Magazine Article	Articles Archive

For us slaves to the Gregorian calendar, the millennial passage offers a chance to take stock of many things, including the events affecting homosexuality in the last 1000 years. And so long as we've climbed the mountain of historical evidence to see what stands out below in the foggy past, why not about-face and peer into the even murkier future?

Were the millennium a day, the modern gay movement, as marked by Stonewall, would have occurred at 11:37 pm-- just about right for a gay party to get hopping. Homosexuality the practice, by contrast, extends back deep into the prehistoric and prehuman. From the perspective of 1000 years, the failure to win gay marriage in Hawaii, Matthew Shepard's murder, and the fiasco of America's policy of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" prove insignificant. Only the AIDS epidemic stands out as an obvious landmark, but a familiar one, next to regular onslaughts of cholera, influenza, bubonic plague, and malaria.

View our poll archive

Perhaps the next thousand years will realize a capacity to download consciousness to computer chips, and humans will abandon flesh, shit, blood, and mucus for clean, sexless living through fiber-optics. But the big story at the end of this millennium is the global penetration of the ideas of the European Enlightenment-- individualism, democracy, free enterprise-- their eddies now carrying gay identity to the earth's farthest reaches.

Gayness spreads from Minsk to Miami, cross-cutting almost all barriers of language and heritage. Yet the very spread and novelty of its penetration raises questions. This novelty is key to the story the modern gay movement tells about itself. Pick up a recent "Queer Studies" book and it will probably recount earlier forms relative to which contemporary gayness is seen as a unique evolutionary attainment. The book will mention the comradely love of the samurai, pederasty in ancient Greece, the berdaches of the Amerindians, drag in Latin America, and those curious New Guinea tribes where, from time immemorial until last decade, boys ritually sucked semen from their elders to insure they grew properly into men, and then switched in adulthood to exclusive heterosexuality. The New Guineans will be discussed as a deep mystery, explainable only by asserted power of societies to "construct" in an individual whatever sexuality they desire. Queer theorists embrace this notion of social construction because modern gay identity is posing homosexuality as the exact mirror opposite of heterosexuality, tending in its essence toward lifelong matrimony of same-sex adult equals. Indeed, this homosexuality-- not without some pride-- is felt to be even more egalitarian than the most enlightened heterosexuality.

Lost flexibility

A survey of the history of sex suggests that modern gay identity has supplanted a pattern of widespread male bisexuality. This bisexuality is not an indifference among men as to whether it's a male or female partner in bed, so much as male sexual flexibility. Males on average show strong tendencies toward heterosexuality together with strong tendencies to seek out intense emotionally and erotically-charged same-sex relationships. How these get expressed-- at what periods in life, under what circumstances, with what frequency of genital play-- all vary greatly among individuals and societies. But the constancy of this overall pattern has been remarkable. Admittedly, this is not the usual sense of the term "sexual orientation," which has become a psychological, almost medical category, focused on conscious predilection toward certain genital sexual behaviors. But whether sexuality is a narrow thing or something broader, about solidarity and affiliation, is what's at issue. It wasn't sexuality in the narrow sense that Freud meant when he wrote that male homosexuality was the glue of academic, military, religious, and corporate institutions.

This broadened picture of homosexuality suggests a bell curve. The big hump in the middle consists of males who engage in same-sex play as youngsters, or have male friendships suffused with eroticism; males who, if thrown together for long stretches with other men, make do sexually with their confreres. On the right are those few who simply won't. And on the left is that minority of males who won't do anything but.

Pre-Stonewall queers had little trouble finding sex partners, despite the absence of an open gay scene. Most sailors in the 40s could be approached to see if they were up for a blow job, and generations of horny adolescents knew where in their hometowns they could find some quick relief.

Sailors one might run into on the street today, should they be men, are much less likely than those of two generations ago to be up for a blow-job. And he who solicits a random teenager is likely to suffer at the hands of the law something far worse than "Fuck off, faggot," perhaps delivered with a wink. These developments go hand-in-hand with the success of post-Stonewall gay identity, which has squashed the large hump of homosexuality's bell curve, impoverishing the middle ground in favor of the extremes. The new U-curve allows the creation of pure gay spaces that are visible, economically integrated, and well-policed. At the same time, the very fixity of gay identity guarantees that of the heterosexuality that emerges as gayness's inevitable correlate.

