Friday, June 17, 2005

   The Suppression of Lesbian and Gay History
The Suppression of Lesbian and Gay History


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Copyright © Rictor Norton. All rights reserved. Reproduction for sale or profit prohibited. This essay may not be republished in whole without the permission of the author.


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‘Obscenity’

The whole of lesbian and gay history and culture, not merely queer sex, is frequently silenced. It is important to recognize that because of the common prejudice that male–male or female–female love is obscene per se, any texts that celebrate this love, despite being utterly devoid of explicit sexual details or even innuendo, are subject to suppression. When Christina Rossetti’s brother edited her poetry for publication, he apparently destroyed some half-dozen of her poems, not because they were explicitly ‘erotic’, but simply because they were love poems addressed to women. The censorship of sexuality is seldom taken as seriously as the censorship of politics or religion, hence because homosexuality is usually considered solely as a sexual problem its censorship is seldom perceived as having racial or political overtones. The reason given for destroying Sappho’s works was their ‘immorality’. But the effects of suppression are the same as if the motivation were cultural imperialism, as it was when the English destroyed the archives of Ireland, or when missionaries destroyed much of the culture of Central and South America, or when Nazi newspapers praised the destruction of Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science as ‘a deed of culture’.

A few examples of South American pottery depicting male anal intercourse and lesbian relations survive, but the vast majority of pottery illustrating sexual practices or representing sexual objects was destroyed by the Christian missionaries. Even in the twentieth century when people in Peru found some pre-Columbian pieces which showed same-sex images, they destroyed them because they were ‘insults to national honour’. There is much evidence suggesting widespread homosexual relationships amongst the Mayans during the sixteenth century, but the Spanish Jesuits destroyed the Aztec and Mayan libraries, so our knowledge about Aztec or Mayan queer culture does not predate the Conquest and does not come direct from the people themselves.

The suppression of gay history is the deliberate destruction of a culture, and it is no good making excuses for, say, early nineteenth-century historians by referring to their different sexual ‘morals’. By regarding queers as people with dirty habits rather than people with a culture, sociologists and historians with more enlightened sexual ‘morals’ have connived at the obliteration of this culture. We must not lull ourselves into believing that this is merely a matter of distaste at obscenity. In India from the 1920s to the 1940s ‘Gandhi decided to send squads of his devotees to destroy the erotic representations, particularly those depicting homoeroticism and lesbianism, carved into Hindu temples dating from the eleventh century, as part of a program to encourage both Indians and non-Indians to believe that such behaviors were the result of foreign, namely Euro-western, influence’ (Conner 1997). This desecration was temporarily halted by Rabindranath Tagore, but renewed under Jawaharlal Nehru, who ‘became extremely irritated with his friend Alain Daniélou when the latter, together with his lover, published photographs of the same-sex erotic and transgendered-themed sculptures.’ Daniélou was no mere collector of obscene postcards; he was committed to making a photographic record of ancient queer culture before evidence of it was systematically effaced from Indian temples and monuments. The first law criminalizing homosexual relations in India was passed by the British rulers in 1860, imitating the British penal code. Most modern Indians firmly believe that homosexuality is a decadent Western import, whereas in fact homophobia was the product of British colonialism.

The erasure of historical images of homosexuality is the cultural equivalent of ethnic cleansing, and the battle is still underway. In 1993 Shivananda Khan, founder of London’s Asian HIV health promotion agency the Naz Project, visited Daniélou in Rome to examine his collection of 10,000 photographs for ‘proof that Asians have enjoyed gay sex for centuries’, and subsequently showed pictures from Daniélou’s archive to new members of the Naz male sexual health group in an effort to counter prejudice that homosexuality was a Western disease. In July 1996 Scotland Yard’s child protection unit began investigating complaints that Shivananda Khan and his agency were distributing ‘pornography’. He was suspended pending the outcome of inquiries; funding of the agency was suspended; its staff was accordingly issued with redundancy notices (Pink Paper, 26 July 1996). The Naz Project, which has spread the safer-sex message among Asian, Turkish and Iranian communities in Britain and which has worked on safer-sex projects in Bangladesh, Delhi and Calcutta, barely survived this crisis. (Daniélou has since died, and donated his collection to a Berlin museum.) The masculinization of feminine and lesbian iconography is current practice in Gujarat, and anti-gay cultural vandalism has been witnessed by Giti Thadani (1996): ‘In Bhuveneshvar, at the Lingraj temple, I saw the breasts of a goddess being cut, then polished over with orange, and a new male divinity was born. At Tara Tarini, the temple of the lesbian twin goddesses, the original iconography of the goddesses in an embrace has been replaced by a heterosexual image.’ Normative heterosexuality has been retrospectively imposed upon the history of India.

Similarly in China queer culture has been inverted into its opposite. The ‘Two Flower Temple’, built near Guilin in southern China in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century to honour the homosexual love of the handsome scholar Choy and a male actor, both murdered when they refused to submit sexually to a rogue named Wong, attracted pilgrims celebrating same-sex love until the nineteenth century – when it was rededicated as the ‘Temple of Virtuous Female Ancestors’, ‘its earlier history purposely buried’ (Conner 1997; it was destroyed by the Japanese in 1894).


Outright destruction

Research into queer history faces an insuperable problem – the outright, total destruction of the queer record. Much of our knowledge about homosexuality in the ancient world comes from literary works which feature homosexual characters or incidents which are peripheral to the central action and hence contain only a limited amount of information. But many works which do not survive were devoted entirely to homosexuality, and presumably would have given us a much fuller picture: for example, Athenaeus at the beginning of the third century cites the titles of no-longer-extant works such as The Pederasts by Diphilus, a play called Ganymede, and The Effeminates by Cratinus. Four lost plays by Aeschylus were pederastic in theme, as was Euripides’ lost tragedy Chrysippus and Sophocles’ Lovers of Achilles. There seem to have been at least a dozen ancient comedies titled Sappho; presumably they would have satirized a licentious lesbian and were full of realistic everyday details about queer life, but they are no longer extant. Of course a vast amount of Greek literature in general has disappeared, and this is a problem common to all historical investigation. Nevertheless the fact that not one single play dealing entirely with a homosexual theme has survived seems to suggest that queer works were deliberately suppressed and destroyed rather than merely lost during the passage of time.

As Christianity established its base in the remains of the crumbling Roman empire, celebrations of ‘pagan immorality’ were systematically destroyed by monastic compilers busily engaged in rewriting history with a Christian slant. The destruction of the works of Sappho of Lesbos (c. 612–558 BC) is deemed by many, straight as well as gay, men as well as women, to be the greatest single loss in all literature. Although in her own day her works were widely popular and statues were erected and coins were minted in her honour, her works were burned in the late fourth century during the tenure of Gregory Nazianzen Bishop of Constantinople (c. 390), appointed by Emperor Theodosius’ First Ecumenical Council of Constantinople which outlawed paganism and declared homosexuality to be crime punishable by death. In the Western Empire, only fragments survived the further destruction ordered by Pope Gregory VII during his reign (1073–85). These consist mostly of phrases quoted as examples in ancient books on rhetoric and poetic diction, and the archaeological discovery in 1897 of copies of a fourth-century Alexandrian edition on shreds of papyrus subsequently used as wadding material to stuff mummified sacred animals in Egypt – what survives typically consists of only one or two strips torn from a scroll, so that every line has one or two gaps. In all, scholars have pieced together some 600 lines from a total output estimated at 12,000 lines – tantalizingly insufficient for the reconstruction of lesbian history, but precious for all that (Klaich 1974). Only two complete (or nearly complete) poems by Sappho survived outright destruction, but they did not survive censorship, at least in their English translations. Her ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’ in its last line indicates that the gender of the beloved is feminine, but translators regularly rendered this as ‘he’ until the twentieth century. ‘Blest as the immortal Gods is he’ is an ode addressed to Sappho’s mistress, but its pronouns were transposed in the late eighteenth century. Many women also translated Sappho, but were as guilty of censorship as the men, even more so (Donoghue 1993).

It is not solely Christians who are responsible. Homer’s Iliad was subjected to censorship even in ancient times, for example by the Alexandrian editor Aristarchus, who omitted a line in Book XVI in which ‘Achilles asks the gods to rid the world of all humanity except Patroclus and himself’, and a line in Book XIV about Achilles mourning Patroclus’ death, in which Thetis finds him ‘Lying in the arms of Patroclus / crying shrill’ (Spencer 1995). If lines with homosexual import could be censored at such an early stage, it is quite possible that the oral tradition regarding the homosexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus was modified by the time the epic got written down for posterity. Many modern homophile readers have sensed the homosexual relationship in the story, even without resorting to a psychoanalytical interpretation.

John Boswell, in his research into the ceremony of same-sex union that existed in the eastern Christian church from the sixth through the sixteenth century, came across much evidence of the censorship of documents:

folios from the ceremony have been ripped out of at least one Euchologion from the thirteenth century, . . . and in two other Greek prayer books the folios immediately following the ceremony have been torn out, suggesting either that the censor was not good at reading Greek or that there was some additional text that could not be shared. Even Gerald of Wales’ [late twelfth century or early thirteenth century] description of the ceremony in Ireland has been defaced in one of its recensions and tampered with in others. . . . [The title] has been cut out of the page, along with a drawing. This was obviously deliberate. (Boswell, 1994)

Thus visual evidence as well as textual evidence has been destroyed. In two twelfth-century liturgical texts containing this ceremony, the phrase ‘united together’ is immediately followed by a lacuna in the manuscript; in another case the phrase is followed by the very rare word euchlinus which seems to mean ‘well in bed’, so censorship of the homoerotic aspect seems likely. The office of same-sex union survives only in Greek and Old Church Slavonic texts, but Gerald of Wales’s account proves that this homosexual marriage ceremony survived in Ireland, where Greek probably would have been unfamiliar (and Slavonic unknown), where the service was almost certainly conducted in Latin. Boswell thinks that all of the Latin liturgical texts of the ceremony were destroyed rather than simply lost, as a result of the fourteenth century attack on homosexuality when such ceremonies were condemned in the West.

Destruction is not limited to the ancient or medieval world. The history of the early gay rights movement is hampered by the destruction of much material. On 6 May 1933 Nazi students from the Gymnastic Academy ransacked the library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, and Hirschfeld’s own apartment in the same building, seizing some 12,000 books and 35,000 photographs, plus thousands of irreplaceable original manuscripts. As two lorry-loads of books were removed, the students insultingly chanted out the names of such authors as Freud, Havelock Ellis, Wilde, Carpenter, Gide, and Proust, and ended by singing a ‘particularly vulgar song’ and the Horst-Wessel song (Lauritsen and Thorstad 1974). Everything was burned in a huge bonfire on the square in front of the University of Berlin on 10 May 1933. Photographs, including a torchlight procession in which Hirschfeld’s bust was waved aloft, and a cinematic film of this public bookburning became famous as a symbol of Nazi censorship and the destruction of culture. Few people realize that it was queer culture specifically that was going up in flames.


