by eliminating offenses like blasphemy, heresy, and sacrilege that were seen as relics of religious superstition.”(Jackson, Living in Arcadia Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS, p. 20)

“Unlike prostitution, there was no legal regulation of sodomy per se because the Constitution Assembly in 1791 had abrogated Old regime laws concerning “crimes against nature.” Nevertheless, police continued to arrest men suspected of sodomitic solicitation under the Penal Code of 1810: Article 330(which condemned “public offenses against decency”) and Article 334 (which made it a crime to corrupt young people). Public concern about and private titillation over sodomy had grown since the Enlightenment with the emergence of sodomitic subcultures and the proliferation of pornography.” In eighteenth-century Paris, undercover agents (known as mouches and “pederasty patrols) had entrapped suspected sodomites.”(Rosario, The Erotic Imagination French Histories of Perversity, p.72-73)

“In fact, it was the Constituent Assembly of 1789-91 that abrogated French antisodomy laws in 1791, and Napoleonic legislation merely incorporated this previous reform. Moreover, Napoleon's government never showed itself particularity tolerant of homosexual activity. Determined to enforce the highest moral standards in France, Napoleonic officials sometimes ignored the inconvenient fact that the law no longer penalized “crimes against nature.” Whenever they deemed unconventional sexual behavior a threat to public morals, they did not hesitate to take repressive action against pederasts and sodomites.”(Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 80)

“In fact, the legislators never provided any explanation for this omission, which they even debated. Enlightenment philosophy may have guided the legislators, but it is more likely that the decriminalization of sodomy was simply a fortuitous and unforeseen consequence of their secularization of criminal law.”(Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 82)

“The Constitutional Assembly actually voted two distinct law codes in 1791. The Penal Code of 1791 (25 September-6 October) covered felonies, that is, series offenses, punishable by more than two years in prison and tried by a jury in the criminal courts. The Code of Municipal Police and Correctional Police, more commonly known as the Law of 19-22 July 1791, covered misdemeanors, that is, lesser offenses tried without the benefit of jury by judges in the correctional courts.”(Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 82)

“The Penal Code of 1791 included no sex crime other than rape, which French jurisprudence defined as a crime whose victim was necessarily a female. On the other hand, the Law 19-22 July 1791 dealt with public offenses against decency and alluded very indirectly to same-sex sexual relations. Chapter II Article 8 declared,

Those accused of having committed a gross public indecency, by a public offense against the decency of women, by unseemly actions, by displaying or selling obscene images, of having encouraged debauchery, or having corrupted young people of either sex, will be immediately arrested.”

(Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 82-83)

“In sum, legislation adopted during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period did not outlaw pederasty and sodomy in and of themselves. It merely criminalized sexual assault, public offenses against decency, encouragement of debauchery, and corruption of young people of either sex.” (Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 83)

“The Napoleonic code, which from 1810 was the legal instrument for France (and Holland, Belgium, and Italy) laid down no penalty for sodomy or homosexual acts. The code punished only rape, child molestation, and public outrage to bonnes moeurs (indecent behavior), preferring in matters of sexual comportment the same guiding principles that fueled the civil rights agenda of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to wit: “All that is not expressly forbidden by the law is permitted.” More out of a consistent vision of the role of law than for any other reason, no statutory emendations were made respecting homosexual behavior until a mild law under Vichy in 1941. What rights might discontented homosexuals claim in an atmosphere of such legal forbearance?”(Nye, “The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions, p. 392-393)

“From the time of the shaping of the criminal code in the Napoleonic era, French lawmakers had been reluctant to overturn the libertarian dimension of the code that permitted (any) sexual activities between (any) consenting adults, unlike nineteenth-century legislation elsewhere in Western Europe that sought to ban “unnatural” sexual relations carried out in public or in private. Providing they carried out their lovemaking in private, French homosexuals did not have to dread arrest or scandal until the Vichy regime, though even then the law of 1942, extended by the DeGulle government after the war, targeted only pedophiles by raising the “age of consent” to twenty-one.”(Merrick & Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France, p. 231)

“One paradox of France, then, was that a more liberal legal context engendered a more conservative, and inhibited, medical approach to homosexuality than in Germany.” (Jackson, Living in Arcadia Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS, p. 26)

Sexology in France

In the late nineteen-century a new field of medicine and science was just beginning, sexology. Some of the leading advocates for this new field were homosexuals themselves.

“To an extraordinary extent early sexology was associated closely with movements aimed at sexual reform, in particular efforts to abolish or revise harsh laws outlawing homosexual behavior. In some cases men who were themselves homosexuals – among them Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany and Edward Carpenter in England – initiated these movements, combing political activity with efforts to gather and disseminate enlightened medical knowledge on homosexuality.”(Nye, “The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions, p. 390)

“Despite the existence of a number of shared assumptions that united sexologists across national borders, there were significant differences in national sexological traditions prior to 1914, indicative of the extent to which national political concerns shaped scientific research agendas. In France, anxieties about a declining birth-rate led sexologists to cast the perversions, especially homosexuality, as deviations from, and threats to, heterosexual norms that needed to be bolstered as a matter of national urgency. Sexology in Germany and Austria was increasingly associated with movements of sexual reform, especially aimed at abolishing or revising the laws against homosexuality.” (Waters, Sexology, p. 44- 45 in Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality editors H. G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook.)

“Whilst the field of French psychiatry, into which early sexology was embedded, was shaped by more general processes related to the advent of industrialization and secularization, such as bureaucratization, professionalization and a growing scientistic belief in the explanatory power of biological models, the demographic concerns relating to waning fertility rates as well as political anxieties about the loss of military power in the ongoing French-German rivalry were some of the factors that led to the emergence of a distinctively French tradition of sexological writing.” (Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature 1850-1930, p. 63-64)

“Unlike its German and British counterparts, French sexology was never tied to activism and legislative change, but instead 'put special emphasis on a familialist ethic and stressed the centrality of reproductive fertility'. At least in part, this can be explained by the fact that, in contrast to the situation in most other European nation states, homosexuality was not outlawed under the Napoleonic Code.” (Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature 1850-1930, p. 63.)