Will this pattern prove a temporary way-station or enduring? Will those who grow up finding it relatively safe to express same-sex feeling decide a heavy investment in sexual identity excess baggage? Those are questions for the future. But looking back at the last 1000 years, what events stand out?

Thomas Aquinas condemns sodomy

Judeo-Christianity has never been very welcoming of same-sex sucking and fucking. Remember the Old Testament tale of Sodom and Gommorrah? Scholars dispute whether the original Sodomites and Gomorraharians were big buggerers or whether the Biblical point of their destruction was more along the lines of, "Don't rape or be otherwise inhospitable to visitors." But the story was, and is, invoked to fuel Judeo-Christian prejudice against homosexuality. The Talmud suggests a penalty of stoning.

Nonetheless, over the centuries, Judeo-Christian institutions gave plenty of wiggle-room for same-sex love-- think of Jesus and his disciples, those nunneries and monasteries, and millennia of altar boys. The room for wiggling waxed and waned but was often considerable. At his coronation in 1492, Pope Alexander VI had gilt-painted youths posing nude as living statuary. Some trying to square the circle of Judeo-Christian homo-hostility have argued that the Catholic church once sanctioned "gay marriage." That claim is hard to credit. But the zeal of enforcement against and penalties imposed for same-sex acts varied widely within early Christendom.

In his efforts to systematize church teachings, Thomas Aquinas threw the book at sodomy. His notion of "natural law" fortified Christian dogma with Aristotelian logic, and his declarations against sodomy in his 1273 Summa Theologica proved highly influential. If Christianity's fear and loathing of same-sex relations had seemed often just a leaky wooden shack, Aquinas helped fashion it into a solid brick house.

Europe conquers America

The wide variety of cultures in the Americas allows no easy summary. But many showed a fundamentally different notion of gender-- a more fluid one-- than among the Indo-Europeans. The term berdache has become associated with a role combining gender-mixing, cross-dressing, homosexual relations, along with recognized spiritual insight and authority. Such gender-bending also appears in Hindu culture among the cross-dressing, somewhat holy, sometimes castrated Hjira, but is rare elsewhere among the generally sex-role-rigid Indo-Europeans. Yet the berdache appears in cultures all over the Americas, a respected role that was open for youngsters at odds with there apparent sex. This was one of the justifications Europeans used for their slaughter and subjugation. Thus conquerors almost completely wiped out a culture of homosexuality that as the world grows less gender-policed, seems freshly relevant.

Christians defeat Islam

In 1571 forces of the Christian Holy League defeated the Turkish navy off of Lepanto, Greece, putting paid to the prospect of mosques instead of cathedrals in Paris and Copenhagen.

You wouldn't know it watching CNN, but Islam is the most homophillic of the great Western faiths. There are proscriptions against sodomy to be found in some religious texts, to be sure, but they've been widely ignored. And what there is not in Judeo-Christianity are plenty of sacred Islamic texts waxing positively about the joys of same-sex love, together with one of the world's longest-running continuous traditions of homoerotic poetry. Mohammed promises believers beautiful boys in the afterlife, among other sensual rewards. And no wonder, for Allah, unlike the Christian almighty, is fully sexual, and is said to have created humans not merely out of dust, but from dust mixed with dollops of semen and blood-- all the substances mingling in anal sex.

With Islam and Christianity historically at each other's throats, the latter tried to differentiate itself by priming the pumps of its own anti-homosexuality. Christian Crusaders riled their troops with tales of Christian boys being sold into sexual slavery by the Saracen. Had the Turks prevailed at Lepanto, one could imagine mullahs winning Christian hearts and minds by showing how homo-friendly Islam could be.

Epidemics rage

In 1495, Europe had its first confirmed cases of syphilis, which may be one of the only diseases to travel from the Americas back to Europe. Outbreaks all over the continent raised the stakes of sexual contact, and hotted up the rhetoric of moralists. "Ought one to work against the will of God," asked physician Gaspare Torella, "who has punished them by the very means in which they had sinned?"

A spur to the 20th century's sexual liberalization was the idea that germ theory and its antibiotic "magic bullets" had finally won the day against infectious disease. By the time Castro and Christopher Streets were in full swing in the 1970s, syphilis had been reduced to a minor annoyance. But that situation only proved a cover for the spread of a new epidemic, HIV, which by the end of 1999 had killed some 16 million people and left 33 million others infected. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa will suffer from the disease on a scale rivaling Europe's black death-- in which perhaps a third of the population succumbed. In rich nations, expensive new drugs turned HIV for a large proportion of sufferers into what is perhaps a manageable, long-term illness, but also fed complacency that the crisis was over. At the epicenter, in poor countries, the epidemic continues to spread out of control-- ideal conditions for evolving more virulent viral strains that would spread around the world.