Protection of privacy

Much of gay history has gone up in flames, just like the records of sodomy trials in medieval Europe, which were burnt together with the convicted queers, including some lesbians, because the information they contained was too shameful (or too threatening?) to become public knowledge. In the history of gay history, the register of bonfires makes sorry reading. Sir Richard Burton’s wife destroyed the manuscript he was working on at his death, supposedly a massive study of homosexuality in the form of an annotated translation of Sheikh Nefzawi’s Perfumed Garden. The wife of C. R. Ashbee, founder of the Guild of Handicrafts and promoter of the arts and crafts movement, after his death in 1942 burnt his notebook Confessio Amantis, in which he probably described an affair with a young soldier named Chris. A box of ‘secret papers’ belonging to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the poet and playwright who killed himself in 1849, found its way into the possession of Robert Browning, who told Edmund Gosse, who was editing Beddoes’ works, that ‘the particular fact about which you enquire is painful enough, and must remain a secret, at least for some time longer’, whereupon ‘the dismal box’ disappeared forever (Elliman and Roll 1986). The papers of Edward Lear, who had many passionate friendship with men, were destroyed by his literary executor, presumably because they compromised his non-literary reputation.

John Addington Symonds – the father of gay history – wrote to his wife Catherine from his death bed in Rome in 1893, asking her to give all his manuscripts, diaries, letters ‘& other matters found in my books cupboard’ to his friend Horatio Forbes Brown (also gay) – ‘I do this because I have written things you could not like to read, but which I have always felt justified and useful for society. Brown will consult & publish nothing without your consent.’ Catherine withheld her consent. Brown fully understood the importance Symonds attached to the memoirs – whose whole raison d’être was to chart the emotional and intellectual growth, the ‘coming out’, of a homosexual man, in the hopes of helping to liberate homosexuals of the future – and that they must be saved from destruction after his death. But Brown had to obey the wishes of Catherine, and he therefore totally suppressed all homosexual references in his biography of Symonds. The strange gap sensed by most readers was inferred as an indication of a secret religious melancholy. Sir Charles Holmes, who was working at the publishers (Nimmo) at the time, said that Brown ‘exercised little more than ordinary discretion in cutting out the most intimate self-revelations. But a straiter critic had then to take a hand’. That critic was almost certainly Edmund Gosse, who received the bowdlerized proofs of the biography and proceeded to completely emasculate them. Brown died in 1926, bequeathing Symonds’ memoirs and papers to Gosse. Gosse and the librarian of the London Library made a bonfire in the garden and burned everything except the memoirs, which were deposited in the London Library with injunctions that they were not to be made available or published for fifty years. The papers that were destroyed probably included Symonds’ sexual diary and material collected for his project with Ellis on the history of sexual inversion; correspondence with fellow homosexuals across the world; and love letters. Symonds’ granddaughter Janet Vaughan was nauseated by the ‘smug gloating delight’ with which Gosse informed her what he had done to preserve Symonds’ good name.

Women in particular have been brought up to value discretion, modesty and propriety, and families take special care to protect the unblemished reputation of their female members: this ‘would have ensured that most passions between women were presented in letters and memoirs as harmless and innocent’ (Donoghue 1993). But at the same time, women tend to record more intimate personal details in their diaries and letters than men, possibly because they are urged to cultivate their sensibilities and express their feelings more than men, so it is not surprising that documents of possibly-lesbian important are frequently suppressed. None of Ellen Nussey’s letters to Charlotte Brontë survive; presumably they were destroyed just as Nussey was asked by Brontë’s husband Arthur Bell, soon after their marriage, to destroy those she had received from Brontë because of their ‘passionate language’. She refused, but her proposed biography of Brontë had to be suppressed because Bell refused to grant her copyright permission to quote any of the letters. A surviving letter from Charlotte to Ellen dated 20 october 1854 shows her husband’s surveillance in action:

Arthur has just been glancing over this note . . . you must BURN it when read. Arthur says such letters as mine never ought to be kept, they are dangerous as Lucifer matches so be sure to follow the recommendation he has just given, ‘fire them’ or ‘there will be no more,’ such is his resolve . . . he is bending over the desk with his eyes full of concern. I am now desired to have done with it . . . (Miller 1989)

George Eliot (pen name of Mary Anne or Marian Evans) had formed intense friendships with women in her youth. In April 1849 she wrote to Sara Hennell, ‘I have given you a sad excuse for flirtation, but I have not been beyond seas long enough to make it lawful for you to take a new husband – therefore I come back to you with all a husband’s privileges and command you to love me’. Such passages were omitted from the letters quoted by Eliot’s husband when he wrote her biography in 1885 (Johnson 1989).

Sixteen lines of a letter by Mary Wollstonecraft describing her passion for Fanny Blood were obliterated by some ‘well-meaning scholar’, and are irrecoverable (Faderman 1994). Willa Cather destroyed the letters she had written over a period of forty years to Isabelle McClung, with whom she fell in love though McClung got married and denied her a passionate relationship, and after her death in 1947 most of her personal papers were burned in accordance with her instructions. Lorena Hickok, apparently Eleanor Roosevelt’s lover, burned Roosevelt’s letters after her death; the biographer Doris Faber tried to suppress the surviving letters between the women, for fear they would be ‘misunderstood’. In the 1920s Emily Dickinson’s niece censored Dickinson’s passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert. Annie Fields, companion of the novelist Sarah Orne Jewett, wanted to publish Jewett’s letters to her after the novelist’s death in 1911, but was advised by the official biographer to omit most of the affectionate references for fear of ‘all sorts of people reading them wrong’.

Many families continue to protect the family honour by not allowing access to papers which would incriminate one of their members. (For most of history, evidence of homosexuality is literally evidence of criminal activity.) When Henry Maas edited The Letters of A. E. Housman (1971) he was refused permission to include Housman’s letters to Moses Jackson, the great love of Housman’s life. Maas was allowed to see these letters but he was not allowed even to summarize their content – all he could say was that they were ‘of the greatest interest’. The family continues to refuse permission for publication.

Wives are understandably reticent concerning their husbands’ papers. T. S. Eliot’s widow in 1988 allowed the publication of some letters to him from Jean Jules Verdenal, with whom Eliot lodged in Paris in 1910–11 and to whom he dedicated The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, recently interpreted as a gay love song. Verdenal’s letters are full of youthful enthusiasm and devotion to ‘mon cher ami’, but Eliot’s replies have not been published, and there are said to be others that are franker. Although Yukio Mishima’s autobiographical novels reveal his homosexual relations with complete frankness, his wife will not allow the publication of her husband’s letters.

Federico García Lorca, who was executed for leftist sympathies in 1936, has been subject ‘to deliberate manipulation and "cleansing" of his image by surviving family members’ (Eisenberg, ‘Lorca’, EH). His openly queer play The Public was partly published in 1976 against his relatives’ opposition; his homoerotic Sonnets of Dark Love were withheld by his family but published clandestinely in 1983; much other material is still suppressed and his intimate letters have not been published. When William Warren Bartley published a biography (1973) revealing that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was homosexual, Bartley was vilified as a liar and mischief-maker by Wittgenstein’s friends and admirers even though Wittgenstein’s literary heirs possess a coded diary detailing the philosopher’s cruising for rough trade in Vienna. When Weatherby (1989) was preparing his biography of James Baldwin – who was quite open about his homosexuality – he discovered that ‘Many of Baldwin’s most intimate companions or lovers didn’t wish to be interviewed. . . . Several did talk providing they weren’t identified. . . . Others explained that they didn’t trust American society’s inconsistent attitude toward homosexual relations and thought they were safer remaining silent.’ So even in the liberal 1980s it was not possible to write a full and frank biography of an openly gay man.

Sometimes family protectiveness is carried too far. Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès (1753–1824), Napoleon’s Arch-Chancellor, was openly homosexual and the object of prejudice. Though he is wrongly credited with being responsible for the decriminalization of homosexuality under the Code Napoleon, his papers nevertheless ought to contain valuable material for the gay historian. But his memoirs remain unpublished, and his heirs have refused historians permission to examine their archives, according to Jean-Louis Bory who wrote his biography in 1979.

The protection of the reputation even of people long dead is still relatively common. Cole Porter’s satiric song ‘Farming’ describes a bull as being ‘beautiful, but he’s gay’, but Bronski (1984) was unable to say much more than that: ‘The Cole Porter estate refused permission to reprint six lines of lyrics from "Farming" because they did not want them to appear in a "risque context".’ For an even more absurd example, the South Caroliniana Library in 1978 tried to prevent the foremost gay scholar Martin Duberman from publishing gay love letters written in 1826 by Thomas Jefferson Withers, an important politician in the antebellum South. Withers wrote nostalgically to his former ‘chum’ James Hammond: ‘I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole – the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honour of feeling.’ Duberman went ahead and published the letters without permission, accompanied by an excellent essay on the dilemma of how gay historians can remain true to the ideals of their profession when confronted with such censorship. Lillian Faderman was refused permission to include poems by Edna St Vincent Millay in her anthology Chloe Plus Olivia (1994) because, according to Millay’s literary executrix, ‘These poems are not appropriate for your collection, as Millay did not write lesbian literature. She wrote poetry – pure and simple.’ As possibly the most absurd example, the Fellowship of the School of Economic Science, London (not to be confused with the London School of Economics), and their publishers Shepheard-Walwyn, refused to grant me permission to include any selection from their modern English translation of the letters of Marsilio Ficino in an anthology of gay love letters, though it does seem preposterous that a modern academic institution would wish to prevent a sixteenth-century philosopher from appearing in a queer context.


Self-censorship

The intimate, private life is difficult to trace in the public pages of history. While marrage and children are fairly clear public markers of heterosexual private lives, non-marriage or lack of children do not automatically signify homosexual private lives, although if people talk about a man being a ‘confirmed bachelor’, that’s a pretty good giveaway. A natural prudence about one’s personal life is exacerbated when certain revelations would subject one to ridicule or ostracism or criminal prosecution. Working-class people seldom have the leisure or inclination to record and examine their lives in diaries, and the middle classes are often too ‘proper’ to record details that are not quite ‘respectable’. It is remarkable that queer-revealing diaries and letters get written at all, much less survive the death of their writer. Countee Cullen, leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, in the 1930s and 1940s used codes in letters to his friends recording his gay affairs, and even signed letters to his lover with a pseudonym. Tchaikovsky once said, ‘To think that one day people will try to penetrate the intimate world of my feelings and thoughts, everything I have kept so carefully hidden throughout my life, is very depressing and hard to bear.’ But when his brother Modest, who was actually more openly gay than he, compiled Tchaikovsky’s Life and Letters in twenty-five volumes, not a word was mentioned about gomoseksualiszm, which the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in its 1952 edition defined as a symptom of the ‘moral decay of the ruling classes’.