“Many French sexologists tend not to differentiate as strictly between the aim and object of the sexual drive as their European colleagues: what counts for them is above all the departure from the procreative aim as such. Another specificity of the French sexological discourse is the predilection to classify all perversions under a single nosological entity, a 'master perversion' such as inversion in the case of Jean-Martin Charcot and Valentin Magnan, and fetishism in the case of Alfred Binet.”(Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature 1850-1930, p. 64-65.)

“I think there are three major reasons for the unique trajectory of French sexology. The first may be formulated as an irony. The Napoleonic code, which from 1810 was the legal instrument for France (Holland, Belguim, and Italy) laid down no penalty for sodomy or homosexual acts.” (Nye, “The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions”, p. 393)

“Second, the French after 1860 or so were experiencing an extraordinary slackening of their birth rate, so that by the late 1880s their population had virtually stopped growing, in contrast to the burgeoning demographic expansion elsewhere in the industrialized west.” (Nye, “The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions”, p. 393)

“Third, in 1870 the French experienced a major military defeat by the Prussians and watched helplessly as a huge and demographically vigorous new nation took shape on their eastern frontier.” (Nye, “The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions”, p. 393)

Homosexuality and Psychiatry in France

“As this summary of medical writings demonstrate, the dominant experts in the field were French or German (even if the word “inversion” was invented by the Italian Arrigo Tamassia in 1878). Although French and German writers shared much in common, their approaches affected by the different national contexts.”(Jackson, Living in Arcadia Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS, p. 24-25)

“In France medical experts operated in a difference context. First, homosexuality was not illegal, and as we have seen, many believed that the law was too liberal. Second, French elites were increasingly preoccupied with the physical degeneration of the “race”-especially the fear of alcoholism, syphilis, and TB.”(Jackson, Living in Arcadia Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS, p.25)

“An all-important shift in attitudes towards homosexuality came with the new approach of psychiatric medicine, above all with the work of Drs Charcot and Magnan, a shift from a criminal model for the homosexual to a pathological one.” (Copley, Sexual Moralities in France 1780-1980, p.135-136)

“In terms of aetiology, the psychiatrists were firm advocates of heredity over environmental factors. They wrote of an innate predisposition, some physiological impulse in the brain, which would sooner or later be triggered off by some external phenomenon.” (Copley, Sexual Moralities in France 1780-1980, p.139)

“Psychoanalysis saw itself in the morally neutral tradition of nineteenth-century positivism. Freud himself can be quoted as seeing homosexuals as neither criminal, nor sick. Yet psychoanalysis, nevertheless, defined homosexuality as a neurotic condition” (Copley, Sexual Moralities in France 1780-1980, p.151)

“French psychiatrists turned their interest toward the “perversions” about the same time psychiatrists did so elsewhere; and as was the case in England, Austria, Germany, homosexuality seems to have been a primary driving force in the creation of new nosologies. But the outcome of this process was markedly different in France. No medical champions of male love appeared, and the medical characterizations of it were qualitatively different and characterized by far less generosity. Rather than try to provide a lengthy narrative of these developments - as I have already done elsewhere (Nye 1989b, 32-51) – I will summarize the main points of contrast between the psychiatric treatment of homosexuality in France and other countries.” (Nye, “The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions, p.398)

“First, French sexology remained firmly committed to the model of degeneracy, which had become something of a native medical tradition by the 1890s (Pick 1989, 37-108; Nye 1974, 141-170).” (Nye, “The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions”, p. 398)

“A second point of contrast is that psychiatrists insisted on measuring the sexual perversions as departures from a procreative sexual norm, thus grounding sexuality in sex and recognizing no distinction between aim and object (Nye, 1989a, 65-66).” (Nye, “The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions”, p.398)

“Third, by viewing sexual inversion as a fetishistic perversion, French psychiatrists invariably considered inverts to be lacking in normal quantum of masculine genital sexual energy. Thus effeminacy – whether considered in terms of “hermaphroditic” genital stigmata, underdeveloped secondary sex characteristics, or feminine attitudes or gestures – became clinical evidence for the condition.”(Nye, The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions”, p.399)

“Finally, French psychiatrists were so sensitive to the implication of homosexuality and perversion in their nation that they invariably presented the problem as a cultural crisis of grave proportions.” (Nye, “The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions”, p. 399)

“I will consider three final medical themes that suggest the uniqueness of the French conception of the homosexual, and carry the consideration of homosexuality into the 1920s and 1930s.” (Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, p.116)

“First is the persistent reluctance of French medicine to distinguish between “sexuality' and “sex” Arnold Davidson uses the Oxford English Dictionary to date the use of the first appearance of the word “sexuality” in English, a usage which first appears in 1879 in a British gynecological textbook.” . . . The first use of sexuality in the “modern” sense in French is identified in Le Grand Robert and the Grand Larousse as 1924, both in reference to Freud's Three Essays, which first appeared in French the year before” (Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, p.116)

“Second, one might have well expected the growth of a French psychoanalytic movement to have popularized Freud's new conception of sexuality, but even here the story before 1945 suggest more continuity with the older views than conversation to the new.” (Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, p.116)

“Third, lest us consider homosexuality in Greek antiquity as a touchstone for European sexologists. . . . French medical commentators could not bring themselves to adopt a relativistic perspective, despite a French tradition of admiration of antiquity in no wise inferior to other European countries.” (Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, p.116)

Bibliography

Cocks, H. G. and Matt Houlbrook editors. Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality. Palgrave MacMillian. New York, 2006.

Copley, Antony. Sexual Moralities in France 1780-1980. Routledge. London and New York, 1989.

Dean, Carolyn J. The Frail Social Body Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France. University of California Press. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2000.

Eder, Franz X., Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma editors. Sexual Cultures in Europe Natural histories. Manchester University Press. Manchester and New York, 1999.

