Gay Life and Culture: a world history
Edited by Robert Aldrich Thames & Hudson, 384pp, £24.95
ISBN 0500251304
Read the religious press, and homosexuality would appear to be an invention of the past 20 years, designed specifically to embarrass popes, cardinals and archbishops. Listen to an imam, and it becomes an exclusively western sin, crime or disease. Turn to the gay press and the phen omenon seems never to involve anyone over 30. Consult this weighty history (its subtitle is the more precise label) and you marvel at the variety of practices and practitioners around the world and throughout history that, since the word was coined in 1869, can be termed "homosexual".
Fourteen essays describe some of the many customs, attitudes and persecutions that make up "gay life and culture", from the heady and physical camaraderie of naked bodies in ancient Greek gyms and Sapphic colonies, through Roman lust and licence, medieval "friendship", Christian persecution and the contradictory attitudes of the 18th-century enlightenment up to the present day. On the way, there is detailed analysis of homosexuality in pre-conquest and modern America; in Australasia and Asia - together with an especially lucid chapter on the inconsistencies of the Arab world. If there are only two chapters devoted exclusively to lesbianism, this is partly explained by the lack of historical evidence and by the fact that (male) scholars of early modern times dismissed it as "the impossible love".
Drawn from universities around the world, the essayists have a sober style: Teutonic sexo logists are less than camp, but then German is a language in which one synonym for gay is "gleich geschlectlich". These academics can prove, however, notable phrasemakers: "the rediscovery of the clitoris" and "the privatisation of the anus" are memorable concepts. So are other details. In classical Rome, houses often bore warning notices: "Trespassers will be penetrated." Eighteenth-century travellers seeking a bed in an English country inn were warned: "Ne'er pull your breeches off;/From health restoring slumbers strive to keep,/Or ten to one you are buggered in your sleep." Harrow School in the 1850s was famous for "the sports of naked boys in bed together".
Considerably more sobering are the many ways Holy Mother Church has sought to persecute and eradicate homosexuals. Public castrations, secret stranglings, burnings and beheadings were common in early modern Europe. More than a thousand such executions were held within 30 years in Florence alone. Boys under 12 were exempt from the maximum penalties, but were still severely tortured. Earlier, in Augsburg, four convicted priests were put in a giant birdcage and hung from a high tower until they died of hunger and thirst. In the Americas, early Spanish invaders killed cross-dressing native youths with their hunting dogs. Modern Islamic states can be equally savage. In Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iran, the death penalty for homosexual acts is still enacted by stoning, decapitation, throat-slitting, burning, stoning, cutting the accused in half with a scimitar or by throwing the victim off a cliff or crushing him under a wall.
Various reasons are suggested for this antagonism (or fear). Sometimes it is a society's simple need to breed after war, famine or exile; more frequently it comes from a conviction that same-sex activity is a sign of social disorder that would bring divine wrath upon a community (a belief fuelled by the biblical myth of Sodom and Gomorrah). And in both pre-scientific and modern times, we find the widespread belief that it is simply "unnatural" - and therefore to be eradicated. Equally strong has been the veneration of the family unit.
The lack of a concluding chapter means these threads are not drawn together neatly, but the editor cannot be blamed for this. The story of homosexuality is not a tidy graph, a story of progress from historic repression to modern tolerance and, eventually, equality. Between the frequent periods of persecution, gay sex has been seen as a natural pleasure - and (in ancient Greece) often performed in public. The Roman empire became "anti-gay" only with the rise of Christianity. A by-product of the Renaissance was a proliferation of gay pornography. Same-sex pleasures were common in the American West among pioneering cowboys, lumberjacks and gold-miners. At a dance in Washington in 1864, the "queen" of the ball was a black man wearing only a ribbon round his penis. Gay fashions themselves change: intergenerational sex was once the norm, but is now less acceptable.
The wonderful and often unexpected illus trations form an integral part of a book that (despite its chronicles of persecution) offers frequent cheer to those of us for whom this is our history. Praise be to Queen Anne for her "immoderate passion" towards the women of her bedchamber and a toast to the Prussian ruler, Frederick the Great, who granted to his subjects "freedom of conscience and cock".
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