The fact that the lesbian sections of Anne Lister’s journals in the early nineteenth century were written in a code using the Greek alphabet and special characters is ample testimony to the perceived need for secrecy. Anne Lister was always quite careful in the phrasing of the letters that she wrote to her lover Mrs Barlow after returning to England in 1825; she even asked her to burn them and was rather disturbed that Mrs Barlow was not so cautious as she. One day Anne carefully studied a love letter she had composed the previous night, to determine if it was safe enough to send or if it should be modified to avoid exposure if it was read by a third party:

This ought not to be seen – not that there is anything in it flaming but some allusions to herself & others; telling her how much I am altered; to have no fear of me in future, etc., which might be ambiguous & turned against us. Yet there is nothing, I think, I could not manage to explain away to warm friendship if I had the letter before me & was obliged to defend myself.

This journal entry constitutes important and incontrovertible evidence that lesbians disguised their writings so that their sentiments could be ‘explained away’ as part of a non-sexual ‘friendship’ tradition. If someone in 1825 can self-consciously avoid giving the appearance of being a ‘flaming’ lesbian (‘flaming’, as in ‘flaming faggot’, was a slang word for ‘flagrant’ from about 1780), then ‘passing’ must have been part of lesbian practice for at least a generation or two earlier, well into the period for which we supposedly have ‘no evidence’ other than the literature of ‘romantic love’ between female friends. Surely we can no longer dismiss documents expressing ‘warm friendship’ without carefully considering the possibility of self-censorship.

There are probably a vast number of queer love letters which have not survived because (a) personal papers of unmarried persons without younger heirs are destroyed immediately when personal effects are cleared up; and (b) they are destroyed prior to marriage. Many such letters were brought to light in the 1950s as a result of police investigation and helped to convict many men of various homosexual offences (Higgins 1996). John Reynolds, one of the RAF airmen involved in the prosecution of Lord Montague of Beaulieu, Peter Wildeblood (diplomatic correspondent to the Daily Mail) and Michael Pitt-Rivers in 1953/4, had written a letter describing one of his friends as ‘my husband dear’, which did not help when Lord Montague’s letters to ‘Dear Johnny’ were read out in court. Upon conviction of these men for indecency (with boy scouts and RAF men), Michael Davidson, foreign correspondent for the Observer who was over-fond of young men, ‘destroyed two suitcases of letters, diaries and photographs of friends. He was far from alone. Late-night burning of incriminating material occurred far and wide’ (Spencer 1995). In an unrelated case, Lieutenant Colonel Julius Caesar, sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in 1954, had written to Private John Everton ‘I am dreadfully afraid that I am desperately in love with you. . . . Please, please, try to make chances to meet me privately somewhere. I want you so much . . . Burn this without fail.’ I have no doubt that this closing injunction was obeyed by many persons, and that much documentation of queer love has been thrown upon the flames of prudence. One man who saw Victim in 1961 recorded in his diary (cited in Bourne 1996): ‘Victim – and for me a lesson in how not to become one. . . . It was letters which exposed the Wilde–Douglas affair, and in this film it was the same. I’ll never commit anything to paper in that aspect, and destroy all I may receive.’

The dearth of material for British lesbian life in the 1930s (and the stigmatization of spinsters as lesbians) may be owing to the prosecution of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness for obscenity in 1928. In that year the poet Charlotte Mew burned most of her work, almost certainly an attempt to destroy all evidence of her lesbianism, and then killed herself. In the 1930s well-known lesbians wrote very circumspect autobiographies (e.g. Viscountess Rhondda, Cicely Hamilton, Elizabeth Robins), and ‘One of Constance Maynard’s executrices apparently destroyed a particularly revealing portion of her intimate diaries’ (Lesbian History Group 1989, 1993). Ann Bannon, author of the Beebo Brinker series of lesbian novels in the 1950s, destroyed all the correspondence she received from women in response to her novels for fear that it would be discovered by her children.


Misconstruction

A serious problem for lesbian and gay history is the deliberate effort by scholars to disguise the queer matter in historical documents. This has been a common practice since medieval times, when Latin translators of Arabic and Greek writings on ancient medicine simply deleted passages detailing homosexuality, e.g. Prose Salernitan Questions around 1200 draws on the ancient Problemata but ‘omits the passage dealing with pathic homosexuality’ (Greenberg 1988). Thomas Aquinas quoted a passage from Aristotle about homosexuality but deliberately suppressed the passage in which Aristotle says that some homosexual urges are determined ‘by nature’, which would have contradicted Aquinas’s argument that sodomy is a (sinful) choice rather than something innate. Some medieval lais were edited, and homosexual references were suppressed or turned around to become unfavourable references (Greenberg 1988). Matteo Ricci was so distressed at the prevalence of male prostitution in Peking that when he translated the Ten Commandments for the Chinese in 1584, the commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ was replaced by ‘Thou shalt not do depraved, unnatural, or filthy things.’

Boswell’s (1994) survey of the nineteenth-century translations of the office of same-sex union is illuminating: Goar, a major scholar, translates the operative Greek term adelphopoia as spiritualis fraternitas despite the fact that ‘the word for "spiritual" does not occur in a single manuscript title for the ceremony’, and another major scholar, Jean Frcek, translated the Old Church Slavonic term as fraternité adoptive, ‘though no word occurring in or relating to the ceremony in any version in any language justifies introducing the concept "adoptive"’. Boswell offers convincing evidence that ‘soul mates’ is a much more accurate translation than ‘spiritual brotherhood’ or ‘adoptive brother’, though mainstream scholars still find this view provocative.

Horatio Alger Jr. (1832–99), the American novelist famous for his boys’ stories promoting the American dream of success, early in his life was driven out of town for having sex with boys, evidence of which was suppressed and not rediscovered until 1971. Prior to that date, and even since that date, the biographies of ‘the great American’ simply created bogus relationships with women, complete with detailed episodes that were wholly fictitious. For domestic consumption Alger was a successful heterosexual, when in fact the great love of his life was a ten-year-old Chinese boy named Wing.

Women’s feelings for other women are regularly trivialized in biographies, while their feelings for men are exaggerated. To dismiss the love of Charlotte Brontë and Ellen Nussey as an ‘adolescent crush’, as has been done, is to define adolescence ‘as a somewhat protracted period continuing until the age of 25 or so’ (Miller 1989). Similarly, ‘Octavia Hill’s passionate friendship with Sophia Jex-Blake was written out of mid-twentieth-century biographies, while a hasty engagement which lasted exactly one day was elevated into the romance of her life, with Hill holding the young man’s memory "sacred to her heart till the end of her life". In fact she lived for the last 35 years of her life with another woman, Harriot Yorke’ (Lesbian History Group, 1989, 1993). The Lesbian History Group attributes this ‘normalizing’ process to the negative associations of the word ‘lesbian’ – an insult, a label of abnormal perversion or pitiful handicap, a description solely of a sexual practice rather than a cultural universe. We should also recognize that there is a well-established economic market for heterosexual history, and only a niche-market for gay history.

The year 1996 marked the centenary of the death of Frederic Leighton, and the Royal Academy of Arts – of which he was President from 1878–96 – held a major exhibition of his works in February–April. I suppose it was too much to expect the Royal Academy to endeavour to bring to light proof of Leighton’s long-suspected homosexuality, but I burst into laughter when I read the catalogue entry describing his sculpture The Sluggard, which acknowledged the extraordinary languor and sensuous beauty of this young male nude, but dismissed it as evidence of Leighton’s ‘suppressed homosexuality’ because ‘for Leighton this represented the ideal’! Can it really be possible that (heterosexual) critics do not recognize the link between the real and the ideal? Or do their mental faculties just seize up when faced by queer tangibility? Art historians probably are not really blind to the obvious – they just refuse to countenance it. Andrée Hayum in her 1976 biography of Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, ‘Il Sodoma’, claimed that ‘speculations about his private personality’ – including the source of his nickname ‘The Sodomite’– were ‘essentially fruitless’ and ‘an extraneous issue’. Extraneous to whom? It is for historians such as these that we require Saslow’s excellent survey of Ganymede in the Renaissance (1986) to prove what is self-evident: that the image of Ganymede was ‘an artistic vehicle’ for the homoeroticism of artists or their patrons.

Mainstream critics and historians would rather do anything than call a queer spade a queer spade. Jason Wilson in the introduction to his 1995 translation of the natural historian Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey has invented the curious term ‘male-scientific friendships’ to describe Humboldt’s love of other men, so as to site it within the tradition of friendships among colleagues in scientific professions – but this hardly accounts for the fact that all of Humboldt’s protégés and travelling companions were handsome young men. Wilson acknowledges that ‘Humboldt deliberately suppressed his private life. He burned or destroyed many letters in order to further efface himself from biographers.’ Many historians regularly refrain from reaching what seems to me to be the obvious conclusion: not that certain individuals have suppressed their homosexuality, but that they have suppressed evidence of their homosexuality. Humboldt died in 1859, one decade before ‘the homosexual’ was allegedly ‘invented’; but Hirschfeld gathered reminisces of him from people still living in 1914, who recalled his participation in the gay subculture of Berlin.


Ethnography

George Caitlin, who observed and described and painted the North American Indian berdache in the 1830s, concluded his account by saying ‘I should wish that it might be extinguished before it be more fully recorded.’ Such a sentiment was not rare; surely many observers refrained from recording details that shocked their European sensibilities.

Greenberg (1988) has an excellent appendix outlining the methodological problems in anthropological research on homosexuality which amount to a conspiracy of censorship: anthropologists often ignored the subject for fear of being suspected as participants themselves; they feared not being allowed to return to a research site; they were simply obtuse. As late as 1980 one anthropologist in New Guinea, despite published reports going back to the nineteenth century about ritualized sodomy in the area, ‘Even though he saw a good deal of same-sex physical contact, . . . simply assumed that homosexuality could not be a part of the culture.’ It is impossible to gather evidence of indigenous attitudes to homosexuality that has not been tainted by negative Western attitudes: ‘For many cultures, sexual mores have been deeply affected by prolonged and extensive exposure to the sermons of missionaries, the lectures of school teachers, and the offhand comments of traders, tourists, and government agents.’ An anthropologist in the 1950s found that among the Winnebago, ‘the berdache was at one time a highly honored and respected person, but . . . the Winnebago had become ashamed of the custom because the white people thought it was amusing or evil’. If homosexuality is unrecorded for some 60 per cent of known indigenous societies we must ask if that is because contact with Western moral puritanism has exterminated it.

Bleys (1996) has established that the general tendency among nineteenth-century ethnographers was to focus exclusively on passive, effeminate roles and to dismiss the sexuality of their active partners or equal-age partners as merely ‘circumstantial’; indigenous behavior that did not consolidate the Western preconception that homosexuality was a feature only of passive or cross-gender or age-structured roles was simply ignored: ‘When these conditions were not fulfilled, observers were reluctant to acknowledge that, in these cases too, same-sex praxis may spring from an inborn drive or propensity.’ Literally scores of native terms were translated indiscriminately as ‘sodomite’ or ‘hermaphrodite’ or ‘catamite’ depending on the anthropologists’ prejudgment about what constitutes the homosexual, and without offering detailed observations that would help us sort out the semantics today; the Hawaiian aikane were literally ‘man-fucking men’ whose relations were neither age-structured nor gender-structured, yet they were grouped by early observers under the category of cross-gender roles.

