Given that only free men had full status, women and male slaves were not problematic sexual partners. Sex between freemen, however, was problematic for status.
The central distinction in ancient Greek sexual relations was between taking an active or insertive role, versus a passive or penetrated one. The passive role was acceptable only for inferiors, such as women, slaves, or male youths who were not yet citizens. Hence the cultural ideal of a same-sex relationship was between an older man, probably in his 20s or 30s, known as the erastes , and a boy whose beard had not yet begun to grow, the eromenos or paidika. In this relationship there was courtship ritual, involving gifts such as a rooster , and other norms.
The erastes had to show that he had nobler interests in the boy, rather than a purely sexual concern. The boy was not to submit too easily, and if pursued by more than one man, was to show discretion and pick the more noble one.
There is also evidence that penetration was often avoided by having the erastes face his beloved and place his penis between the thighs of the eromenos , which is known as intercrural sex. The relationship was to be temporary and should end upon the boy reaching adulthood Dover, To continue in a submissive role even while one should be an equal citizen was considered troubling, although there certainly were many adult male same-sex relationships that were noted and not strongly stigmatized.
While the passive role was thus seen as problematic, to be attracted to men was often taken as a sign of masculinity. Greek gods, such as Zeus, had stories of same-sex exploits attributed to them, as did other key figures in Greek myth and literature, such as Achilles and Hercules. Plato, in the Symposium , argues for an army to be comprised of same-sex lovers. Thebes did form such a regiment, the Sacred Band of Thebes, formed of soldiers.
They were renowned in the ancient world for their valor in battle. Ancient Rome had many parallels to ancient Greece in its understanding of same-sex attraction, and sexual issues more generally. This is especially true under the Republic. Yet under the Empire, Roman society slowly became more negative in its views towards sexuality, probably due to social and economic turmoil, even before Christianity became influential.
Exactly what attitude the New Testament has towards sexuality in general, and same-sex attraction in particular, is a matter of sharp debate. What is clear, however, is that while condemnation of same-sex attraction is marginal to the Gospels and only an intermittent focus in the rest of the New Testament, early Christian church fathers were much more outspoken.
In their writings there is a horror at any sort of sex, but in a few generations these views eased, in part due no doubt to practical concerns of recruiting converts. By the fourth and fifth centuries the mainstream Christian view allowed only for procreative sex.
This viewpoint, that procreative sex within marriage is allowed, while every other expression of sexuality is sinful, can be found, for example, in St.
Soon this attitude, especially towards homosexual sex, came to be reflected in Roman Law. Historians agree that the late Roman Empire saw a rise in intolerance towards homosexuality, although there were again important regional variations. With the decline of the Roman Empire, and its replacement by various barbarian kingdoms, a general tolerance with the sole exception of Visigothic Spain for homosexual acts prevailed.
The latter part of the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, however, saw a sharp rise in intolerance towards homosexual sex, alongside persecution of Jews, Muslims, heretics, and others. While the causes of this are somewhat unclear, it is likely that increased class conflict alongside the Gregorian reform movement in the Catholic Church were two important factors.
This appeal to natural law discussed below became very influential in the Western tradition. A sodomite was understood as act-defined, rather than as a type of person. Someone who had desires to engage in sodomy, yet did not act upon them, was not a sodomite. Also, persons who engaged in heterosexual sodomy were also sodomites.
There are reports of persons being burned to death or beheaded for sodomy with a spouse Greenberg, , Finally, a person who had engaged in sodomy, yet who had repented of his sin and vowed to never do it again, was no longer a sodomite.
For the next several centuries in Europe, the laws against homosexual sex were severe in their penalties. Enforcement, however, was episodic.
In some regions, decades would pass without any prosecutions. Yet the Dutch, in the s, mounted a harsh anti-sodomy campaign alongside an anti-Roma pogrom , even using torture to obtain confessions. As many as one hundred men and boys were executed and denied burial Greenberg, , —4.
Also, the degree to which sodomy and same-sex attraction were accepted varied by class, with the middle class taking the most restrictive view, while the aristocracy and nobility often accepted public expressions of alternative sexualities. At times, even with the risk of severe punishment, same-sex oriented subcultures would flourish in cities, sometimes only to be suppressed by the authorities. In the 19 th century there was a significant reduction in the legal penalties for sodomy.
Furthermore, in many countries where homosexual sex remained a crime, the general movement at this time away from the death penalty usually meant that sodomy was removed from the list of capital offenses. In the 18 th and 19 th centuries an overtly theological framework no longer dominated the discourse about same-sex attraction.