Eder, Franz X., Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma editors. Sexual Cultures in Europe Themes in sexuality. Manchester University Press. Manchester and New York, 1999.

Gunter, Scott. The Elastic Closet A History of Homosexuality in France 1942-present. Palgrave MacMillan. New York, 2009.

Jackson, Julian. Living in Arcadia Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago and London, 2009.

MacCubbans, Robert Purks. Editor. Tis Nature's Fault. Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press. New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney, 1987.

McCaffrey, Enda. The Gay Republic Sexuality, Citizenship and Subversion. Ashgate. Burlington, VT and Hampshire, England, 2005.

Merrick, Jeffrey and Bryant T. Ragan JR. Editors. Homosexuality in Modern France. Oxford University Press. Oxford and New York, 1996.

Nye, Robert A., “Sex Difference and Male Homosexuality in French Medical Discourse, 1830-1930”. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 63:1 (1989:Spring) p.32-51.

Nye, Robert A., “Honor, Impotence, and Male Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Medicine”. French Historical Studies, 16:1 (1989:Spring) p. 48-71.

Nye, Roberts A. “The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions. Science in Context. 4, 2(1991), pp.387-406.

Nye, Robert A. Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France. University of California Press. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1993.

Nye, Robert A. “Sex and Sexuality in France since 1800.” p. 91-113 in Sexual Cultures in Europe Natural histories. editors Franz X. Eder, Lesley Hall and Gert Hekma. Manchester University Press. Manchester and New York, 1999.

Provencher, Denis M. Queer French Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship in France. Ashgate. Burlington, VT and Hampshire, England, 2007.

Rosario, Vernon A. The Erotic Imagination French Histories of Perversity. Oxford University Press. New York and Oxford, 1997.

Schaffner, Anna Katharina. Modernism and Perversion Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature 1850-1930. Palgrave Macmillan. Great Britain, 2012.

Tamagne, Florence. A History of Homosexuality in Europe Berlin, London, Paris 1919-1939 Volume I. Algora Publishing. New York, 2004.

Waters, Chris. Sexology. p. 41-63 in Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality editors H. G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook.

Chapter Seven: Stonewall and the American Psychiatric Association

Larry Houston — 2013-02-18T07:00:00Z

Chapter Seven Stonewall and the APA

· Stonewall

“In short, the political and cultural environment had undergone a liberalizing shift which had created the opportunity for the emergence of a mass homosexual movement.” (Engel, The Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement Theory and the Gay and Lesbian Movement, p.38)

“Ironically, when the uprising finally occurred, many people failed to recognize its significance. Looking back, however, there is no denying that what began, as a skirmish at a Greenwhich Village bar became the harbinger for a new movement of human rights. Detailed accounts of Stonewall have taken on the quality of myth, as more people remember being there than could have possibly have fit in the tiny grimy bar. It is generally accepted that a diverse group of bar patrons, led by the drag queens who were Stonewall regulars, spontaneously began to fight back during a police raid. The resistance turned into a riot, which lasted for several days.” (Kranz & Cusick, Gay Rights: Revised Edition, p. 35)

“The years leading up to Stonewall saw a breach in the assimilationist attitudes of the docile homophiles of the previous generation in favour of more revolutionary ones of people who craved more purely sexual freedom.” (Archer, The End Gay, p.91)

“But in the 1960s and 1970s, the gay movement broke decisively with the assimilationist rhetoric of the 1950s by publicly affirming, celebrating, and even cultivating homosexual difference.” (Chauncey, Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality, p.29)

An event that took place on June 12, 1969, in New York City at a gay bar called, the Stonewall Inn, had great social and cultural historical significance in the development of the concept of the “modern homosexual” who soon adopted what is known as a “gay” identity. This was an act of resistance, a riot by drag queens mourning the death of Judy Garland. It was a group of effeminate men, wearing women's clothes resisting police authority, during a raid on the gay bar. What started out as a typical raid by the police, a shake down for bribery from a gay bar turned out much differently. This event is often linked with the beginning of the “gay liberation movement.” It should be noted that it was a fringe group of homosexuals, and not representative individuals of the homosexual community at large who displayed this physical resistance.

“Stonewall was an act of resistance to police authority by multiracial drag queens mourning the death of Judy Garland, long divinized by gays. Therefore Stonewall had a cultural meaning beyond the political: it was a pagan insurrection by the reborn transvestite priests of Cybele.” (Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, p. 67)

“In the 1970s gay liberation was the name of a major theoretical challenge to assimilation as well as minoritization. Early activists and writers argued that gay liberation could transform all sexual and gender relations; they argued against marriage and monogamy and against existing family structures (Altman 1981; Jay and Young 1972).” (Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship, p. 108-109)

“Gay liberation had somehow evolved into the right to have a good time-the right to enjoy bars, discos, drugs, and frequent impersonal sex.” (Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, p.445)

· American Psychiatric Association

Another historically significant event in the development of the concept of the “modern homosexual” occurred in the early 1970s. This was the decision in 1973 by the APA, American Psychiatric Association, to remove homosexuality from the lists of sexual disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Homosexual advocates acknowledge the hijacking of science for political gain.

“In the last 15 years, the APA has battled groups who wanted certain conditions withdrawn from the DSM list of mental disorders. Homosexuality is the most celebrated case of a controversial diagnosis, which psychiatrists were forced to discard in 1974 (Bayer).” Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 237)

“Of course, to mount this counterattack, gays and lesbians must challenge authority of scientists, and that is exactly what gay rights activists did when they campaigned to have homosexuality removed from the APA's list of mental disorders. In fact, those activists argued that homosexuality is not a disease but a lifestyle choice. Although that argument was successful in the early 1970s, the political climate has changed in such a way that gay rights advocates no longer want homosexuality to be thought of as an immutable characteristic, and the gay gene discourse helps them in this effort.” (Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene, p. 43)

“The man who took control was Robert Spitzer. Although he was a member of the Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics, which produced DSM-II, he had not been assigned to resolve the conflict. As the story has been told, he was at a meeting in October 1972, when more than a hundred gay activists protested antihomosexual bias. This was his first contact with gays protesting against psychiatric mistreatment and he stayed afterwards to talk with one leader of the protest, Ron Gold.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 83)