Boswell (1994) reviews the many attempts made by anthropologists to ‘explain away’ the phenomenon of same-sex union, adelphopoia. Giovanni Tamassia in 1886 (L’Affratellamento), discussed it solely as a folk custom of ‘artificial kinship’; since then, ‘blood brotherhood’ and ‘collateral adoption’ ‘have become the standard anthropological sleights of hand to obscure its more troubling aspects’. Boswell accuses the modern pro-gay anthropologist Gilbert Herdt of himself representing homosexuality among the Sambia as merely a ‘phase’, ‘apparently hoping to placate the dogmatic school of history known as "social constructionism"’.

When the ‘pathological’ discourse was being consolidated by the medical and criminological professions, the contrary views of anthropologists that ‘uranism’ could be found in quite normal and healthy peoples were suppressed. For example, when the Dutch criminal anthropologist Arnold Aletrino presented a paper sympathetic to homosexuals in Amsterdam in 1901, his colleagues and the President of the Congress prevented his views being publicized by the press. One of the reasons why social constructionists are able to assert that homosexuality did not become a subject of discourse until the later nineteenth century is because homosexual discourse preceding that date had been suppressed and censored.


Suppression of research

The increasing difficulty of maintaining effective censorship from the late nineteenth century has led to the illusion that the subject of homosexuality is ‘modern’, because only in recent times do we know so much about it. But in fact homosexuality was certainly a subject of discourse from the mid-eighteenth century in Europe. Johann Matthias Gesner gave a scholarly lecture on Socrates’ homosexuality in 1752, though the text, Socrates Sanctus Paederasta, was not published until 1769, eight years after his death, and not in Germany, but in Utrecht where there was greater freedom of the press. From the 1750s in Germany and from the 1780s in the Netherlands there were several studies of Greek pederasty, and theories about ancient Indo-European pederasty were developed in the early nineteenth century. Prior to this, the late-medieval and early Renaissance studies of Platonic love and friendship are arguably self-censored or disguised studies of homosexuality. Homosexual apologetics existed centuries before the supposed ‘invention’ of homosexuality, but have never achieved high profile precisely because they formed part of the ‘secret history’ tradition.

The Utilitarian philosopher and law reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) wrote some 500 manuscript pages on the place of homosexuality in history, using common sense to counter the view that would dominate the nineteenth century:

The Greeks knew the difference between love and friendship as well as we – they had distinct terms to signify them by: it seems reasonable therefore to suppose that when they say love they mean love, and when they say friendship only they mean friendship only. And with regard to Xenophon and his master, Socrates, and his fellow-scholar Plato, it seems more reasonable to believe them to have been addicted to this taste when they or any of them tell us so in express terms than to trust to the interpretations, however ingenious and however well-intended, of any men who write at this time of day, when they tell us it was no such thing.

Bentham’s extensive defence of homosexuality in 1785 – arguing that it is neither unnatural nor immoral – was never published because he feared being branded a sodomite himself; as he noted in marginal jottings: ‘To other subjects it is expected that you sit down cool: but on this subject if you let it be seen that you have not sat down in a rage you have betrayed yourself at once’ (Crompton 1978). Among Bentham’s papers are ‘fair copy’, polished essays on this subject, obviously intended for circulation and perhaps sent to colleagues in France: his writings should therefore be treated as part of Enlightenment ‘discourse’.

Historical research in southern Europe is still hampered by Mediterranean machismo: the censorship imposed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is compounded in modern times by ‘a certain reluctance by Italian historians to enter "obscure zones of a special character"‘ (Dall’Orto, ‘Italy’, EH). In Latin America anything that seems to legitimate homosexuality in print is censored as an apology for vice.

Kinsey’s findings on the widespread practice of homosexuality provoked a massive reaction from university professors, Congressmen and religious leaders, led particularly by Henry Van Dusen of the Union Theological Seminary who was also on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation which funded Kinsey. Because of the outcry, the National Research Council requested the American Statistical Association to examine Kinsey’s work. Though the ASA eventually praised Kinsey’s methods and findings, the examination took many years, during which time Kinsey’s financial backing disappeared. He had been effectively silenced, and never again has sexual research on this scale been attempted.

Public access to books dealing with homosexuality has been restricted until recent times, and the books themselves stigmatized so as to render them untouchable. When Judy Grahn (1984) in 1961, at the age of twenty-one, tried to investigate the subject of homosexuals and lesbians in a library in Washington, DC, ‘The books on such a subject, I was told by indignant, terrified librarians unable to say aloud the word homosexual, were locked away. They showed me a wire cage where the "special" books were kept in a jail for books. Only professors, doctors, psychiatrists, and lawyers for the criminally insane could see them, check them out, hold them in their hands.’


Censorship of literature

When ONE Institute of Homophile Studies gave its first course on Homosexuality in History in 1957, the first thing they discovered when preparing the course was that ancient classical texts had been inaccurately translated, that names and genders were transposed, that behaviour had been deliberately obscured and unpleasant facts evaded through mistranslation, that even Plutarch was censored. After almost fifty years of offering such courses, the Institute still has to emphasize that the essential working tools for homophile studies are ‘bias-free translations of texts from other languages and periods. . . . Whether done consciously or through inability to believe that a text in question meant what it said, meanings have been subverted’ (Legg 1994). Some of the euphemisms used in such inaccurate translations are the words ‘lewd, weak, dissolute, companion, favorite, friend, bohemian, decadent, fop, dandy, Arcadian, epicene, thigh, groin’ (Legg 1994). Hinsch (1990) criticizes David Hawkes for a modern translation of Long Yang zhi xing as ‘Lord Long-yang’s vice’ because the Chinese word xing is always a positive word, and denotes ‘joy, merriment, passion, desire, and appetite’ rather than ‘vice’.

Of course homosexual themselves have taken a lot of trouble to disguise the meaning of their writings. The homosexual literary tradition has employed many strategies of camouflage and concealment that require decoding, and has also used deliberately cryptographic language in order to convey secret messages. Giovanni Dall’Orto has described a genre of early sixteenth-century Italian poetry created by Francesco Berni, a priest once imprisoned for a year and a half in a monastery because of a homosexual scandal, who composed ostensibly innocuous poems for boys which were actually obscene when decoded. Even in his private letters he employed a secret language so that ostensibly quite ordinary correspondence secretly conveys a request that his friends send him boys. Many authors (presumably gay) wrote this ‘Bernesque’ poetry employing double meanings in which, for example, a chamber pot symbolized the anus or a needle symbolized the penis; asciutto, meaning ‘dry’, stood for sodomy (often called the dry fuck), monte, ‘mountain’, signified the anus, and in a more convoluted manner tagliare, ‘to cut’, meant ‘to sodomize’, from the tagliere or round chopping board which symbolized the anus. This secret language has not been the subject of any intensive scholarship, and no key has been worked out.

Writers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took enormous delight in being clever, as illustrated by the complex allegories of Edmund Spenser and the metaphysical poetry of John Donne. In 1993 eighty-five-year-old Elsie Duncan-Jones revealed that when she was helping Dame Helen Gardiner compile her 1965 edition of The Elegies and Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, she suggested to Helen Gardiner that the real ‘marriage of souls’ celebrated in Donne’s poem ‘The Anniversarie’ was that of Donne and John King, chaplain to Sir Thomas Egerton, for whom Donne worked as a secretary. But Helen Gardiner’s response to this interpretation was: ‘Forget it.’ That is still the attitude of many English teachers and literary historians even today.

I believe that the vast corpus of pastoral-mythological literature of the Renaissance period has a homoerotic ambience not by the accident of imitating the ancients, but because the references to Corydon and Hylas are deliberately coded (Norton 1974). A vast corpus of late nineteenth-century pederastic poetry employed code words such as ‘earnest’ to mean boy-love and used simple acrostic techniques to spell the names of their boyfriends in their verse (d’Arch Smith 1970). Modern homosexual intellectuals have always rather enjoyed establishing contact with one another through the use of coded language. Henry James recognized that John Addington Symonds was simpatico and introduced himself by alluding to the love that dare not speak its name:

I sent [my article] to you because it was a constructive way of expressing the good will I felt for you in consequence of what you had written about the land of Italy – and of intimating to you, somewhat dumbly, that I am a sympathetic reader. I nourish for the said Italy and unspeakably tender passion, and your pages always seemed to say to me that you were one of the small number of people who love it as much as I do . . . for it seemed to me that the victims of a common passion should exchange a look. (Summers 1995)

The censorship and bowdlerization of erotic literature is of course an established fact, and I shall not belabour the point that queer erotic literature has been suppressed. What I wish to focus upon is the anti-queer substitution for the original texts. Heterosexualization is a very curious operation to which only queer history has been subjected. Not only are queer details deleted from the lives of notable people, but heterosexual details are gratuitously invented for them. In a comedy written two centuries after her death, Sappho was portrayed as the lover of the sailor Phaon, a figment of the heteroerotic imagination made popular by Ovid. Sappho’s alleged marriage to Cercylas (cercos, penis) of Andros (‘city of men’) is a patent fabrication: ‘Generations of classical scholars abused these bits of ancient wit to construct the preposterous image of a heterosexual Sappho whose unconventional [i.e. lesbian] love was a legend fabricated by slander or even by misogyny, and their falsehoods continue to be parroted in standard reference works’ (Evelyn Gettone, ‘Sappho’, EH). In Vasco da Lucena’s medieval French translation of the ancient Roman History of Alexander the Great by Quintus Curtius Rufus, Alexander’s boyfriend the eunuch Bagoas appears in both text and illumination as a beautiful young woman: Vasco says the change was made ‘to avoid a bad example’. Saslow (1989, 1990) has traced the suppression of same-sex imagery in seventeenth-century art, e.g. Rubens’s copy of a painting by Titian transforms embracing male cupids into heterosexual couples, and Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo omits the pederastic section of the life by Poliziano upon which it was based. The ancient story of the same-sex love of Polyeuct and Nearchos was transformed into a heterosexual triangle including Polyeuct’s wife ‘Paulina’ by Corneille in the seventeenth century and by Cammarano in the nineteenth century, a situation which ‘is utterly wanting in the early texts’ (Boswell 1994). In other words, on one hand it is claimed that homosexual love is not universal and therefore we need not pay much attention to it, and on the other hand homosexual lovers are disguised as heterosexual lovers because the love they express is clearly meaningful and relevant for all men and women.