Henry the VIII asserts control over sodomy

In 1533, England's King Henry the VIII, full of Reformation zeal, wrested sodomy from the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts, making it a felony punishable by hanging. It was all part of the wrangling between Europe's newly vigorous secular states over whether pope or king was top dog. The implication that the church couldn't be trusted with policing sodomy because monks and deacons were in bed with each other wasn't lost on anyone, either.

England's new sodomy law wasn't much used. Queen Mary returned buggery to church jurisdiction in 1553, but ten years later, Queen Elizabeth brought it back under state aegis. But her reign, a golden age of English literature and music, was notably homophilic. Shakespeare wrote sonnets to a young man, Christopher Marlow declared that "Love is a naked boy," and the all-male worlds of theater and music were rife with lust.

Nonetheless, Henry VIII's reassertion of direct state control over sexuality-- the norm in the ancient world-- was prescient for the future. As a matter of law rather than dogma, sexual regulation was potentially subject to democratic choice, which opened the door to sex law reform centuries later. But the very idea of Protestant reformation countered the corporate tendencies of Catholicism with a new individualism. Where Catholicism viewed humankind as a community of sinners-- and was quick to grant indulgences for past sins and bring wayward sheep back into the flock-- Protestantism emphasize a personal relationship with God and individual salvation.

Gay identity sprang from soil that Protestantism plowed. The gay movement has grown strongest in the West's historically Protestant nations. And capitalism's spread of a species of Protestant ethic world-wide accounts for much of gay identity's global success.

The concept of total war

Those who cruise them say that US Marines have a penchant for getting fucked. To current sensibilities, this sexual preference and Marines' buffed masculinity stand in contradiction. But the idea that same-sex acts, even "passive" ones, enhance rather than detract from masculinity has been established creed in other times and places. The Marines themselves have a saying that sums it up: "Pain is fear leaving the body."

Homosexuality is correlated with militaristic societies-- it was favored among the perennially-warring city states in ancient Greece, among knights in medieval Europe, and samurai in feudal Japan. In his 1883 A Problem in Greek Ethics, the early English homosexual activist John Addington Symonds wrote, "To love was glorious, since it pledged the lover to self-sacrifice in case of need." The New Guinea tribesmen whose boys sucked cock and swallowed sperm so that they grew into strong warriors had a particularly literal take on this idea.

Reformers at the end of the 19th century, sensing a looming war, worried that men who had flocked to cities from the farm had grown sissified from office work and urban pleasures. The moral danger of homosexuality in the bustling, anonymous city was not the least of reformers' concerns. Out of this crisis of masculinity grew institutions like the YMCA and Boy Scouts. Swimming naked together and huddling in pup tents on winter camp-outs was deemed to foster the rugged masculine solidarity needed for soldiering. Yet the concentration and celebration of maleness these institutions abetted, far from stamping it out, made homosexuality its playground

Allan Bérubé and other historians have noted the importance of World War II for the gay and lesbian movement. Mobilization uprooted millions of men and women from small towns, mixed them up in cities and on battlefields, and freed them, out of fear of imminent death, to act on their desires. But in addition, the atomic age that the war ushered in forced a rethink of gender. After Hiroshima, it was obvious that even the bravest man in the most cohesive army of his fellows was utterly helpless. The atomic age undercut formerly an essential purpose of male-bonding-- communal protection and war-making-- and so knocked away one of homosexuality's traditional pillars. Hiroshima was a secret boon to gender equality, helping lay the groundwork for the historically unprecedented joint lesbian and gay movement.

Stonewall Riot

When patrons at the Stonewall Inn did not go docilely into the paddy wagons during a routine police raid one night in June 1969 it was not, of course, the beginning of homosexual resistance. But the riots that ensued over the next two days and nights in New York City's Greenwich Village signaled a break with what had come before, and was quickly seen as such around the world. Groups and publications named in Stonewall's honor can be found now from Australia to Zimbabwe.

But Stonewall riot would not have happened without more than a century of writing, publishing, archive-building, and organizing, most of which seemed to come to naught. In their work, such pioneers as Karl Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfeld, Edward Carpenter, and Adolf Brand variously resisted and tried to turn to advantage the move in the 19th century to make sexual difference a scientific concern. After being coined in 1869 by German-Hungarian activist Karloy Kertbeny, "homosexual" was adopted as a medical term.