“The result of this encounter was that Spitzer agreed to arrange a meeting with the Committee on Nomenclature and to schedule a panel at the next meeting of the APA in May 1973 in Honolulu. Although this chance encounter has been reported in several different accounts of the controversy of the diagnosis of homosexuality, the story leaves much to be explained. Spitzer, by all accounts, was unfamiliar with the literature and had little, if any, clinical experience with homosexuals. Nevertheless, as a result of an unanticipated discussion, he agreed to undertake a major role in this struggle.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 83)

“Although he expressed "severe discomfort" (Bayer, 1981:143) over the idea of a referendum, he and gay activists drafted a letter that was signed by all of the candidates in an upcoming election for president and vice president of the APA. The letter was sent to the entire APA membership, paid for by funds raised by gay groups, although their participation was concealed.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 87-88)

“In 1973, by a vote of 5,854 to 3,810, the diagnostic category of homosexuality was eliminated from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (Bayer 1981).” (Donohue and Caselles, “Homophobia: Conceptual, Definitional, and Value Issues,” p. 66 Wright, and Cummings. Destructive Trends in Mental Health The Well-Intentioned Path to Harm, editors Wright, and Cummings)

“The decision of the American Psychiatric Association to delete homosexuality from its published list of sexual disorders in 1973 was scarcely a cool, scientific decision. It was a response to a political campaign fueled by the belief that its original inclusion as a disorder was a reflection of an oppressive politico-medical definition of homosexuality as a problem.” (Weeks, Jeffery. Sexuality and Its Discontents Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities, p. 213)

“Perhaps the greatest policy success of the early 1970s was the American Psychiatric Association's 1973-74 decision to remove homosexuality from its “official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual list of mental disorders.” This decision did not come about because a group of doctors suddenly changed their views; it followed an aggressive and sustained campaign by lesbian and gay activists.” (Rimmerman, From Identity to Politics: The Lesbian and Gay Movements in the United States, p. 85-86)

“Writing about the 1973 decision and the dispute that surrounded it, Bayer (1981) contended that these changes were produced by political rather than scientific factors. Bayer argued that the revision represented the APA's surrender to political and social pressures, not new data or scientific theories regarding on human sexuality.” (Donohue and Caselles, “Homophobia: Conceptual, Definitional, and Value Issues,” p. 66 Wright, and Cummings. Destructive Trends in Mental Health The Well-Intentioned Path to Harm, editors Wright, and Cummings)

“The APA's very process of a medical judgment arrived at by parliamentary method set off more arguments than it settled. Many members felt that the trustees, in acting contrary to diagnostic knowledge, had responded to intense propagandistic pressures from militant homophile organizations. “Politically we said homosexuality is not a disorder,” one psychiatrist admitted, “but privately most of us felt it is.” (Kronemeyer, Overcoming Homosexuality, p.5)

“Actually, Spitzer's position paper, "Homosexuality as an Irregular Form of Sexual Development and Sexual Orientation Disturbance as a Psychiatric Disorder," did not recommend the entire elimination of homosexuality from the manual. Although homosexuality per se was not enough to warrant a diagnosis, those who were troubled should be given a new diagnosis of Sexual Orientation Disturbance. Spitzer did not accept the position of gay activists that homosexuality was a normal variant of sexual behavior. He proposed a middle ground between their position and the assertion that homosexuality was pathological.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 85)

“Finally, in December 1973, the matter was considered by the board of trustees. After listening politely to the objections of opponents, the board voted unanimously to delete homosexuality and to replace it with the diagnosis of Sexual Orientation Disturbance. The final text made a distinction between homosexuality per se and Sexual Orientation Disturbance. "This diagnostic category is distinguished from homosexuality which by itself does not necessarily constitute a psychiatric disorder" (APA press release cited in Bayer, 1981:137). The meeting was followed by a press conference attended by the president of the APA, gay activists, and Robert Spitzer. Major newspapers across the country carried stories announcing the revision. Many reports missed the nuances of the compromise. For example, the Washington Post reported "Doctors Rule Homosexuals Not Abnormal" (December 12, 1973, p. 1). Their headline ignored the careful denials of the APA president and Spitzer that the board had not declared that homosexuality was normal. Spitzer's statement infuriated gays, but it made little difference in the public perception of what had happened.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 87)

The removing of homosexuality as a sexual disorder was as a result of a three year long social/political campaign by gay activists, pro-gay psychiatrists and gay psychiatrists, not as a result of valid scientific studies. Rather the activities were public disturbances, rallies, protests, and social/political pressure from within by gay psychiatrists and by others outside of the APA upon the APA. The action of removing homosexuality was taken with such unconventional speed that normal channels for consideration of the issues were circumvented. This action taken in the APA had dramatic consequences on psychosexual life according to Charles Socarides in a article published in The Journal of Psychohistory, “Sexual Politics and Scientific Logic: The Issue of Homosexuality.” Socarides writes the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual was a false step with the following results.

“At the 1970 annual convention of the APA in San Francisco and at subsequent psychiatric meetings, gay activists picketed and disrupted conference events in order to draw attention to their demand that homosexuality be dropped as a psychiatric category. In addition to disrupting the presentations by psychoanalysts who were well known for their views that homosexuality was a form of pathology, gay activists forced the APA to schedule panels at the annual meetings where the protesters presented an alternative view of homosexuality as a normal variation of sexual activity. This pattern of protest persisted for several years and at the 1972 meeting a masked and cloaked psychiatrist, "Dr. Anonymous," joined the panel and declared that he was a homosexual as were more than two hundred of his associates, some of them members of the Gay Psychiatric Association, which met socially but secretly during the annual APA meetings.” (Kirk and Kutchin, The Selling of the DSM The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, p. 82)