Film censorship

The suppression of queer themes in the most public forms of art – the theatre, television and the cinema – has been amply demonstrated (Russo 1981, Bourne 1996, Howes 1993). From about 1930 until 1961 the Hays Code, the voluntary self-censorship code of the American film industry, specifically forbade any representations of either male or female homosexuality. This resulted not only in indirection, subterfuge and camouflage, but in the rewriting of history. ‘Hollywood rewrote original scripts, and even history, to ensure the exclusion of lesbian material – as witnessed, for example, by the 1950 We Three heterosexualized version of Lillian Hellman’s play, The Children’s Hour, or Garbo’s portrayal of a heterosexual romance to explain the abdication of the Queen of Sweden in Queen Christina’ (Kitzinger 1993). Similarly for the emperor of China: ‘Although copious evidence exists to confirm the homosexuality of Puyi, final ruler of the Qing, the creative heterosexual love scenes in the acclaimed film The Last Emperor have created a lasting impression in both Asia and the West that Puyi zestfully took full advantage of his female concubines’ (Hinsch 1990). In the 1940s film The Red Shoes, Diaghilev’s boyfriend Nijinsky is transformed into a woman, played by Moira Shearer. During this period, whenever a novel was adapted for the screen, the gay character was either straightened out or the gender was reversed. In 1952 Brian Desmond Hurst abandoned his dream of producing a film about Ludwig II because ‘the Bavarian Royal Family didn’t want any mention whatsoever of the King’s homosexuality so it became pointless to continue with it’ (cited by Bourne 1996). Even theatrical and nightclub acts were censored through the 1920s and 1930s; female impersonation and pansy acts were prohibited, cabarets had their licenses withdrawn if performers sang campy songs by Cole Porter, and theatre chains nationwide prohibited use of the words fairy and pansy in vaudeville routines (Chauncey 1994). It really is not until the 1960s that film censorship ceases to be a serious problem, though filmmakers had to proceed cautiously. John Trevelyan, Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors, in 1962 advised Bryan Forbes regarding Scene 404 of The L-Shaped Room (cited by Bourne 1996): ‘When Mavis talks about the love of her life, we learn from the photograph that this love was for another woman. . . . I suggest that you shoot the scene in such a way as to make the omission of the photograph, if considered desirable, something which could be done without spoiling the scene.’


Secret history

A modern history of homosexuality published in Hong Kong in 1964 by Weixingshi Guanzhaizhu is appropriately titled Zhongguo tongxinglian mishi (The secret history of Chinese homosexuality). Secrecy has always been an important feature of queer history and culture, partly because sexual relations are usually very private affairs, whether they be the sexual rituals of religious mysteries that must be kept secret from the uninitiated, or the ‘secret games’ played between the Chinese Emperor Jing (reigned 156–141 BC) and his favourite Zhou Ren, to cite but one example from hundreds. Homosexual relations are frequently forbidden by a hostile society and therefore become especially secretive, even ‘furtive’. When queer culture began to be driven underground in America in the 1930s, surreptitious communication networks were developed; for example, ‘Science-fiction clubs attracted some, who corresponded with one another through the personal columns of the clubs’ newsletters’ (Licata 1980, 1978). The Mattachine Foundation was formed in 1953 with secret cells along the Communist model so as to avoid widescale discovery in the case of infiltration by outsiders, and an article in the Mattachine Review in 1955 explained that the society was named after late medieval societies of ‘unmarried townsmen who never performed in public unmasked’. In premodern times queers were said to gather in ‘secret synods’ – which historians should not dismiss as homophobic rhetoric. In more recent times there have certainly been secret homosexual societies, such as the Order of Chaeronea (named after the spot where the Sacred Band of Thebes fell) organized by George Cecil Ives (Weeks 1977). In America there were several semi-secret gay rights organizations about which little is known, such as the Sons of Hamidy around the turn of the century which was reorganized in 1934, the Knights of the Clock formed by the gay black man Merton Bird in 1949 to combat homophobia and racism, and the Cloistered Loyal Order of Conclaved Knights of Sophistacracy in 1951–52 (Licata 1980, 1978). It is not widely known that the largest homophile society in the world in 1970 was the Society of Anubis, a semi-secret organization with a thousand members and a ten-acre club site in the San Gabriel Valley, interested primarily in social and community programmes (Legg 1994).

Robert Martin, founder of the Gay Academic Union in America, in an interview in Gay News following the publication of his book The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, observed that

In the teaching of English literature there is a kind of accepted tradition that an author’s gayness comes under the heading of gossip, that it has nothing to do with the work. It’s this English thing that gayness is an amusing eccentricity, you chat about it over tea, entre nous, but otherwise it should be avoided. I see it, and resent it, in the works of someone like A. L. Rowse who treats it like telling tales. [Reference to the Cambridge historian’s Homosexuals in History]

While I sympathize with Martin’s dislike of the somewhat smutty contextualization of such knowledge, thank goodness for gossips, without whom queer historians would hardly get anywhere in our research. ‘Secret history’ – that long tradition of scandalous memoirs and political smears – is essential to the compilation of queer history. Classic examples include Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; Luca Ombrosi’s eighteenth-century Vita dei Medici sodomiti, biographical gossip about the last two rulers of the house of Medici; The Private Life of the King of Prussia, in which Voltaire reveals the homosexual relations of Frederick the Great (1712–86) and reprints Frederick’s Le Palladion, a privately printed defence of homosexuality, which Voltaire successfully smuggled out of Prussia although Frederick’s agents had his luggage searched.

The chroniques scandaleuse of eighteenth-century France have many references to secret gay and lesbian scandals. Such books are too often dismissed as libellous fictions, but they draw heavily upon contemporary gossip and insider information from court spies. Voluminous notes appended to the anonymous pederastic poem Don Leon (published sometime before 1853) help to document queer life in the early nineteenth century, while Henry Spencer Ashbee’s po-faced Bibliography of Prohibited Books (1877–85) helps us do the same for the mid-nineteenth century. Books dealing with curiosae are invaluable for queer historians.

Lesbian clubs – the Order of Anandrynes – are supposed to have flourished in Paris in the 1780s and are fully described in several secret histories such as Hic et Haec ou l’Eleve des RR.PP. Jesuites etc. (Berlin, 1798), La Cauchoise, etc. (London, 1788), Le Petit-Fils d’Hercule (1788), L’histoire de la secte anandryne, and Mairobet’s L’apologie de la Secte Anandryne and his more notorious L’espion Anglais (1779). Members supposedly included even married women such as the Marquise Terracenes, the wife of the Attorney General, and several actresses such as Mlle Arnould. Such ‘histories’ are imaginatively embellished and salacious, but the real reason why the leads they contain have not been seriously followed up is because lesbian and gay history is considered to be merely gossip not worth pursuing. To say that we know hardly anything about lesbian history, and then to say that gossip is not worth investigating, that it is pornographic ‘literature’ rather than history, is a dual bind that ensures that queers will always remain hidden from history.

Queer historians cannot afford to be as ‘strict’ as mainstream historians, who seldom allow much weight to anonymous works (as many secret histories are, if not pseudonymous) patently motivated by political animosity or private malice. But a good working hypothesis is that secret history is about 90 per cent accurate. The fact that defamatory accusations occur in the context of a political attack does not necessarily mean that the basic facts are untrue, only that they have been embellished so as to show the most negative aspect. Everyone who works in the news media knows a great many more facts than they are willing to publish, partly because of libel laws. When the British Government failed to equalize the age of consent for homosexual men and lowered it only to eighteen, demonstrators outside the Houses of Parliament chanted the names of alleged queers in John Major’s Cabinet; though done for the benefit of the television and newspaper reporters present, the chanting was not reported or broadcast. This kind of information is widely known and widely hinted at. Peter Tatchell’s (1996) article provocatively titled ‘Have You Slept With Michael Portillo?’ begins, ‘At least 15 gay MPs, including two cabinet ministers, have voted against equality since 1994.’

The homosexuality of many celebrated people is an ‘open secret’ while they are living, though it may not reach print until after their death. As the Observer commented when reporting on the disposal of the ‘155 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures of the male nude’ from the estate of Rudolf Nureyev at the end of 1995: it ‘tells us much about the dancer that was never made public while he was alive’. A kind of secret history finally becomes public knowledge at the death by violence of people not always widely known to have been gay: the suicide of Sir Hector MacDonald in 1903; the drowning, apparently as a lovers’ pact of joint suicide, of Rupert Buxton and Michael Barrie in 1915 (one of the boys who influenced Peter Pan); the murder of García Lorca in 1936; the suicide of Alan Turing in 1954; the murder of Joe Orton by his lover in 1967; the murder of Marc Blitzstein by a hustler in 1968; the murder of Ramon Novarro by two hustlers in 1968; the hari-kari of Yukio Mishima in 1970; the suicides of Hart Crane, William Inge, Freidrich Alfred Krupp, F. O. Matthiessen, Charlotte Mew, Alfred Redl, Renée Vivien, James Whale, Virginia Woolf and many others. In recent decades, many rumours have been confirmed by death from AIDS.

A study of suicides (and murders disguised as suicide) in the past would no doubt turn up much queer material. A footman in the service of the Prince of Wales shot himself shortly after the Vere Street raid and trials in 1810, and a manservant of the Duke of Cumberland, the future King of Hanover, was discovered in the Duke’s bedroom in St James’s Palace with his throat cut. Cumberland said it was suicide, but the rumour was that he had killed the servant, who had discovered the Duke’s homosexual relations with his valet, who in the meantime had vanished. Cumberland took a close interest in the Vere Street case, and was in the Newgate press-yard to witness the hanging of two of the convicted men in 1811. When the rumour about Cumberland was published in 1813 the journalist was sentenced to fifteen months in prison; when it was published again in 1832, another journalist was sentenced to six months (Norton 1992). Further contemporary details of the affair appeared in 1861, in the gossipy Autobiography of Miss Cornelia Knight, Lady Companion to the Princess Charlotte of Wales.

To refuse to credit gossip and rumour merely on the grounds that they are gossip and rumour, is to seriously undervalue the validity of any sexual information that is not allowed a place in the conventional public record. There is no legitimate reason why the historian of private lives should not rely upon private records, of which secret histories are a prime example. The more secret the life, the more secret will be the source that reveals that life. It is imperative for the queer historian not to succumb to the mainstream prejudice against secret history, for secret history is queer history.

It is the duty of the queer historian to make public that which was private, to reveal that which has been suppressed. In so far as censorship is an incontrovertible fact, and the prejudicial rewriting of history/literature is a demonstrable fact, it seems to me that after we have recovered as many facts as possible, the still-existing gaps have to be filled in with a pro-queer interpretation rather than an apologetic admission of defeat. The ‘nature of the evidence’ is not so much that the evidence is limited, but that the signs of suppression are plainly evident. What I want to suggest on the basis of all the above is that the queer historian should not despair when confronted by the charge that we really do not have the ‘genital evidence’ to prove incontrovertibly that someone was queer, for we often have abundant evidence of suppression which in itself is sufficient confirmation of the likelihood of a queer interpretation. Queer historians should never apologize for basing queer history on context rather than text, on socio-cultural rather than sexual behaviour, on broad ‘queer’ paradigms rather than narrow ‘homosexual’ ones.