Instead, secular arguments and interpretations became increasingly common. Probably the most important secular domain for discussions of homosexuality was in medicine, including psychology. This discourse, in turn, linked up with considerations about the state and its need for a growing population, good soldiers, and intact families marked by clearly defined gender roles.
Doctors were called in by courts to examine sex crime defendants Foucault, ; Greenberg, At the same time, the dramatic increase in school attendance rates and the average length of time spent in school, reduced transgenerational contact, and hence also the frequency of transgenerational sex.
Same-sex relations between persons of roughly the same age became the norm. Clearly the rise in the prestige of medicine resulted in part from the increasing ability of science to account for natural phenomena on the basis of mechanistic causation. The application of this viewpoint to humans led to accounts of sexuality as innate or biologically driven.
The voluntarism of the medieval understanding of sodomy, that sodomites chose sin, gave way to the prevailing though contested modern notion of homosexuality as a deep, unchosen characteristic of persons, regardless of whether they act upon that orientation. The effects of these ideas cut in conflicting ways. Since homosexuality is, by this view, not chosen, it makes less sense to criminalize it.
Persons are not choosing evil acts. Yet persons may be expressing a diseased or pathological mental state, and hence medical intervention for a cure is appropriate.
They also sought to develop techniques to prevent children from becoming homosexual, for example by arguing that childhood masturbation caused homosexuality, hence it must be closely guarded against. In the 20 th century sexual roles were redefined once again. For a variety of reasons, premarital intercourse slowly became more common and eventually acceptable. With the decline of prohibitions against sex for the sake of pleasure even outside of marriage, it became more difficult to argue against gay sex.
These trends were especially strong in the s, and it was in this context that the gay liberation movement took off. Although gay and lesbian rights groups had been around for decades, the low-key approach of the Mattachine Society named after a medieval secret society and the Daughters of Bilitis had not gained much ground.
This changed in the early morning hours of June 28, , when the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, rioted after a police raid. In the aftermath of that event, gay and lesbian groups began to organize around the country. Gay Democratic clubs were created in every major city, and one fourth of all college campuses had gay and lesbian groups Shilts, , ch. Large gay urban communities in cities from coast to coast became the norm. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official listing of mental disorders.
The increased visibility of gays and lesbians has become a permanent feature of American life despite the two critical setbacks of the AIDS epidemic and an anti-gay backlash see Berman, , for a good survey. The post-Stonewall era has also seen marked changes in Western Europe, where the repeal of anti-sodomy laws and legal equality for gays and lesbians has become common. In the 21st century, the legal recognition of same-sex marriage has become widespread. While it seems unlikely that gay, lesbian, or queer persons of color, or who live in rural areas, or are otherwise in a marginalized position will achieve such assimilation in the foreseeable future, the debate is still of theoretical interest.
For instance, post-gay can be conceptualized as either a specific political order, characterized by equality across sexual orientations, or it can be seen as a specific type of identity, where persons understand and accept themselves as same-sex oriented but as not in any way defined by that.
Post-gay can also be a time, an era marked by widespread assimilation, or a space, where persons are fully treated as equals. Some regard the variety of meanings given to the term as evidence of confusion Kampler and Connell, A better understanding, however, is that the term is being used to rival ends. For some, post-gay marks the culmination of the gay rights movement, which all along, they contend, was an effort to be treated as equals.
For others, it opens a space where sexual labels can be resisted, renegotiated, and made fluid and non-binary Coleman-Fountain, Broader currents in society have influenced the ways in which scholars and activists have approached research into sexuality and same-sex attraction. Some early 20 th century researchers and equality advocates, seeking to vindicate same-sex relations in societies that disparaged and criminalized it, put forward lists of famous historical figures attracted to persons of the same sex.
Historians and researchers sympathetic to the gay liberation movement of the late s and s produced a number of books that implicitly relied on an essentialist approach. In the s and s John Boswell raised it to a new level of methodological and historical sophistication, although his position shifted over time to one of virtual agnosticism between essentialists and their critics.
Essentialists claim that categories of sexual attraction are observed rather than created. Through history and across cultures there are consistent features, albeit with meaningful variety over time and space, in sexual attraction to the point that it makes sense of speak of specific sexual orientations.
According to this view, homosexuality is a specific, natural kind rather than a cultural or historical product. Essentialists allow that there are cultural differences in how homosexuality is expressed and interpreted, but they emphasize that this does not prevent it from being a universal category of human sexual expression.
