I did call it boring, but I didn’t dismiss it – I brought it up again because it was important in a new context. And then I brought it up yet again above, where it was a good example of someone being careless with definitions.

DB: “Mark and I mutually feel that the other person’s reading of the Nine Scholars is comical. Repeatedly, he will quote a scholar saying exactly what I’m trying to say,… ”

Well that’s the other problem. You said above that “pattern of attraction” was a fair approximation to what you thought gay meant, and again above I went along with that for the sake of argument, but revisiting Nine Scholars and Phantom Past I was reminded of why I was confused in the first place: you pay lip service to that definition, but you don’t actually take any notice of it – your own usage is all over the map. And I think that’s because you don’t actually distinguish. You start talking about sexual orientation and then seamlessly flip flop to behaviour or identity or the like without any sign of awareness that these are different things and you’ve changed the subject. You quote Katz approvingly as saying ‘“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.”’ But he doesn’t say how he knows this, and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you to ask. You and everybody you talk to seems to take as axiomatic that there’s nothing but behaviour and identity worth talking about, but nobody ever says why. It’s all as strangely disconnected from reality as a Social Constructivist theory of eating:

“If you are arguing a biological basis for eating, you are making a claim which would be controversial to social constructionists. ”

“But a person who engaged in it wasn’t demonstrating a specific hunger, they were just eating.”

“If, by hungry, you mean expressions of desire for food, the idea that it happened in “nature” is a retrospective view, and not something that was attendant to most of human history….

“I don’t think it’s just a matter of semantics when a person says the ancient Greeks weren’t hungry. By that, they don’t mean to deny that Greek men ate, but are making the point that in their society, that didn’t make them “hungry” in the current sense of the term. ”

“To characterize these experiences as ‘hungry’ is to lock them down to one formulation that resonates for us now, but may not have signified in similar ways then.”

“I cannot agree with the two basic premises of your statement: 1) that “being hungry” is a singular thing, and 2) that it is a relatively static product of nature rather than society.”

And in crafting the above parody, I do mean to include as part of the analogy that it’s self-evidently stupid because it doesn’t account for either people’s experiences or the historical record. It certainly doesn’t account for my experience. As far as I can tell I’m 100% gay. I’ve been sexually attracted to guys since puberty, but never, ever in the slightest, to a girl. It took me a while to figure out what sexual attraction was, because what I had been lead to expect was so totally not there, and there was this other feeling barging in from a wholly different direction. Meanwhile, I had exactly zero exposure to any concept of gayness except for the character of Mr Humphries on Are You Being Served, and he was such a caricature that I totally failed to realize we had anything in common. It wasn’t till about age 21 that somebody said something offhand that caused the penny to drop and me to think, “Oh. Is _that_ what they were talking about.” And while I may be a bit slow, the basic outline that the same-sex attraction comes on full-strength and with no plausible precursors at puberty is extremely common.

Moreover, it’s not even as if the ancients didn’t know this. For example in Plato’s Symposium, the character Aristophanes tells a quaint creation story about how Zeus made double-people of three types, male-male, female-female and and mixed and then cut them in half. Nowadays supposedly the halves are trying to reunite, at least by type. Male who had been paired with males are seeking males, males who were paired with females are seeking females, and females who were paired with females are seeking females. The story is almost certainly satire, but it presupposes an understanding that to a good approximation people come innately in four flavours, gay, straight male and female, and lesbian. And it goes on and on, painting a picture very close to the modern view, down even to marriage as an unpleasant duty for some. Even the reference to pedophilia is the exception that proves the rule – it takes for granted that it’s about sexual attraction in both directions and that it’s a closed ecosystem, with the same individuals playing both roles at different times, not something that the straight men do as an unpleasant social duty converse to gay men getting married:

“Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are loves of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,-if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. “

Mark and I mutually feel that the other person’s reading of the Nine Scholars is comical. Repeatedly, he will quote a scholar saying exactly what I’m trying to say, and then claim they are making a much smaller point. I am very comfortable having blog readers check out these scholars’ comments (and Mark’s spin) and decide for themselves whether they support my point that homosexuality as a sexual orientation has a very short history.

Please go back and read my lengthy article (it’s a tab on the main page) “Phantom Gay Past” which deals with many of the objections you make. But please note:

•Not surprisingly, most of your examples are 19th century, and I don’t dispute there were gays in the 19th century;

• I’m not making a semantic point. It’s not that there weren’t people called gay before 1850 or so; it’s that there weren’t gay people in any recognizable sense.

• I’m also not saying same-sex love, relationships, or sex didn’t exist. I’m saying gay people, a gay minority, people oriented to have sex with the same sex is something new, and there is an utter lack of evidence of people oriented to the same sex before the 19th century.

No I didn’t. I said, “Why would I want to have a debate with you beyond what I’ve already said?” when you tried to change the subject away from the fact that you don’t care that your sources are using key words in different sense from you, and towards the subject of credentials. And I stand by that. Who cares what your credentials are when if I’m right, you’ve committed multiple counts of a really elementary misreading that makes most if not all of your sources irrelevant to what you’re claiming.