References

Bleys, Rudi C., The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-male Sexual Behavior outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination 1750-1918. London: Cassell, 1996.
Boswell, John, The Marriage of Likeness: Same-sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe. London: HarperCollins, 1995 (orig. pub. 1994).
Bourne, Stephen, Brief Encounters: Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema 1930-1971. London: Cassell, 1996.
Bronski, Michael, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
Conner, Randolph P. Lundschen, David Hatfield Sparks and Mariya Sparks, Encyclopaedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit. London: Cassell, 1997.
Crompton, Louis (ed.), `Jeremy Bentham's Essay on "Paederasty"', Journal of Homosexuality, 3 (1978), 383-405; 4 (1978), 91-107.
Dall’Orto, ‘Italy’, Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne R. Dynes (Chicago and London: St James Press, 1990).
d’Arch Smith, Timothy, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English `Uranian' Poets from 1889 to 1930. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Donoghue, Emma, Passions Between Women: British lesbian culture 1668-1801. London: Scarlet Press, 1993.
Eisenberg, ‘Lorca’, Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne R. Dynes (Chicago and London: St James Press, 1990).
Elliman, Michael, and Roll, Frederick, The Pink Plaque Guide to London. London: GMP, 1986.
Faderman, Lillian (ed.), Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994.
Evelyn Gettone, ‘Sappho’, Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne R. Dynes (Chicago and London: St James Press, 1990).
Grahn, Judy, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds, updated and expanded edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
Greenberg, David F., The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Higgins, Patrick, Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Post-war Britain. London: Fourth Estate, 1996.
Hinsch, Bret, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1990.
Howes, Keith, Broadcasting It: An Encyclopaedia of Homosexuality on Film, Radio and TV in the UK 1924-1993. London: Cassell, 1993.
Johnson, Pam, `Edith Simcox and heterosexism in biography: a lesbian-feminist exploration', in Lesbian History Group, Not a Passing Phase (1989, 1993), 55-76.
Kitzinger, Jenny and Kitzinger, Celia, `"Doing it": Representations of lesbian sex', in Griffin, Outwrite (1993), 9-25.
Klaich, Dolores, Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974 (London: New English Library, 1975).
Lauritsen, John, and Thorstad, David, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935). New York: Times Change Press, 1974.
Legg, W. Dorr (ed.), Homophile Studies in Theory and Practice. San Francisco: ONE Institute Press and GLB Publishers, 1994.
Lesbian History Group (ed.), Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History 1840-1985. London: Women's Press, 1989, repr. 1993.
Licata, Salvatore J., `The homosexual rights movement in the United States', in Licata and Petersen, The Gay Past (1985), 161-89 (orig. pub. 1980; partly based upon a doctorial dissertation of 1978).
Miller, Elaine, `Through all changes and through all chances: The relationship of Ellen Nussey and Charlotte Brontë', in Lesbian History Group, Not a Passing Phase (1989, repr. 1993), 29-54.
Norton, Rictor, The Homosexual Literary Tradition: An Intepretation. New York: Revisionist Press, 1974.
Norton, Rictor, Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830. London: Gay Men's Press, 1992.
Russo, Vito, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. New York: Harper & Row, rev. ed. 1987 (orig. 1981).
Saslow, James M., Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986.
Saslow, James M., `Homosexuality in the Renaissance: Behavior, identity, and artistic expression', in Duberman et al., Hidden from History (1989), pp. 90-105.
Spencer, Colin, Homosexuality: A History. London: Fourth Estate, 1995.
Tatchell, Peter, `Have you slept with Michael Portillo?', Thud, 29 November 1996, p. 8.
Thadani, Giti, Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India. London: Cassell, 1996.
Weatherby, W. J., James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. London: Michael Joseph, 1989.
Weeks, Jeffrey, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. London: Quartet, 1977.

"The Suppression of Lesbian and Gay History", 12 February 2005, updated 5 April 2005
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Thursday, June 16, 2005

   Medieval Basis of Modern Law
Essays by Rictor Norton on the Historical Roots of Homophobia from Ancient Israel to the End of the Middle Ages
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5 The Medieval Basis of Modern Law
Although the Middle Ages, extending from about the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, is not a single cohesive epoch, the copious citation of trials and laws would merely accumulate evidence of homophobia rather than give us insight into its causes. Throughout this period antihomosexual attitudes and stereotypes changed only in so far as they became more rigid, and were used increasingly to bolster certain social institutions such as the papacy and state governments. The real reason for the persecution of the Templars — the most powerful crusading order of its time — derived from political and economic hostility, greed and envy. The Church and the State defeated a real threat to their authority, confiscated their great wealth, and achieved an object lesson which struck terror into the hearts of much less powerful potential enemies. The unquestioned authority of Church and State was reaffirmed.

Since medieval asceticism was virtually identical with an obsession about sex, it was inevitable that charges of heresy and treason were always accompanied by charges of sexual deviation. Popular writers such as Dante used the same technique to attack their personal enemies. It is embarrassingly clear that certain men are condemned as sodomites in his Inferno, Canto XV, simply because it was a convenient smear tactic. Most of those literary men and clerks assigned to the seventh level of hell were Dante's political opponents; some, such as Guerra, Rusticucci, Aldrobandi, Latina, and perhaps Borsiere, were Guelfs, those responsible for Dante's exile from Florence.

Nor should we ignore the role that homophobia plays in the denunciation of intellectual nonconformity as well as religious heresy. D. Stanley-Jones has interestingly argued that a hidden battle over homosexuality paralleled the struggle to introduce Aristotle at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. Aristotle was tolerated and eventually accepted as the lesser of two evils as opposed to the Neoplatonic idealism and its associations with Platonic homosexuality. His argument is overstated in lieu of definite evidence, but those of us who have ever worked in an academic department know how effectively a homosexual rumour can damage a teacher's reputation without ever finding its way into a printed record. In any case, at a later date we do know that intellectual heretics such as the Averroists were condemned at the University of Paris and charged with sexual vices. The University of Paris played a major role in the trial of Joan of Arc for heresy, the main charge against her being that she dressed in men's clothing.

The most famous professor at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century was of course St Thomas Aquinas, who in his Summa Theologica established a rational basis for antihomosexual prejudice by defining the peccata contra naturam as the greatest sin of lust, specifically founded upon pleasure rather than procreation. He declared that "right reason" would always see procreation as the purpose of intercourse, and his philosophical condemnation of homosexuality became the precedent for all theological and intellectual discourse upon the subject. His views are the foundation for most modern declarations against homosexual acts by the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.

In order for the Church and State to maintain control over what they perceived as a disorderly population, medieval people were increasingly forbidden to deviate from the right path in anything. Religious orthodoxy, political orthodoxy, and intellectual orthodoxy were all firmly bolstered by the savage imposition of sexual orthodoxy. Medieval secular law almost universally deferred to ecclesiastic law, in ever more rigid sanctions.

In French legislation, in Beauvais sodomites were burned and their property confiscated; in Touraine-Angou, they were burned and their goods fell to the local baron. In Italy, in such cities as Perugia, Bologna, and Ancona, lay confraternities were created in 1233 and entrusted with the task of ensuring religious and sexual conformity with particular attention to sodomy. In Perugia, the law provided for 40 men (8 from each of the 5 sections of the city) to investigate and denounce sodomites. At Ascoli Piceno a bounty was given to those who denounced sodomites. At Pisa, people who harboured sodomites were fined 100 lire. At Bologna, whoever dwelt in a building where sodomy was practised might be burnt along with the house. In Sienna, if a sodomite could not pay the 300 lire fine for a first offence, he was suspended by his genitals.

In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence — where men were fond of sodomy to such an extent that the Germans dubbed pederasts Florenzer and the German word for sodomy became florenzen — the laws were precise with a vengeance: pederasts were castrated; consenting boys under 14 were beaten, driven naked through the city, and fine 50 lire; youths between 14 and 18 were fined 100 lire; houses or fields where the act took place were laid waste; men found in suspicious circumstances were presumed guilty; torture could be used to elicit a confession; conviction resulted in burning at the stake. The chief city officials could investigate, punish, and torture in any way they saw fit, and could ban suspects from the city; even songs about sodomy were fined 100 lire. It is not much of an exaggeration to call this a campaign of extermination, although the penalties were gradually lowered toward the end of the fifteenth century, and a fine was often sufficient for those enforcers of the law who were more interested in money than in morals.

The persecution of homosexuals was one of the tools in the repertoire of repressive measures by which the Inquisition strengthened the Church and contributed to the centralization of the papacy. Modern defenders of Christianity, who point out that canon law emphasized the punishment of homosexuals within the clergy, usually ignore the fact that the law confraternities and mendicant orders had a brief to seek out and punish homosexuals in all sectors of the community. The fact that that ecclesiastical authorities turned over the heretics / witches / sodomites to the civil authorities for execution or punishment was of course a pious hypocrisy. The Inquisition's spawn of lay confraternities and the mendicant orders established sexual oppression throughout much of northern Europe as well as Italy, and every secular law justified itself with references to the Church Fathers, Scripture, and the papal decrees. Burning at the stake, and laying waste the fields were sodomy occurred, were directly inspired by the Christian interpretation of the store of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the severity of the antihomosexual secular laws was a Judaeo-Christian inheritance.

The more specific detailing of homosexual crimes and punishments may be due to the rapid rise of political democratization in Italy, the reduced power of the oligarchy and the ethics of the petit bourgeois — though again, the Church's hatred and fear of material pleasures formed the basis of this morality.

The Penitential System had a devastating effect upon the laws of England (and consequently the laws of America). In 960 St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, began a moral reform of the Church and society, and under his influence ecclesiastical law became the core for civil law. Thus "penances" came to be enforced as "sentences" in the courts of law. The eleventh-century court of the Normal William Rufus and Robert Duke of Normandy was believed to have been rife with homosexuality, and the successor King Henry I set about cleaning it up. At a Council in London he laid down new penalties for "those who commit the shameful sin of sodomy, and especially for those who of their own free will take pleasure in doing so." Homosexual clerics were to be expelled from their orders, and homosexual laymen were to be deprived of their civil rights. Henry's orders were moderated by Archbishop (later Saint) Anselm (himself probably at least a repressed homosexual, to judge by his love letters to several young men), who directed the clergy to exercise discretion: "It must be remembered that this sin has been publicly committed to such an extent that it scarcely makes anyone blush, and that many have fallen into it in ignorance of its gravity."

The first significant reference to civil laws against homosexuality in England occurred in 1376, when the God Parliament unsuccessfully petitioned King Edward III to banish all "Lombard brokers" because they were usurers, and other foreign artisans and traders, particularly "Jews and Saracens," who were accused to having introduced "the too horrible vice which is not to be named" which they thought would destroy the realm. But it was not until 1533 that a statute was actually enacted against homosexuals. The Act (25 Henry 8, chapter 6) adjudges buggery a felony punishable by hanging until dead. The Buggery Act was piloted through Parliament by Thomas Cromwell in an effort to support Henry VIII's plan for reducing the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, as the first step towards depriving them of the right to try certain offences, which supported his policy of seizing Church property. Thus it was defined as a felony without benefit of clergy, which denied homosexuals in holy orders the right to be tried in the ecclesiastical courts, with the result that a conviction entailed loss of property to the Crown. The statute was re-enacted in 1536, 1539 and 1541 under Henry VIII; it was repealed in the first Parliament of Edward VI, along with all new felonies established by Henry VIII, but re-enacted in 1548 with amendments which no longer forfeited the felon's property to the Crown, and stipulations that indictments had to be framed within six months of the commission of the alleged act, and that no person who would benefit from the death of the accused could give evidence against him. With Mary's succession in 1553 it was repealed, along with many other statutes, thus giving jurisdiction back to the ecclesiastic courts. In 1563 it was revived by Queen Elizabeth I, in the harsh terms of the 1533 Act rather than with the amendments of 1548, because according to the Preamble, since the repeal of the Act in 1553 "divers ill disposed persons have been the more bold to commit the said most horrible and detestable Vice of Buggery aforesaid, to the high displeasure of Almighty God." Historical evidence fails to reveal any such excessive "boldness" for the years 1553 to 1563, and the only circumstance which prompted this severe reaction of Elizabeth's ministers was probably Elizabeth's desire to establish her claim to the throne as direct heir of Henry VIII: always politically astute, Elizabeth naturally re-enacted her father's laws rather than those of intermediate monarchs.