In contrast, in the s and since a number of researchers, often influenced by Mary McIntosh or Michel Foucault, argued that class relations, the human sciences, and other historically constructed forces create sexual categories and the personal identities associated with them. For advocates of this view, such as David Halperin, how sex is organized in a given cultural and historical setting is irreducibly particular Halperin, In a manner closely related to the claims of queer theory, discussed below, social constructionists argue that specific social constructs produce sexual ways of being.
There is no given mode of sexuality that is independent of culture; even the concept and experience of sexual orientation itself are products of history. For advocates of this view, the range of historical sexual diversity, and the fluidity of human possibility, is simply too varied to be adequately captured by any specific conceptual scheme.
There is a significant political dimension to this seemingly abstract historiographical debate. Social constructionists argue that essentialism is the weaker position politically for at least two reasons. Second, social constructionists argue that an important goal of historical investigations should be to put into question contemporary organizing schemas about sexuality.
There are related queer theory criticisms of the essentialist position, discussed below. Only an essentialist approach can maintain the project of gay history, and minority histories in general, as a force for liberation. Today natural law theory offers the most common intellectual defense for differential treatment of gays and lesbians, and as such it merits attention.
The development of natural law is a long and very complicated story. A reasonable place to begin is with the dialogues of Plato, for this is where some of the central ideas are first articulated, and, significantly enough, are immediately applied to the sexual domain. For the Sophists, the human world is a realm of convention and change, rather than of unchanging moral truth.
Plato, in contrast, argued that unchanging truths underpin the flux of the material world. Reality, including eternal moral truths, is a matter of phusis. Even though there is clearly a great degree of variety in conventions from one city to another something ancient Greeks became increasingly aware of , there is still an unwritten standard, or law, that humans should live under. In the Laws , Plato applies the idea of a fixed, natural law to sex, and takes a much harsher line than he does in the Symposium or the Phraedrus.
In Book Eight, the Athenian speaker considers how to have legislation banning homosexual acts, masturbation, and illegitimate procreative sex widely accepted. He then states that this law is according to nature —d.
Plato clearly sees same-sex passions as especially strong, and hence particularly problematic, although in the Symposium that erotic attraction is presented as potentially being a catalyst for a life of philosophy, rather than base sensuality Cf. Dover, , —; Nussbaum, , esp. Other figures played important roles in the development of natural law theory. Aristotle, in his approach, did allow for change to occur according to nature, and therefore the way that natural law is embodied could itself change with time, which was an idea Aquinas later incorporated into his own natural law theory.
Aristotle did not write extensively about sexual issues, since he was less concerned with the appetites than Plato. Probably the best reconstruction of his views places him in mainstream Greek society as outlined above; his main concern is with an active versus a passive role, with only the latter problematic for those who either are or will become citizens.
Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was, according to his contemporaries, only attracted to men, and his thought did not have prohibitions against same-sex sexuality. In contrast, Cicero, a later Stoic, was dismissive about sexuality in general, with some harsher remarks towards same-sex pursuits Cicero, , The most influential formulation of natural law theory was made by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Integrating an Aristotelian approach with Christian theology, Aquinas emphasized the centrality of certain human goods, including marriage and procreation.
While Aquinas did not write much about same-sex sexual relations, he did write at length about various sex acts as sins. For Aquinas, sexuality that was within the bounds of marriage and which helped to further what he saw as the distinctive goods of marriage, mainly love, companionship, and legitimate offspring, was permissible, and even good. Aquinas did not argue that procreation was a necessary part of moral or just sex; married couples could enjoy sex without the motive of having children, and sex in marriages where one or both partners is sterile perhaps because the woman is postmenopausal is also potentially just given a motive of expressing love.
For example, a Thomist could embrace same-sex marriage, and then apply the same reasoning, simply seeing the couple as a reproductively sterile, yet still fully loving and companionate union.
Aquinas, in a significant move, adds a requirement that for any given sex act to be moral it must be of a generative kind. The only way that this can be achieved is via vaginal intercourse. That is, since only the emission of semen in a vagina can result in natural reproduction, only sex acts of that type are generative, even if a given sex act does not lead to reproduction, and even if it is impossible due to infertility.
The consequence of this addition is to rule out the possibility, of course, that homosexual sex could ever be moral even if done within a loving marriage , in addition to forbidding any non-vaginal sex for opposite-sex married couples. What is the justification for this important addition? This question is made all the more pressing in that Aquinas does allow that how broad moral rules apply to individuals may vary considerably, since the nature of persons also varies to some extent.
Unfortunately, Aquinas does not spell out a justification for this generative requirement. The first is that sex acts that involve either homosexuality, heterosexual sodomy, or which use contraception, frustrate the purpose of the sex organs, which is reproductive.
