The phantom gay past
CommentsThere’s a worldview that lies beneath the contemporary debate on same-sex marriage and other controversies related to homosexuality. More and more people have come to believe that being gay means membership in a naturally occurring minority in every society. The problem is, it’s just not true. However, explaining the scholarship (which has almost all been done by LGBT scholars) that proves being gay is a culturally bound phenomenon arising in Western society over the last 150 years is not easy to do in a paragraph or two - or even in an 800-word column.
So I’ve written a new permanent page - “Phantom Past” with a more than 3,000-word essay citing a half-dozen leading gay and lesbian historians and anthropogists, which meticulously refutes the errors made by people who espouse the widespread mistaken belief that a certain percentage of every society across space and time has been, is, and will be gay or lesbian.
David: ‘But even without terminology or cultural identity, one might object, on a basic level some people in earlier centuries desired their own sex and thus were, essentially, gay or lesbian, right? Katz says no. “The existence of the words and our use of them can’t be separated from the feelings and the acts,” he told me in an interview a few years ago. In his opinion, “it’s literally true that homosexual feelings and acts didn’t exist before those concepts.”’
This is bullshit and it really doesn’t matter how many historians and anthropologists say so. Tabula rasa models of human personality were very popular on the political left for a while, but they’re more wrong than right. Nurture is not unimportant, but nature is comparably so, across many areas of social development. In particular they’re bullshit when it comes to sexual orientation. We can be _quite_ sure of this just by asking people about their experience. The fairly standard one is that the same-sex attraction which is the defining feature of gay as a sexual orientation comes on full force right at puberty (i.e., the earliest moment it sensibly could) and commonly without any exposure to cultural manifestations of gayness. This happens in every known culture across the world today, many of them very different from one another, so it’s pretty much inconceivable that it didn’t happen in earlier eras as well.
That’s not to say that there isn’t also a spectrum through bisexual orientation to straight, but more or less exclusively same-sex attracted people do exist and in not insignificant numbers. That’s also not to say that same-sex attraction wasn’t very likely channelled into different behaviours where it was allowed to be expressed at all. Given that women were trained in housekeeping (which was a _much_ bigger deal until only a few decades ago), and that children were an old age pension, I’d be surprised if the prevailing model _wasn’t_ gay men in loveless marriages creeping out at night to get their rocks off.
Similarly that’s not to say that people couldn’t sometimes have been expected to have same-sex sex for some cultural reason unconnected with sexual attraction. But we know that sexual attraction independent of any cultural ritual was important because people such as Christianity’s Paul (very possibly a self-loathing closet case himself) tell us so: “In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with _lust_ for one another.” [MB's emphasis]
Mark, you say that you disagree with the historians and anthropologists cited by David.
Yet you also note the significant distinction between same-sex sexual behavior, same-sex sexual attraction, and gayness. Your own reference to Paul undoes the claim of gayness across time and cultures.
Gay is a socio-political construct and whether or not same-sex sexual attraction is inborn (this remains highly disputable), no socio-political identity is inborn. The identity may serve to channel behavior and subjective feelings but it is not the behavior nor the attraction nor is it both.
Orientating one’s life according to a socio-political construct is what gayness is. But, as you’ve noted in your own words above, there have, and there are, other forms of orientation (not necessarily defined solely by sexual urges) that may serve to channel behavior and feelings toward cultural norms. Not least of these are principles of sexual morality that are largely rejected by gay identity politics.
This shows up when most SSMers display an ignorance of what marriage is.
Marriage is a near-universal cultural norm by which urges, desires, feelings, and behavior are channeled toward the unity of man and woman; and twoard the bonding of fathers and mothers and their children; and as such marriage is a foundational social institution (not a bunch of bits and pieces decreed by the government) that arises from the nature of humankind (two-sexed), the nature of human generativity (both-sexed) and the nature of human community (also both-sexed). The nature of humankind is a given, not a human construct, and marriage is essentially a cultural adaptation to biology and human physiology. It is this that makes of marriage a central feature of civilization through-out human history.
Gay idenity has not the same strength of claim on civilization. It is not compatable with the nature of marriage, the social institution. It is far more likely that gayness, as a modern feature of our sex-obsessed society, is not a permanent fixture of civilization but an anomaly, a cultural innovation that is incongruous with two-sexed nature of humankind — and at odds with the essentials of marriage.
Mark-
I sympathize with your position. I believe G-d created the universe and the Torah has one author, both positions that are completely rejected by virtually every scholar with a Ph.D. in natural science and Hebrew Bible. Similarly, you think gays have always existed, despite the fact that virtually every scholar with a Ph.D. in gay history or gay anthropology disagrees. It can be very frustrating - but I admire your choice to stick to your beliefs rather than give in under the weight of scholarly opinion.