“Spitzer figured out that what he had to do was propose a policy that would give therapists the option of treating homosexuals for something. So he wrote a statement that homosexuality by itself, while an irregular sexual development, is not a psychiatric disorder unless the homosexuals are distressed by their homosexuality. For the next six or seven months, Spitzer's comprise wound its way through the many levels of the psychiatric bureaucracy. Bolstering the series of votes on the proposal to change the treatment of homosexuality in the DSM was the firm commitment of Freedman and the insurgents at the top to seeing this get done. Finally on December 15, 1973¸the Spitzer proposal was presented to Frededman's liberal of trustees. Freedman knew that he had the votes. But Freedman wanted this profound social and professional conversion to be as close as possible to unanimous. To gather more support, Freedman agreed to weaken some of the pro-homosexual language. Thus, the original statement that “homosexuality in itself does not by itself constitute a psychiatric disorder” was changed by the board to say that “homosexuality in itself does not necessarily constitute a psychiatric disorder”. This was no small change, but, at the end of the day, the first proposal in history to withdraw homosexuality from the list of psychiatric disorders passed unanimously. “Victory for Homosexuals,” the New York Times proclaimed the next morning.” (Hirshman, Victory The Triumphant Gay Revolution, p. 139)

“This amounted to a full approval of homosexuality and an encouragement to aberrancy by those who should have known better, both in the scientific sense and in the sense of the social consequences of such removal.” (Socarides, Charles W. “Sexual Politics and Scientific Logic: The Issue of Homosexuality,” p.320-321)

In this article he described a movement within the American Psychiatric Association that through social/political activism resulted in a two-phase radicalization of a main pillar of psychosocial life. The first phase was the erosion of heterosexuality as the single acceptable sexual pattern in our culture. This was followed by the second phase the raising of homosexuality to the level of an alternative lifestyle. As a result homosexuality became an acceptable psychosocial institution alongside heterosexuality as a prevailing norm of sexual behavior.

“In essence, this movement within the American Psychiatric Association has accomplished what every other society, with rare exceptions, would have trembled to tamper with, a revision of the basic code and concept of life and biology: that men and women normally mate with the opposite sex and not with each other.” (Socarides, Charles W. “Sexual Politics and Scientific Logic: The Issue of Homosexuality,” p.321)

The hijacking of science in the APA by those advocating homosexuality has now taken a very interesting twist. Thirty years later after this decision by the APA, Robert L. Spitzer, M.D. who was instrumental in the removal of homosexuality in 1973 from the lists of sexual disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is once again facing the anger of others. The first time was by those who opposed the normalization of homosexuality. Now after publishing the results of a study showing that some people may change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual, it is those advocating for homosexuality. Dr. Spitzer's study and peer commentaries have just been published in the October 2003 issue of the “Archives of Sexual Behavior.”

“An additional personal parallel-the anger that has been directed towards me for doing this study reminds me of a similar reaction to me during my involvement in the removal of the diagnosis of homosexuality from DSM-II in 1973.” (Spitzer, “Reply: Study Results Should Not be Dismissed and Justify Further Research on the Efficacy of Sexual Reorientation Therapy”, p. 472)

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Spitzer, M.D., Robert L. “Reply: Study Results Should Not be Dismissed and Justify Further Research on the Efficacy of Sexual Reorientation Therapy.” Archives of Sexual Behavior October 2003, Vol. 32, No. 5, 469-472.

Weeks, Jeffery. Sexuality and Its Discontents Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1988.

Wright, Rogers H. and Nicolas A. Cummings. Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well-Intentioned Path to Harm. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. New York and Hove, 2005.

Chapter 2 The 1860s to the 1940s

Larry Houston — 2012-11-17T07:00:00Z

Chapter 2 The 1860s to the 1940s

The actual term, homosexuality, comes from the late 18th century, when it was first used. The word itself is a unitary construct that is derived from the Greek term “homos” or same. Sexual is related to the Medieval Latin word “sexualis” Thus making reference to physical sexual acts with members of the same sex or gender, i.e. male with male, or female with female. It is quite interesting that different sources trace the origins of this word to a medical background or a criminal code use. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs first wrote about the concept of homosexuality in 1864, and Karoly Maria Kertbeny coined the actual word in 1869. The word “homosexual” was coined and used in what may be seen as a struggle for “homosexual rights” in Germany to eliminate state proscriptions against homosexual practices. The word was first used by homosexuals themselves, and then by the medical community to describe what they were seeing in individuals. Homosexuality originated not as a medical term, but rather as a neutral, legal, scientific term for the emancipation of homosexuals. Those who coined and first used the term “homosexual” were lawyers and writers. They saw homosexuality as inborn, natural and congenital. The medical community began using a “medical model” of homosexuality, which emphasized “perversion, sickness and deficiency”. In was during this same time period that a new field of study began, “sexology” to study sexuality and specifically homosexuality. Beginning in the 1860s homosexuals advocating for legal rights, and sexologists espoused the idea to see homosexuality not as a sin or a crime, but to recast it primarily in medical terms.

“Ulrich's goal was to free people like himself from the legal, religious, and social condemnation of homosexual acts as unnatural. For this, he invented a new terminology that would refer to the nature of the individual, and not to the acts performed.” (Kennedy, “Karl Heinrichs Ulrichs: First Theorist of Homosexuality,” p. 30 in Science and Homosexualities, editor Vernon A. Rosario)

“The study of homosexuality began in Germany, where it was intertwined with the struggle to eliminate state proscriptions against homosexual practices.” (Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture, p. 22)