Gay men in England kill themselves after being arrested in 1707.
The immediate effect of the 1533 Act is unknown. It was on the books primarily as a symbolic token of the supremacy of the secular courts over the ecclesiastical courts. The prosecution of homosexuals was rare during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, and as far as one can discover, homosexual acts were not prosecuted with vigor until the second and third decades of the eighteenth century. The first recorded instance of any legal action was in 1541 (one of the years in which the Buggery Act was re-enacted), when Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton, was convicted of buggery; but strings were pulled in high places, and he was set free within a year. Homosexual prosecutions throughout the sixteenth century are sparse; in 1570 John Swan and John Lister, who were smiths and servants of the same master, with whom they lived, were charged with mutually consenting sodomy in Edinburgh, and in 1580 Matthew Heaton, a clergyman in East Grinstead, was prosecuted at the Sussex Assizes for a relationship with a boy in his parish. Fewer than a dozen prosecutions are recorded up through 1660, though this may reflect inadequate research into the subject, and a scarcity of extant legal records.

Convictions and punishments in other countries seem to have been more frequent and more severe. When William Lithgow visited Malta in 1616 he "saw a Spanish soldier and a Maltese boy burnt in ashes, for the public profession of sodomy," and by the end of the following day more than one hundred young men had fled to Sicily for fear of suffering a similar fate. In Geneva there were frequent prosecutions for sodomy from 1560 to 1610, linked to peaks of religious revival; a typical case was that of Pierre Canal, who in 1610 was tortured for high treason and murder, and before this inquisition was finished he had accused some 20 men of sodomy. Most of the sodomy charges throughout this period of Genevan history were levelled against French religious refugees. In Ireland, in 1640 John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, and his lover and tithe proctor John Child were convicted of buggery and hanged.

One of the tragedies of the New World is that it took over much of the legal system of the Old World. The Buggery Act of Henry VIII (as re-enacted by Elizabeth I in 1563) was adopted, often verbatim, by the original thirteen Colonies, and buggery was punished by death. The records of convictions are scarce, but they were not systematically recorded and are therefore difficult to discover. In 1624 Richard William Cornish, Master of the ship Ambrose, anchored in the James River, Virginia, was hanged for committing sodomy with the 29-year-old cabin boy William Couse. We know that sodomites were prosecuted in Plymouth Plantation in the 1640s. In 1646, in Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Plaine was executed for having committed sodomy with two persons in England before going over to the colonies; and in the same year, in Manhattan, New Netherland Colony, Jan Creoli, a negro, was sentenced to be choked to death and burned to ashes for a second offence of sodomy. In New Netherlands Colony there is a reference to attempted sodomy by N. G. Hillebrant or Hillebrantsen in 1658; and to alleged homosexual rape by J. Q. van der Linde (or Lijnden) in 1660 — he was tied in a sack and drowned in a river, while his partner was whipped and "sent to some other place." In 1674, in Massachusetts, a young man named Benjamin Goad was castrated for a crime which seems to have involved masturbating himself in front of, or with, other boys. Over the years, the death penalty was gradually replaced by whipping, imprisonment, castration, and forfeiture of all lands and goods, though in several states the death penalty was reintroduced.

Indeed the reform of antihomosexual laws has been exceedingly difficult despite the increasingly liberal attitudes of more recent times. The Judaeo-Christian abhorrence of homosexuality and the buggery laws are likely to be with us for a long time to come, exacerbated by the fear of AIDS. In March 1991 for example, during the debate in the parliament of the Isle of Man as to whether or not to decriminalize homosexual acts in accordance with the British Government and the European Convention on Human Rights, the majority of the Council of Ministers wished to retain their law against homosexuality. The argument of the select committee which rejected a proposal to bring their law into line with the rest of Western Europe pretends to be modern in its assertion that private homosexual activity should be banned in order to protect public health by preventing the spread of AIDS, but the vocabulary of prejudice has not changed over the centuries. It was summarized in the words of Mr Edgar Quine, opposed to reform of the Manx laws, who said "Dress it up as we will we are still talking about the unnatural offensive and abominable act of buggery."



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SOURCES: Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London and New York, 1955); Vern L. Bullough, "Heresy, Witchcraft, and Sexuality," Journal of Homosexuality, 1, 2 (1974), 183-201; Michael Goodich, "Sodomy in Ecclesiastical Law and Theory," Journal of Homosexuality, 1, 4 (1976), 427-34; Michael Goodish, "Sodomy in Medieval Secular Law," Journal of Homosexuality, 1, 3 (1976), 295-302; Montgomery H. Hyde, The Other Love (London: Heinemann, 1976); Jonathan Katz, Gay American History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976); John J. McNeil SJ, The Church and the Homosexual (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977); William E. Monter, "La sodomie à l'epoque moderne en Suisse romande," Annals: E. S. C., 29 (1974), 1023-33; Rictor Norton, "The Biblical Roots of Homophobia" and "A Rejoinder," in Towards a Theology of Gay Liberation, ed. Malcolm Macourt (London: SCM Press, 1977), pp. 39-46, 57-60.

Rictor Norton, A History of Homophobia, "The Medieval Basis of Modern Law" 15 April 2002 .
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   Gay Heretics and Witches
Essays by Rictor Norton on the Historical Roots of Homophobia from Ancient Israel to the End of the Middle Ages
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4 Gay Heretics and Witches

Buggery in Bulgaria
Throughout its early development, the Christian Church was under constant threat by the religious teachings of Mani, born in Persia in AD 216. His system, now called Manichaeism, held that evil was as powerful as goodness, contrary to the Christian view that the God of goodness was all-powerful, and it acquired an immense number of believers, no doubt because common sense tells us that evil is indeed a power to be reckoned with in the real world. During the early Middle Ages cults of this religion spread throughout Egypt, Asia Minor, Byzantium, northern Italy, southern France, the Balkans and Bulgaria.

Of greatest importance to us is the fact that many of these Manichaean groups permitted homosexual intercourse. They not only tolerated homosexuality, but went so far as to advocate its superiority over heterosexuality, on the grounds that the latter enslaved humanity in a chain of procreation which bound us to the earth and hence to Evil. They thus held in varying degrees of esteem all the non-procreative sex that the Christian Church condemned: masturbation, male and female homosexuality, anal and oral sex between men and women, and group sex-play that wasn't designed to produce offspring. The Church's condemnation of members of these cults as homosexuals as well as heretics was not only inevitable, but to a large extent accurate.

Nevertheless the condemnation still had more to do with church politics than with morality. Most of these heretical groups, the Albigensians, Paulicians, Patarenes, Bogomiles, Cathars, etc., were rather puritanical in non-sexual areas and appealed not only to the common people, but to wealthy burghers and the nobility. The Cathars (a term meaning "the pure") were openly supported in France by the counts of Toulouse, Foix and Bezier, and the king of Aragon, and the princes seized Church property on the "religious" authority of the Cathars. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Church branded these people as heretics, and used the homosexual charge as an effective weapon in its crusade against them. Any defeat of heresy meant the confiscation of more property for the Church.

When Manichaeism entered France by way of Bulgarian immigrants in the eleventh century, the word bougre, meaning "Bulgarian," became synonymous with both "heretic" and "sodomite" — and survives in the English language today as "bugger." Nor is it insignificant that the Inquisition's official term for heresy was "heretical pravity," having much the same meaning as "depravity" and "sexual depravity."


The Knights Templars
The first explicit allegation of homosexuality against the heretics was made in 1116, concerning the Henricians. From that time onward we hear more and more frequently that the heretics copulated vir cum viris (man with man) and femina cum feminis (woman with woman). In 1209 Pope Innocent authorized the Crusade against the Albigensians in France, a policy which resulted in nearly total genocide throughout the southern part of the country, and by the time the Inquisition would finish its work in the seventeenth century, several million heretics and homosexuals had been burned at the stake. But let us pause for a moment and look at the first well-organized persecution, that against the Knights Templars.

The Order was founded in 1118 by Hughes de Paynes and eight French knights, followers of Godefroy de Bouillon. Their religious function was to defend the Holy Sepulcher, and to safeguard pilgrims to it. But due to the constant intermingling of cultures in that area, they quickly became adherents to the great heresy; just as quickly took up the sexual practices tolerated in the East, including homosexuality; and at the same time acquired vast wealth and property as traders and bankers. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Order comprised 15,500 Knights, an appropriate number of squires and lay brethren, more than 150,000 gold florins and over 10,000 manors, plus a few fortresses and Temples in every major city in Europe (including London, on the site now occupied by The Temple on the Embankment).

In other words, the Knights Templars were almost as powerful as the Holy Roman Church. Recognizing a threat when he saw one, Pope Clement V persuaded King Philip le Bel in 1307 to issue an arrest order, accusing the Knights Templars of sodomy, heresy, general abominations and criminal acts. Philip himself was homosexual, but he stood to gain much wealth by outlawing the "heretics." On October 13 of that year, Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Order, was arrested along with 140 Knights. They were hideously tortured, and confessed to heresy, sodomy, cannibalism and a host of other crimes. More than a hundred of them were then burned to death, and 51 more were cremated in 1311.

The Order was formally abolished by the Pope in 1312, and on March 18, 1314, Jacques de Molay and his friend Guy D'Auvergne were burned at the stake. Just before dying, Molay ordered his persecutors to join him within the year "at the tribunal of God". Both Pope Clement and King Philip accordingly died before the year was over. But before their deaths they had totally eradicated the Knights Templars.

There is a great scholarly controversy over whether or not the Knights Templars actually were gay. It is impossible here to sum up the evidence for either side of the argument. I can only note the tendency in much recent scholarship to conclude that they were not cannibals etc., but that they were indeed "heretics" as defined by the Church, and that they did indeed engage in homosexual sex. Their initiation ceremony is well documented and has the ring of truth in spite of being extracted by torture. It involved such things as stripping oneself naked, kissing the high priest or leader on the mouth, anus and penis as a sign of fealty, and engaging in homosexual group sex as a symbol of brotherhood. Like the other heresies, they were theologically opposed to marriage and procreation, and taught that erotic tensions were better relieved with one's brothers than with women.