You are right that sexual orientations happen “in every known culture across the world today, many of them very different from one another,” although as Esther Newton testified, no culture previous to Western contact divided people up into the categories we use today (gay, lesbian, straight man, straight woman). Your comment that “it’s pretty much inconceivable that it didn’t happen in earlier eras as well” is understandable. It’s also inconceivable that mathematical systems could exist with the concept of zero - but they did. If these phantom lesbians before the 19th century existed, we would have some documents showing that some women had a lesbian orientation (as opposed to experiences), given the diverse nature of documents we have for centuries and cultures before 1860. But we just don’t have it. Think about it - academics are rewarded for writing dissertations and books that upend previous consensus ideas. If there was a trove of documents showing lesbians in Incan Peru or Ming China or medieval Spain, whoever was the first to publish scholarship showing that there indeed were lesbian orientations before the 19th century would become very important and very famous very fast. But there are no such troves of documents.
David: ‘Similarly, you think gays have always existed, despite the fact that virtually every scholar with a Ph.D. in gay history or gay anthropology disagrees.’
But to the extent they’re talking about gay identity (which they mostly are) and I’m talking about gay sexual orientation, we don’t disagree, except about the use of language - I will simply not cooperate with the use of unqualified “gay” to refer to anything but sexual orientation. That’s the mainstream meaning among gay people and sympathetic straight people, serious confusion is being caused in important discussions by alternatives in circulation (both among lefty scholars and social conservatives), and I’m going to do my best to stamp them out.
Similarly, to the extent they’re talking about how society classifies people, then again, I don’t disagree, except about the relevance of the exercise to actual sexual orientation, either ancient or modern. For example, if you set an anthropologist to study modern conservative Protestants, the result will be that by and large they don’t _have_ a concept of sexual orientation. They use all the key words by strict analogy to “adultery”/”adulterer”/”adulterous”, i.e., to refer to behaviour rather than orientation. They have no need for a concept of sexual orientation, or words for different orientation, because it would never occur to them, and never has, to have a conversation about it. Presumably they must envisage _some_ motivation for people having gay sex, but they have little interest in it because in their world view it couldn’t possibly be relevant - “thou shalt not”, no excuses, end of story. Moreover, since they’re typically not on speaking terms with any gay people, when they do speculate about motivation, they’re way off. As near as I can tell, they view it as a bad and slightly addictive habit picked up from bad company, like smoking. Yet, under their noses is a significant minority of people with gay sexual orientation who are having same-sex sex primarily because they’re spontaneously and consistently same-sex attracted from puberty, and anthropologists would never hear a word about this.
‘You are right that sexual orientations happen “in every known culture across the world today, many of them very different from one another,” although as Esther Newton testified, no culture previous to Western contact divided people up into the categories we use today (gay, lesbian, straight man, straight woman).’
I haven’t been able to find out much about Esther Newton in a quick search except that she was much inspired by Margaret Mead, a very bad anthropologist. But in any case her claim doesn’t appear to be true of the Greeks and Romans. For example, the dialogue “Affairs of the Heart” attributed to Lucian has three characters Callicratus, Charicles, and Lycinas who are speaking for “identities” of pederast, married man and swinger, but who are equally obviously gay, straight and bi by orientation. In particular, Callicratus denies the suggestion of Charicles that he will stop loving his boy when the boy grows up, showing that the author knew that there was a difference between the pederast/youth roles emphasized by Greek society and the pattern of attraction.
Mark-
You think gay historians are talking about gay identity and how society classifies people, and I say we’re talking about gay orientation. Now, I have read at least 75 books on gay history, spoken to at least two dozen gay historians, attended several conferences on gay history, and written a book and many published articles on the subject, as well has having taught it multiple times. I don’t know your credentials. In order to win this debate with me, you can:
1) talk to experts at LGBT history and quote them disagreeing with me (and I hope you’ll try to do that and be honest with us if they indeed agree with me); or
2) become an expert yourself and cite some data that backs up your claim (that would take a long, long time); or
3) acknowledge that while you find what I say to be surprising, you’re far less qualified than I am to make a sweeping claim about the matter.
If you have another approach you’d like to propose, fine, but just asserting that what I’ve written isn’t actually true is not good enough.
If a psychologist is inspired by Sigmund Freud, who by today’s standards is a very bad psychologist, does that cast doubt upon their credibility? I don’t think so.
I’m not familiar with the Greek texts you cite. But I am certain that everyone with a Ph.D. in history teaching about gay history at an American university today thinks there were no gay or straight Greeks (though perhaps many bisexuals).
David: ‘I don’t know your credentials. In order to win this debate with me, you can:’
Why would I want to have a debate with you beyond what I’ve already said? You’ve made it perfectly clear that you don’t care what the words we’re using mean. I’ve drawn your attention to the fact that many of the people you’re quoting are obviously talking about identity or behaviour rather than orientation and it doesn’t seem to register as the big flashing red light with alarm bells that it should. I’m a physicist. We divide ideas into right, wrong, and, in the memorable words of Pauli, not even wrong. Your position here isn’t coherent enough to be wrong because it’s so riddled with equivocations on the meaning of the terms that there’s no fact of the matter about what it means. I made one attempt to clean it up into something that was at least wrong, but you didn’t say either “No, that’s no longer my position” or “Yes that’s my position but it’s not wrong because…”, you responded as if the whole thing had gone a million miles over your head. Whether you can’t comprehend the difference between orientation and behaviour/identity etc, or you can’t keep it unmuddled for the length of an argument, or you don’t care, it’s just too bad, I’m not wasting my time debating you on the matter.