DB: “You suggest I find an authority who thinks gayness is always or at least generally mutable, yet I have never taken that position.”

Sorry, that was unfortunate shorthand. To the extent gayness is defined in terms of sexual orientation, it is of course immutable by definition. I should rather have said, “find us an authority with some sort of relevant experience who is saying that patterns of sexual attraction are always or at least generally mutable, and who from context is clearly talking about sexual attraction, rather gayness as a pattern of behaviour or identity or some vague standard that they don’t want to commit to. I’ll bet you can’t.” I suggest you’re committed to establish that if you want to defend your claim that most people don’t have a sexual orientation.

DB: “My assertion, overwhelmingly supported by the scholars I’ve interviewed and those I have not, is that there were no gay people, by and large, before the 19th century.”

That’s indeed another related assertion that you have made, and as I keep trying to draw to your attention, it’s _not_ supported by the scholars you cite, because what you say that the beginning of the Nine Scholars article is utterly, comically, breathtakingly untrue:

“Please note that most of those surveyed aren’t saying nobody was “called” gay before the 19th century. They’re mostly saying nobody *was* gay, at least as far as sexual orientation and a “gay minority” is concerned. ”

On the contrary, you simply can’t read. _Most_ of them are explicitly talking about terminology, and _none_ of them are saying that nobody was, in actuality, in the sexual orientation sense, gay. Let’s take some representative examples.

From #1: “In the past in Europe, for example, ’sodomy’ – a broad term that usually referred to anal penetration, but could include all kinds of other things – was thought to be abhorrent. But a person who engaged in it wasn’t demonstrating a specific ’sexual orientation’, they were just sinning.”

This is a statement about what people in the past called or thought of certain behaviours, and not at all about the reality of whether people had a sexual orientation.

From #2: “Homosexuality is a product of modern forms of classification, inquiry and identity formation. [...] If, by gay, you mean expressions of same sex sexuality, or same sex love, the idea that it happened in “nature” is a retrospective view, and not something that was attendant to most of human history….”

This is a statement about what people in the past called or thought of certain behaviours and not at all about the reality of whether people had a sexual orientation.

From #3: As early as the 1600s, we have evidence of same-sex relations between colonists, but no one identified them as “homosexuals,” nor did they identify themselves that way. It was more something that they DID, it did not define who they WERE.

This is a statement about what people in the past called or thought of certain behaviours and not at all about the reality of whether people had a sexual orientation.

From 4: “Notions such as ‘gay,’ ‘sexual orientation,’ or minority do not begin to circulate in public culture until the middle of the 20th century, and we are already witnessing a decline in their usefulness. My current students, by and large, would opt for other labels to characterize their sexuality—and many students who once would have identified as ‘gay’ no longer see themselves as part of a minority culture.”

This at least is _possibly_ about sexual attraction, but it’s still a statement about what people in the past called things, and not at all about the reality of whether people had a sexual orientation.

From 5: “Gay behavior has always existed in all societies, but the way people think about it has varied tremendously. ”

This is a statement about what people in the past called or thought of certain behaviours, and not at all about the reality of whether people had a sexual orientation.

From 6: ” If you are arguing a biological basis for same-sex desire, you are making a claim which would be controversial to social constructionists.”

This is certainly about same-sex desire, but as it stands it’s not evidence.

From 7: “How is the tribade not like a contemporary lesbian?”

This introduces a bunch of statements about what people in the past thought about a group of women who had same-sex sex, compared to similar view about “lesbians”. However none of the data bears on whether either the tribades or the modern “lesbians” were all/sometimes/never actual lesbians in the sexual orientation sense.

From 8: “I cannot agree with the two basic premises of your statement: 1) that “being gay” is a singular thing, and 2) that it is a relatively static product of nature rather than society.”

This is a statement about identity, not sexual orientation.

From 9: The notion of a homosexual person did not even exist before the 1870s. What I think is that people have had same-sex sexual desire since the beginning of time, but that at different moments this desire has been manifest in ways that would be somewhat, but not entirely, recognizable to us in the early 21st century.

This is primarily a statement about behaviour, and to the extent it address attraction, it does nothing to establish that same-sex attraction always/sometimes/never rises to the level of innateness and immutability to constitute a sexual orientation.

DB: “I use that situation to argue that God does not make people gay. ”

Oh, it couldn’t be more obvious that you’re desperate to be able to make that argument – that’s what I had in mind when I said you were invested in the confusion. Nothing like a problem in theodicy to selectively reduce someone smart enough, when motivated, to notice really subtle things (like the fact that Perkins is using talk of “family” to hustle his audience past a weak point in his argument) to the reading comprehension of a brick.

Granted the term GAY is a relatively new term. So I guess that ‘gay’ people didn’t exist before the 19th century. . .

but . . .Prejudices and discrimination against those with sexual orientations not conforming to heterosexual and transgender lifestyles have a long history. Laws have banned homosexual relationships at least dating back to Biblical times over two thousand years ago. Sometimes these laws imposed death penalties for violators. Activists proposing acceptance of homosexuality in society first appeared in the late eighteenth century in Western society.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1215936/prejudices_against_homosexuals_and.html

Why is it that were laws against homosexuality, if homosexuals (GAYS) did not exist?