“Sexology's legacy for homosexual rights was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it offered promise in terms of naturalizing homosexuality as a biologically based or developmentally determined variation of human sexuality. It therefore followed that homosexuals should be accorded equal rights. Indeed, medical specialists generally supported homosexual rights activists in campaigning for repeal of penal laws against homosexuality. On the other hand, biologizing and pathologizing homosexuality established a distinct medical classification, akin to categorization of physical and mental diseases. And medical nosologies were created to identify disease entities that, once differentiated, would lead to appropriate treatment. . . . Moreover, biological and psychological reductionism masked the cultural, social, and historical contexts of homosexuality. . . . The sexological discovery of homosexuality was both a response to and a source of constructing gay and lesbian identities. Self-defined homosexual men and woman existed before the sexologist labeled them. In fact, physicians appropriated the label “homosexuality” put forth by Kertbeny in 1869. The sexologists learned about homosexuality from what they observed in their patients and read about in police reports, judicial proceedings, and newspaper accounts. The medical classification, in turn, produced effects on the people who were objects of inquiry. The very act of classification reinforced the grassroots sense of group identity among those who were part of the growing gay and lesbian communities of the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries. Not only did the work of the sexologists reify existing identities and cultural patterns, but it also served as sources for redefinition and resistance. Sexual subjects used the scientific discourse for their own purposes.” (Minton, Departing From Deviance p.13)

“The terms homosexual and homosexuality did not exist until the second half of the 1860s when they first appeared in Central Europe. They were invented by a German-Hungarian publicist and translator who opposed German sodomy laws, K. M. Benkert.

Writing under the noble name of his family, Karoly Maria Kertbeny, he first used the term homosexual in private correspondence in 1868 and in two anonymous German pamphlets in 1869 (Herzer, 1985). He invented this term to distinguish those who participated in same-gender sexual behavior from those who engaged in male-female sexual behavior. He associated "homosexuality" with sickness and deviance but not with sin or criminal behavior (Bullough, 1994; Donovan, 1992). Kertbeny also invented the term heterosexuality in 1869 (Herzer, 1985). The contrasting pair of words, heterosexual and homosexual, were not popularized, however, until the 18805. Krafft-Ebing (1892) adopted and popularized the term homosexual. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, both terms moved from German to other European languages (Dynes, 1990c). They were introduced into the English language in 1897 (Bardis, 1980). In the early years of the twentieth century, the popularity of the term homosexual escalated through its use by Havelock Ellis (1942) and Magnus Hirschfeld (1948).” (Hunter, Shannon, Knox, and Martin, Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths and Adults, p. 7)

· Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

One gay author, Gilbert Herdt in his book, Same Sex, Different Cultures, credits the concept of homosexuality to a German medical doctor, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) in 1869, where it was discussed within a series of books he wrote. His account disagrees with most other authors who generally agree on the following account. Ulrichs was an early theorist and activist for legal and social rights of homosexual persons. He was the first person to write about the concept of homosexuality and has been called “the grandfather of gay liberation”. He was a German lawyer, writer and a homosexual himself. Ulrichs' writing under his own name and the pseudonym, Numa Numantius, generated a series of five pamphlets about homosexuality, “Researches Into the Riddle of Love Between Men, beginning in 1865. He eventually expanded them into twelve pamphlets by 1879. These were first written to argue against state proscriptions towards homosexual practices in the emerging country of Germany. Ulrichs wrote interpreting homosexuality in a naturalistic manner. It was explained to be a benign, inborn anomaly, linked to an organic congenital predisposition or to evolutionary factors. He first located this trait in the brain, and in his later writings in the testicles. Homosexuality was a condition of inborn sexual inversion, which caused homosexuals to be neither truly male nor female, but to have characteristics of the opposite sex. For the homosexual man, he had a “feminine soul or mentality confined within a masculine body.” Ulrichs used the nomenclature of a “third sex” which he called “urning”, and he derived this term from an illusion to Uranus in Plato's Symposium. In his life Ulrichs served in the government as a lawyer, but quit under mysterious circumstances. He was also imprisoned for his out spoken views on homosexuality. Ulrichs eventually left his native country of Germany and spent the last fifteen years of his life in Italy. Although Ulrichs was unable to gain much support for his theory, he did contribute to the growing perception in the nineteenth century of the homosexual as a distinctive type of person. He died a poor broken man, virtually forgotten by his peers in the struggle for the emancipation for homosexuals.

“The word homosexuality did not exist prior to 1869, when it appeared in a pamphlet that took the form of an open letter to the German minister of justice (the German word is homosexualitat). A new penal code for the North German Federation was being drafted, and a debate had arisen over whether to retain the section of the Prussian criminal code which made sexual contact between persons of the same gender a crime. The pamphlet's author, Karl Maria Kertbeny (1824-82), was one of several writers and jurists who were beginning to develop the concept of sexual orientation. This idea-that some individuals' sexual attraction for members of the same sex was an inherent and an unchanging aspect of their personality -was radically new. Thousands of years of record history and the rise and fall of sophisticated and complex societies occurred before homosexuality existed as a word or even as an idea.” (Monimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p.3)

“Until roughly 1900 the dominant explanation of male homosexuality, proposed by the homosexual lawyer and classicist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the 1860's, was that homosexual men had a “women's soul enclosed in a male body [anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa] (Hekma, 178).” Ulrichs defined male homosexuality as an inborn trait located in the brain (and in later works, in the testicles). The Berlin psychiatrist Karl Westphal dubbed this phenomenon “sexual inversion” and defined it as a psychopathological condition. This view of male homosexuality was widely influential.” (Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture, p. 22)

“In his published writings on homosexuality, Ulrichs posited the existence of a “third sex” whose nature was inborn. The essential point in his theory of homosexuality is the doctrine that the male homosexual has a female psyche, which he summed up in the Latin phrases: anima muliebrir virili corpore inclusa (a female psych confined in a male body)” (Kennedy, “Karl Heinrichs Ulrichs: First Theorist of Homosexuality,” p. 27 in Science and Homosexualities, editor Vernon A. Rosario)

· Karoly Maria Kertbeny

It was Karoly Maria Kertbeny (1824-1882) who first coined the word “homosexual” in a private draft of a letter to Karl Heinrichs Ulrichs in 1868. Kertbeny was a German-Hungarian writer, translator, and journalist. He bore the surname Karl Maria Benkert until 1847, when he was authorized by the police of his native city of Vienna to use the Hungarian noble name of his family as his sole name, Karoly Maria Kertbeny. In 1869 Kertbeny wrote two pamphlets that were published anonymously, demanding freedom from penal sanctions for homosexual men in Prussia and the Prussia-dominated North German Confederation. It was in these pamphlets that the word “homosexual” was substituted for the word “urning” that Ulrichs had used in 1864. Though Kertbeny closely followed Ulrichs theory of homosexuals being a third-sex, he saw it as a biologically based type of sexual pathology. His chief emphasis for the emancipation of the homosexual was for the modern constitutional state to extend to homosexuals its principle of non-interference in the private life of its citizens. He asserted the right of all human beings to engage in homosexual activity, rather then for exclusive homosexuals to be free of legal hindrances. This was on the basis of the liberal doctrine that the state itself has no right to interfere in such a private matter as sexual behavior. There is little known about his life, but he was suspected to be secretly homosexual. Kertbeny died from syphilis.