It has, however, come in for sharp attack see Weitham, , and the best recent defenders of a Thomistic natural law approach are attempting to move beyond it e. If their arguments fail, of course, they must allow that some homosexual sex acts are morally permissible even positively good , although they would still have resources with which to argue against casual gay and straight sex.
Although the specifics of the second sort of argument offered by various contemporary natural law theorists vary, they possess common elements Finnis, ; George, a.
As Thomists, their argument rests largely upon an account of human goods. The two most important for the argument against homosexual sex though not against homosexuality as an orientation which is not acted upon, and hence in this they follow official Catholic doctrine; see George, a, ch.
Personal integration, in this view, is the idea that humans, as agents, need to have integration between their intentions as agents and their embodied selves.
Hence, natural law theorists respond that sexual union in the context of the realization of marriage as an important human good is the only permissible expression of sexuality. Natural law theorists, if they want to support their objection to homosexual sex, have to emphasize procreation.
If, for example, they were to place love and mutual support for human flourishing at the center, it is clear that many same-sex couples would meet this standard. The Bible, for instance, condemns homosexual intercourse for the same reason it condemns masturbation: because life-bearing seed is spilled in the act.
Musonius Rufus, for example, argued in On Sexual Indulgence that individuals must protect themselves against self-indulgence, including sexual excess. Early Christian theologians took up this conjugal-reproductive ethic, and by the time of Augustine, reproductive sex was the only normal sex. While Krafft-Ebing takes this procreative sexual ethic for granted, he does open it up in a major way.
When most people today think of heterosexuality, they might think of something like this: Billy understands from a very young age he is erotically attracted to girls. One day he focuses that erotic energy on Suzy, and he woos her. The pair fall in love, and give physical sexual expression to their erotic desire. And they live happily ever after. It was only at the turn of the 20th Century that thinkers began to divorce sexual desire depicted here in Rodin's The Kiss from reproduction Credit: Alamy.
Defining normal sexual instinct according to erotic desire was a fundamental revolution in thinking about sex.
Ideas and words are often products of their time. That is certainly true of heterosexuality, which was borne out of a time when American life was becoming more regularised. As Blank argues, the invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class. In the late 19th Century, populations in European and North American cities began to explode. By , for example, New York City had 3. As people moved to urban centres, they brought their sexual perversions — prostitution, same-sex eroticism — with them.
Or so it seemed. Small-town gossip can be a profound motivator. It was important for an emerging middle class to differentiate itself from such excess.
The anonymity of city life in the 19th Century was often blamed for freer - and more 'immoral' - sexual behaviour Credit: Alamy. Degeneracy, after all, was the reverse process of social Darwinism. If procreative sex was critical to the continuous evolution of the species, deviating from that norm was a threat to the entire social fabric.
Luckily, such deviation could be reversed, if it was caught early enough, thought the experts. All civic-minded people must take their turn on the social watch tower. As Katz points out, heterosexuality for Freud was an achievement; those who attained it successfully navigated their childhood development without being thrown off the straight and narrow. And yet, as Katz notes, it takes an enormous imagination to frame this navigation in terms of normality:. Alfred Kinsey centre may have relaxed the taboo around sex, but his reports reaffirmed the existing categories of homosexual and heterosexual behaviour Credit: Getty Images.
Such attitudes found further scientific justification in the work of Alfred Kinsey, whose landmark study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male sought to rate the sexuality of men on a scale of zero exclusively heterosexual to six exclusively homosexual. And those categories have lingered to this day. I was recently caught off guard by Jane Ward, author of Not Gay, who, during an interview for a piece I wrote on sexual orientation, asked me to think about the future of sexuality.
Similarly, why might we be uncomfortable with challenging the belief that homosexuality, and by extension heterosexuality, are eternal truths of nature? The writer James Baldwin balked at defining people as straight or gay, arguing that "it answers a false argument, a false accusation" Credit: Alamy. In an interview with the journalist Richard Goldstein, the novelist and playwright James Baldwin admitted to having good and bad fantasies of the future. The world also belongs to me. Once upon a time, heterosexuality was necessary because modern humans needed to prove who they were and why they were, and they needed to defend their right to be where they were.
As time wears on, though, that label seems to actually limit the myriad ways we humans understand our desires and loves and fears. To leap from an observation of how nature is to a prescription of nature ought to be is, as philosopher David Hume noted, to commit a logical fallacy. As gay rights are increasingly recognised, many people also describe their sexual desires as lying on a spectrum Credit: Alamy.
Why judge what is natural and ethical to a human being by his or her animal nature?
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