World War I veteran Henry Gerber had read gay magazines in Germany, and inspired by Magnus Hirschfeld's example, founded a Society for Human Rights in Chicago in 1924, but it was quickly shut down by police. Hirschfeld's Berlin archive was burned by the Nazis in 1933. Yet a member of that short-lived Chicago group picked up 17-year-old Harry Hay in Los Angeles in 1930, and a seed was planted. In 1948, Hay founded the Mattachine Society, the US's first real gay organization, which by the late 60s seemed hidebound.

Rather than the Big Bang, Stonewall was a tipping point between generations whose work had little effect and the ensuing and speedy transformation and integration of homosexuality into the mainstream of Western cultural, political, and economic life. Stonewall remains a telling case of how-- when the time is ripe-- collective action can give birth to something new.

Advent of birth control

The connection between heterosex and childbirth isn't obvious. Its discovery, suggest anthropologists, propelled a shift from cultures where women were venerated as mysterious vessels of life to patriarchal civilization, where the cock was imagined somehow to do all the real reproductive work. Judeo-Christianity, obsessive about not wasting semen, would have been a kinder, gentler faith had eroticism remained a zone of mystical pleasure, unconnected to any imperialistic command to multiply and conquer.

But the development of cheap and effective birth control in the 20th century-- and the hard-won battle to allow its dissemination-- has put hetero- and homosexuality on the same footing, undercutting moralists' condemnations that the latter was uniquely "unproductive." Birth control has also helped equalize the sexes in giving people, especially women, more say about their reproductive lives, and encouraging a spirit of thoughtfulness and rationality about sex that has bolstered tolerance. That a basic means of birth control-- the latex condom-- also protects against HIV and other sexually-transmitted infections, has helped steer the ship of sex safely through the late-millennium's stormy seas of epidemic.

Mass communications

Animal life owes its existence to the oxygen pollution generated by photosynthesizing one-celled organisms. Waste oxygen that the little creatures pumped out over eons changed the earth's atmosphere, allowing new, more energy-intensive forms of life to evolve, and killing off or reducing many of the others. The rise of a world dominated by media chatter and imagery has imposed the same filter on culture, affecting in the process the spread and shape of homosexuality.

Like air pollution, the media is intrinsically placeless-- spreading everywhere. With instant global communication, if drag queens are murdered by vigilantes in Bogota, it's news the next day in Brussels. Likewise, porn uploaded to the Usenet in Kinshasa can be enjoyed instantaneously in Cairns. The Internet and satellite dishes-- like cheap printing before, only more so-- seems to trump the ability of state or church to proscribe. As homosexuality has been a prime target for censorship, its weakening thanks to the new media has seemed a boon.

But how instant, interactive, global communication will eventually affect the prospects of sexual freedom remains unclear. Sexual subcultures have always depended on an information barrier separating in-group from out. Time will tell whether tearoom sex can survive when aficionados post to the Net addresses of hotspots-- for the equal benefit of cruisers, undercover cops, and muckraking TV reporters.

The very integrity of the individual self likewise depends on an information membrane, the capacity of people to keep secrets and manage appearances. But the Internet, an inexhaustible and eternal database, allows new forms of demonization by making permanent pariahs out of, for instance, consensual sex offenders, who in earlier times, after some period of contrition, would generally be welcomed back into the communal fold. And as the state's technological prowess increases, there's no reason why every move you made on the Net-- or in a totally wired and surveiled world-at-large-- could not be logged and entered in your permanent police file, accessible to all.

While the new flows of information allow for incredible specialization available across-the-board-- newsgroups exist where amputee-lovers, foot enthusiasts, and vomitophiles around the world can find birds of their feather-- global differentiation occurs at the cost of the coherence and robustness of local scenes. Adolescents getting off by themselves on Internet porn are less likely to be in the woods learning important social skills around the campfire circle-jerk. The intense specialization new media foster creates a yen for simple, universal messages appealing to the lowest common denominator. The dumbing down of Western political discourse and the worldwide fetishization of child purity exemplify this phenomenon.

And yet erotic desire springs eternal, pushing people to create. What new sexual ecosystems will emerge from the elements, conditions, and tendencies present at the end of the second millennium is a question that will get its answer in the third. **

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com