“In 1869, the Hungarian writer-journalist Karoly Maria Kertbeny apparently used the term “homosexual” for the first time in an anonymous report calling for the abolition of criminal laws on “unnatural acts,” addressed to Dr. Leonhardt, Prussian Minster of Justice. Even if it took several decades before the term stuck, this date, for many historians, marks a turning point in time, clearly distinguishing the sodomite (who offended God) and the homosexual (who offended society). In fact, the years 1869-1919 can be regarded as a major watershed in the history of homosexuality and as the foundation upon which the homosexual “liberation” of the 1920s was built.” (Tamagne, A History of Homosexuality in Europe Berlin, London, Paris 1919-1939, p. 18)

“Despite nearly a century and half of study and debate, there still is no universally accepted definition of homosexuality among clinicians and behavioral scientists - let alone a consensus regarding its origins. The idea that it derives from moral degeneracy has long been discounted by scholars, many of whom have argued for the primacy of either biologic or psychosocial influences.” (Bryne and Parsons, Sexual Orientation: The Biologic Theories Reappraised,” p.228)

· Richard von Kraftt-Ebing

Richard von Kraftt-Ebing (1840-1902) is another prominent German sexologist. He was a German Professor of Psychiatry and in 1886 wrote Psychopathia sexualis, an encyclopedic compendium of sexual pathologies. Kraft-Ebing subverted Ulrichs theory of homosexuality. Though he too believed homosexuality was inborn, he saw it as an inborn constitutional defect that manifested itself in sex-inverted characteristics and in overall degeneracy. Homosexuals were arrested at a more primitive stage of evolutionary development then normal people, i.e. heterosexuals. Krafft-Ebing thought the sexual instinct was lodged in psychosexual centers of the cerebral cortex and located next to the visual and olfactory centers. So in the homosexual these psychosexual centers were congenitally diseased, and relayed inappropriate messages for sexual instinct. So with Krafft-Ebing the theory for homosexuality went from one of “natural and congenital” to a criminal medical model which emphasized “perversion, sickness, and deficiency.”

“Kraft-Ebing defined homosexuality not as a set of sexual acts but as “the determination of feeling for the same-sex” (Kraft-Ebing 1922, 286), a determination brought about by either genetic or situational factors.” (Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual, p. 29)

“In other words, Kraft-Ebing saw homosexuality as a degenerative condition.” (Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual, p.30)

“Although Kraft-Ebing was not a gay rights advocate, his theories of homosexuality are similar to those of Hirschfeld and Ulrichs. He imagined that homosexuality is both a biological and psychological manifestation.” (Brookey, Reinventing the male Homosexual, p.30)

· Magnus Hirschfeld

Another early German leader for the emancipation of homosexuals was Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935). Of the early homosexual rights advocates, Hirschfeld's career and legacy presents in retrospect as many errors and failures to be shunned as achievements to emulate. He was homosexual himself like many of the other early advocates for homosexual rights. His view of homosexuality was similar to that of Ulrichs. Homosexuality was innate and biological in nature. Homosexuals were a third sex, resulting from a hormonal cause. It resulted in a preponderance of the female in the male and the male in the female. Hirschfeld never put forth a coherent scientific explanation of homosexuality and his works were rejected. He helped to organize the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897 and establish the first institute where research and therapy took place.

“He believed that male homosexuals were physically different from male heterosexuals and that these differences were the products of hormones secreted by the gonaads (Hirschfeld, 1944). These hormones not only influenced sexual orientation but were also responsible for gender differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals. He imagined homosexuality to be an intermediate gender between the feminine and the masculine. Although male homosexuals had the phyical bodies of men, Hirschfeld argued they had the sex drive and emotions of the opposite sex.” ( Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual, p.28)

“The committee was established on the assumption, which Hirschfeld took from his sexologist predecessors, that homosexuality is biological, the homosexual a type.” (Archer, The End of Gay and the death of heterosexuality, p.75)

“Hirschfeld's two ultimate justifications for his organization and his activist tactics and pursuits also bore a striking resemblance to those used in continuing the fight he started. The first was to establish as scientific fact that the homosexual was born, not made, and so was beyond the scope of a legal system that could punish people for what they did, not who they were. The second was to prevent teenage suicide.” (Archer, The End of Gay and the death of heterosexuality, p.76)

In 1933 the Nazis burned his works and research. Hirschfeld' legacy was tarnished by serious lapses of professional ethics. He was accused of selling worthless patented medicines. The most serious lapse was the allegations that he extorted money from some famous Germans who had in good faith furnished him with materials revealing the intimate (and incriminating) sides of their lives. Hirschfeld also conducted two polls of high school boys and male factory workers. The poll of the high school boys resulted in legal troubles for Hirschfeld.