Jon Freeman commented about Graham Robb”s Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century and expressed “In France they were known as “chestnut gatherers.” Brits called them “lavender aunts.” The names suggest a quieter, saucier time, when the diluted champagne flowed and gay men and women could live relatively harassment-free lives. And yet the law tells a different story. Gays in the 19th century were living under a death sentence. Sodomy was punishable by death in England until 1861. Forty-six people were executed in England alone between 1810 and 1835.”

Freeman continues “But in Strangers, Graham Robb argues that persecution was the exception, and that homosexual life in Europe was, if not thriving, then vibrant. To build this case, he combs through criminal records, letters, diaries, newspapers, and libraries of literature to find a “vanished civilization,” Wildean before Wilde was a star. In doing so, he takes on French philosopher Michel Foucault, who theorized that until Victorian doctors came up with the category homosexual, no one identified him or herself as such.”

Finally Freeman also notes: “One obvious flaw with Strangers is that it focuses almost exclusively on the upper echelons, a problem Robb attributes to historical record. It is also unfortunate that the book is tilted more toward gay male life than lesbian life. To read Strangers is to hear a lot about Tchaikovsky, André Gide, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and John Maynard Keynes, men of privileged intellect or station, or both, who had access to a larger network of people and whose lives were individually documented.”

You suggest I find an authority who thinks gayness is always or at least generally mutable, yet I have never taken that position. Shouldn’t I get to decide what I want to find sources to support, rather than you? My assertion, overwhelmingly supported by the scholars I’ve interviewed and those I have not, is that there were no gay people, by and large, before the 19th century. I use that situation to argue that God does not make people gay. If, as I suspect, you’re not concerned with whether God made you gay, then this isn’t really your fight. (Not that you’re not welcome.)

When you suggest that for me to win the debate I have to find scholars who state homosexuality is “always” or almost always mutable, you rig the discussion because 1) you know the scholars don’t say that – because it’s not true and 2) you know I never made an argument about mutability, and in fact have been a vocal opponent of the “ex-gay” movement.

Sure, but until such time as you actually do the exercise you accept would be “interesting”, who cares what you think? You came to this opinion while you were under a crippling misapprehension: that your sources were using “gay as it is usually used in the homosexuality debates”, when in fact there is no such thing – when different factions use “gay” in importantly different ways. You came to this conclusion in significant part from listening to religious conservatives, who are precisely the people who tend not to use gay as you naively supposed it was always used. You were confirmed in this opinion in significant part by a survey in respect of which you were clearly oblivious to the fact that over half the respondents dropped blatant clues (to anyone alert to the issue) that they were not using gay as you naively supposed it was always used.

So, go and do your research, properly this time, and get back to us. Find us an authority with some sort of relevant experience who is saying that gayness is always or at least generally mutable, and who from context is clearly talking about gayness as a pattern of sexual attraction, rather than a pattern of behaviour or identity or some vague standard that they don’t want to commit to. I’ll bet you can’t.

I’ll accept “pattern of attraction” as a reasonable attempt of describing what “gay” is, more or less. I also accept that it would be interesting to define “gay” and “sexual orientation” very very specifically, and then to ask historians and anthropologists if such things existed 1000 years ago. I have no objection to that, and am confident that the results would be similar to what I found several months ago on this blog.

Here’s a first draft of a s.o. definition: Sexual orientation is an innate, immutable characteristic, like race or sex or blood type, that indicates whether a person’s innermost attractions, romantic inclinations, and capacities for love relationships are with a member of the same or the opposite sex.

As you might imagine, I don’t believe people have sexual orientations, for the most part.

Same difference: neither can you be induced to care that there are different meanings of “sexual orientation” in circulation. Sure, the term was specifically invented to be unambiguous, but that doesn’t mean that it _is_ unambiguous. Rather, the same thing happened to it that happened to its predecessor, “sexual preference”: people figured that since “gay”/homosexual” were now defined in terms of it, it had to line up with whatever they already thought “gay”/homosexual” meant. So now, with exceptions, “gay” people think (correctly) that it refers to a pattern of sexual attraction, the religious conservatives think it refers to a pattern of behaviour and the identity politics conservatives (and old-school leftists) think it refers to an identity.

And I’ve pointed this out to you before, and you could easily verify it by getting some samples of writing and looking for the clues that one sense or the other is in play. And if you were the sort of person who cared, you’d start by doing that. And then you’d do various other things to avoid perpetuating the confusion, including (i) reassessing claims you’d heard (“homosexuality is a choice”) to see if the people perhaps meant something different from what you’d initially supposed and (ii) avoiding ambiguous terms, or always clarifying which sense you meant.

But no, like, I said, you can’t be induced to care. It doesn’t worry you in the least that a good half of the authors you cited to prove that there were not gay people in historic times explicitly mention behaviour or identity, when the original and still prevailing definition of sexual orientation is in terms of attraction. And if I may rudely venture some speculation, I fancy that’s because, like Chairm, you’re invested in the confusion. There’s a whole class of arguments that you simply don’t have to hear because you can throw up your hands and say it’s “problematic”.