“Though his findings were greatly overshadowed by a lawsuit brought by six students who charged him with obscenity (he was found guilty and made to pay a fine and costs) he managed to conduct the first large-scale gay survey, the scientific technique upon which the gay movement was to continually re-establish its credentials with increasing frequency and specialization over the next century.” (Archer, The End of Gay and the death of heterosexuality, p.76)

· Havelock Ellis

Outside of Germany, Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) was an early homosexual rights advocate from England. Ellis was medically trained, and the author of a six volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex published from 1897 to 1910. He was the first to study homosexuals outside of prisons, asylums, and clinics. Ellis viewed homosexuality neither as a disease or a crime. Homosexuals suffered from arrested development, and inborn sexual inversion. Homosexuality was the result of a congenital organic variation; individuals had both male and female sexual instincts. The invert lacked the ability to see and feel normal emotional desires toward the opposite sex. Ellis popularized the idea of homosexuality as an inversion, an inborn non-pathological gender anomaly.

“The sexological ‘discovery' of the homosexual in the late nineteen century is therefore obviously a crucial moment. It gave a name, an aetiology, and potentially the embryos of an identity. It marked off a special homosexual type of person, with distinctive physiognomy, tastes and potentialities. Did, therefore, the sexologists create the homosexual? This certainly seems to be the position of some historians. Michel Foucault and Lillian Faderman appear at times to argue, in an unusual alliance, that it was the categorisation of the sexologists that made ‘the homosexual' and ‘the lesbian' possible. Building on Ulrichs belief that homosexuals were a third sex, a woman's soul in a man's body, Westphal was able to invent the ‘contrary sexual feeling' Ellis the ‘invert' defined by a congenital anomaly, and Hirschfeld the ‘intermediate sex'; the sexologists definitions, embodied in medical interventions, ‘created' the homosexual. Until sexology gave them a label, there was only the half-life of an amporphous sense of self. The homosexuality identity as we know it is therefore a production of social categorisation, whose fundamental aim and effect was regulation and control. To name was imprison.” (Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities, p.92-93)

· Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was one of the first to challenge the entire construction of a sexual instinct as Ulrichs and others had commonly conceived it. Freud considered homosexuality to be a perversion of the sex drive away from the normal object of desire (i.e. the opposite sex) toward a substitute object, including someone of the same sex. Freud disagreed with Ellis and the other sexologists view of homosexuality by seriously questioning the idea of gender inversion as well as congenital homosexuality. Instead Freud viewed it as a sexual object choice, and generally regarded homosexuality as a psychogentically outcome of early childhood experiences. Homosexuality was an arrested psychosexual development and was purely the result of fixation in an infantile stage of sexual development provoked by the action or inaction of the parents. He saw environmental influences rooted in family dynamics such as a seductive mother and a weak father. This resulted in the compulsive quest of the male that was caused by their restless flight from the female. Homosexuality no longer incorporated the broad meaning of sex-role deviation; instead it referred specifically to aberrant sexual behavior. Homosexuality was acquired and pathological. Because it was not until between the two world wars that Freud's work would have its greatest impact, gender inversion remained the dominant theory of homosexuality for many years to come.

“Only Freud, with whom Ellis disagreed with, seriously questioned the paradigm of gender inversion (as well as congenital homosexuality) by distinguishing between sexual object and aim. Freud, in contrast to the medical men - Moll, Bloch, and others - who influenced his work, challenged the entire construction of a “sexual instinct” as it had been commonly conceived since Kraft-Ebing. In arguing that relation between object and aim was the outcome of the struggle he would later term the Opedius complex, Freud assumed that reproductive heterosexuality was not a natural instinct: instead, it was the product of a successful psychic struggle in which one identified with (and introjected) the same-sex parent.” (Dean, Sexuality and Modern western Culture, p, 25)

“Freud's theories of sexuality take several forms, but certain elements remain fairly constant. He argued that the child is born into a state bisexuality, an innate sexual instinct that he referred to as “polymorphous perversity.” (Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene, p. 30)

“Freud theorizes male homosexuality in several ways, but he often imagines the child adopting a feminine identity.” (Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene, p. 31)

“Although Freud offers alternative theories, they all play off the male child's disrupted relationship with the mother. In many cases, these theories suggest that the male homosexual adopts a feminine sexual identity, and in this process he enters into a state of arrested sexual development.” (Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene, p. 31)

Even still today there are those who hold to a psychoanalytical model or view of homosexuality. In doing so they continue to see homosexuality as pathological. “Among the numerous claims supporting the pathology thesis of male homosexuality there seems to be an essential core of four basic propositions. Analysts assert that homosexual men suffer a form of developmental arrest caused by (1) early narcissistic fixations; (2) disturbed family relationships; (3) an underlying disturbance of male gender identity and finally, (4) pathological defenses against a biologically primary heterosexuality.” (Friedman, “The Psychoanalytic Model of Male Homosexuality: A Historical and Theoretical Critique,” p.511)

Friedman further goes on to write, that a psychoanalytic model is only a theory, among the other theories of homosexuality. Yet it is one that continued to be held by some.

“In this paper I have hoped to demonstrate that the analytic model of male homosexuality is a scientific paradigm with cultural origins and a historical place in the world of sex research that is not absolute.” (Friedman, “The Psychoanalytic Model of Male Homosexuality: A Historical and Theoretical Critique,” p.515)

“Through their contradictory logic, the early theories of male homosexuality struggled to ascertain the relationship between sex and gender. Sexologists and homosexual rights advocates both insisted and denied that homosexuals were different: if they were morally, emotionally, and (at least in appearance) physically like heterosexuals, how could doctors account for their congenital difference? And if they were not congenitally different, than how were they different (in the case of Brand and Friedlander, the most “manly” men)?” (Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture p.25)

Sexology after Freud had very little new to say about homosexuality until Kinsey published his study in 1948, although homosexuals continued to be apart of the emerging modern culture. In Europe and the United States the two world wars, especially WW II was important. What they did was to bring individuals, from primarily an agriculture culture, together to fight a war. Many of these individuals who thought they were unique, now were introduced to others who were just like themselves. After fighting the wars many men remained in the large American and European cities.

“Between the 1850s and the 1930s a complex sexual community had developed in many American as well as European cities, which crossed class, racial, gender and age boundaries, and which offered a focus for identity development. Since the Second World War the expansion of these subcultures has been spectacular, with one of these unlikely heroes of this growth being the gay bar.” (Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents, p.192)

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