Fires and Faggots
Such ideas were intolerable to the Christian Church (particularly dangerous because of its own practice of celibacy), and the commonly-held view (whether true or not) that the Templars were homosexual strengthened the Church's already deeply ingrained prejudice against homosexuals. This charge became a major weapon in the arsenal of the Crusades and the Inquisition. As mentioned, in 1209 Pope Innocent began the Crusade against the heretical and sodomitical Albigensians in France. It was a wholesale slaughter. In Beziers alone nearly 20,000 heretics perished by the sword. Several thousand heretics who had fled for refuge to the Church of Mary Magdalene were massacred after the Crusaders had amused themselves by gouging out their eyes. Within twenty years a million heretics were exterminated. The Cathar movement was similarly expunged.

It is against this political background in which heresy and homosexuality were so closely aligned as to be virtually identical, that the great Church Father St Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) formulated his Christian sexual ethics: "right reason declares the appointed end of sexual acts is procreation," and declared that homosexuality was one of the gravest of the peccata contra naturam or "sins against nature," which is still the official view of most Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and even Protestant Christian Churches.

(Some commentators believe that the term "faggot" as applied to homosexuals is derived from the bundles of sticks or "faggots" that were used to burn the heretics. The heretics were easily identified with the fuel used to burn them, for symbolic faggots were in fact embroidered on the garments of those who refused to recant: hence the phrase "to fry a faggot." However, this etymology is probably not correct, because "faggot" as a slang term for a homosexual only occurs in English, and in England homosexuals were never burned at the stake, but hanged, so it is difficult to see how the metaphorical meaning could have arisen. The term is more likely derived from the French and Italian term baggage meaning "slut, whore.")

For nearly a century "heretical pravity" included only the cults of the Manichaean heresy, but in 1320 Pope John XXII gave his permission to the Inquisitors of Carcassone and Toulouse to prosecute witches. Whereas the Manichaean heresy was an Eastern religious import, witchcraft was native to Western Europe and the survival of a pagan cult. The heretics often came from the upper middle classes in urban centers, while the witches often came from the lower classes in rural areas relatively untouched by new-fangled religions, either Christian or heretical. Nevertheless the very widespread witch cult was a stumbling block to the enlargement of Christendom, and had to be similarly destroyed once the more powerful heresy groups had been disposed of. The Margaret Murray school of anthropological study argues that the witchcraft persecutions were primarily the result of a class war, or a new Christian culture stamping out a witchcraft culture. Many scholars believe that "witchcraft" may have existed as a kind of folk or pagan religion, and is not entirely a figment of a hysterical Christian imagination.


The Kiss of Shame
The important point for us to note is that the witches, like the heretics, either in fact or at least in popular conception, seem to have often approved of all forms of non-procreative sex, partly because they were not prejudiced against any form of erotic pleasure, and partly because the production of offspring was inimical to a peasant population which could not afford more m0ouths to feed or further divisions of limited agricultural areas through inheritance.

Homosexuality was often an important feature of the witches' real or alleged initiation rituals and the communion we now mistakenly refer to as the Black Mass. We have some well-documented evidence, freely given instead of extracted by torture, concerning the practice of one rite sometimes called the osculum infame, the "shameful" act of kissing the anus of the "Devil" or leader of the coven. It is first recorded in 1303 regarding the Bishop of Coventry, and is especially found in the records of the sixteenth century, for example: "le besa de derrier" (1563); "chacun de l'assemblee luy va baiser le derrier" (1567); "puis un chacun luy baisoit le derrier" (1574); "the deuel . . . caused all the company to com and kis his ers" (1590); "They kiss'd his Backside" (1594); "he wold hold up his taill untill we wold kiss his arce" (1662); "Satan offers his back-parts to be kissed of his vassal" (1617); and sometimes his genitals as well as his back parts: "que le Diable lui faisoit baiser son visage, puis le nombril, puis le membre viril, puis son derrier" (1609). Today the contemptuous phrase "kiss my arse" indicates a kind of humiliation, but in the heretical rites it was an act of humility and fealty, in much the same way that in an earlier era ritual prostitution was an act of humility and subservience to Cybele. This "kiss of shame" is still found in primitive initiation rituals today, and even in college fagging.



After everyone in the coven had kissed the Devil's or Leader's arse, and sometimes his penis, they would have sex with one another without regard to gender. Then followed the Black Mass, which in the most authentic accounts is merely a Feast of Communion that is more hearty and friendly than demonic.

May main argument is not that the Christian Church was justified in persecuting heretics and witches, but that to some degree it was justified in believing that the heretics and witches approved of and engaged in homosexual sex. Today so much sentimentality and polemic has obscured the witchcraft persecutions that we can barely credit the existence of witches; that we believe that all witches were women when in fact very many of them were men; and that we think the fertility rites were heterosexual when in fact they often contained a substantial element of homosexuality, e.g. in the form of mutual masturbation which celebrates virility if not fertility. The detailed investigation of homosexuality among heretical and witch cults has not been adequately studied even today, just as contemporary compilers at the trials would give only a few details "as a warning to all Christians to take no part in these abominations," and then would draw a prudent veil over the rest, "and God forbid that curiosity should lead anybody to explore them."

In the book Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 a 1324, based on records taken during a heresy investigation in a village in southwest France from 1319 to 1324 (now deposited in the Vatican), Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, one of the most distinguished French historians, establishes that homosexuality was "far from uncommon," and that the medieval villagers were very "permissive" regarding sex outside marriage. One of the "false priests," and a homosexual as well, was Arnold of Verniolle, who in 1323 confessed to frequently homosexual affairs with students, some of them long-term relationships, and to picking up men in the latrines and in bathhouses. At his trial in 1324 he defended his natural homosexual inclinations, saying "the bishop would have enough on his hands if he were to apprehend everyone in Pamiers who had been infected with that crime because there were more than three thousand persons."


Holocaust
Little purpose will be served by reviewing the slaughter of the witches throughout Europe and the torture of the Inquisition. Once Pope Innocent VIII issued his Bull Summis desiderantes affectibus on December 5, 1484, giving the Inquisition full power to seek out and destroy witches, the sickening note in the margin of the court records is always the same: Conuicta et combusta — "Convicted and burned." The tale may be as horrifying as that of the Nazi concentration camps, and the death toll as high. The story has been told many times, making us aware how thoroughly and perhaps irredeemably the Christian Church disgraced itself, how amply Christians made recompense for their own persecution under the Roman emperors centuries earlier.

What began primarily as a straightforward political ruse to wrest economic power from the Knights Templars and the heretical cults, eventually became a mania so immense as to challenge our powers of comprehension. A number of things can be explained in simple economic terms. For example, female witches were vehemently opposed by the medieval medical profession who were their economic rivals in herb-lore and midwifery. What is more difficult to understand is what some historians refer to as the "anal obsession of the Middle Ages." For nearly half a millennium the Christians of Western Europe were obsessed with a fear of everything associated with the anus. Luther defined the Devil as a giant anus, and in much iconography we see Evil and Sin personified by farting, shitting, and sodomy. There is no satisfactory explanation for this anal phobia, though no doubt it had something to do with what we now call the "anal-retentive" personality of authoritarian types. All we know for certain is that this variety of homophobia wreaked havoc on all things "sodomitical." Very strong pressures — such as the stake and thumbscrew — were brought to bear to "properly align" the husband's penis with the wife's vagina, which meant not only the suppression of homosexuality, but the enforcement of gender-defined clothing (witches were often persecuted for transvestism, for which specific "crime" Joan of Arc died), strictly-controlled marital groups as opposed to the brotherhood and coven groups of the heretics and witches, and a gender-defined labour force. In other words, both homophobia and sexism became even more rigidly entrenched than in earlier periods.

Rictor Norton, A History of Homophobia, "4 Gay Heretics and Witches" 15 April 2002 .
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   Homophobia from Ancient Israel to the End of the Middle Ages
Essays by Rictor Norton on the Historical Roots of Homophobia from Ancient Israel to the End of the Middle Ages
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3 The Later Roman Empire & The Early Middle Ages
Heliogabalus, the last truly pagan Emperor, was an initiate into a Syrian sun-cult, and, like the followers of Cybele, he frequently engaged in homosexual temple prostitution. After his murder, his cousin Emperor Alexander Severus (reigned AD 222-35), son of a Christian mother, resolved to put a stop to such decadent pleasures. He deported homosexuals who were active in public life, and heavily taxed the exsoleti — homosexual prostitutes and camp-followers who had a thriving trade in Rome — as well as heterosexual prostitutes and procurers.


Prostitutes Suppressed
Severus refrained from totally suppressing the exsoleti, only because he feared losing the tax revenues needed for the restoration of the Circus, the Amphitheatre, and the Stadium. After his death, Rome was in a nearly constant state of civil war, running through a dozen emperors in as many years. Nearly two-thirds of the Empire's population was Near Easter — Syrians, Jews, Iberians, and a significantly large number of people who worshipped Cybele. Society became radically fragmented and un-Roman.
The Emperor Philip (reigned AD 244-49), himself the son of a Bedouin chief and a Christian mother, attempted to stem the tide by altogether outlawing the exsoleti, the most visible practitioners of un-Roman practices and "exploiters" of the immigrant population. So once again homophobia was essentially a (semi-)Christian's fear of "foreign ways."

The organized Christian Church began to pass its judgement. In 305-6 the Council of Elvira forbade the giving of last rites to pederasts. In 314 the Council of Ancyra in Asia Minor excluded all homosexuals from receiving the sacrament, and unhappily their decision became the authority for all later ecclesiastical laws. In 323 the Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity, and the doom of homosexuals was sealed.

His worthy sons, the Emperors Constans and Constantius, who ruled respectively the Eastern and Western Empires, in 342 jointly decreed that "the law must be armed with an avenging sword" to rid the land of "passive" homosexuals, "those men who marry men as if they were women." The two doughty sons continued the suppression of the seemingly irrepressible exsoleti.

Church regulations became equally severe. St Basil in 375 and Gregory of Nyssa in 390 demanded of homosexuals a 15-year penitential of self-mortification while going without the sacrament — along with those who committed adultery, pederasty, incest, bestiality, idolatry, witchcraft and murder. In 385 Pope Siricius decreed celibacy for all priests.

Down in Africa, Augustine's boyfriend Alypius died in 386, and Augustine repented of his love for him which had once been more intense than his love for God. He ceased being a Manichaean, converted to Christianity, sublimated his homoerotic emotions and redirected them toward Christ, and exhorted everyone else to do likewise.


Burned at the Stake
In 390 the Emperor Valentinian decreed burning at the stake as a fit punishment for homosexuals — in memory of the purifying flames which devoured the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Five years later the Emperor Theodosius outlawed all religions other than Christianity, and codified the laws against heresy, treason, and homosexuality.
But the Roman Empire was collapsing. In 410 Rome was sacked by the Goths, then re-sacked by the Vandals again in 455. Did that mean that things would get better for homosexuals? Of course not. The Barbarians adopted the laws of the conquered, and in 506 the Visigoth Alaric II decreed burning at the stake for homosexuals. Roman-Christian attitudes pervaded the nearly defunct Empire, i.e. the whole of Western civilization.

The Byzantine Emperor Justinian in 529 closed the Platonic Academy in Athens, bringing to an end the era of classical learning. Justinian preferred superstition. He believed firmly that the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah was an example of how God destroyed cities with homosexual citizens, and feared it would happen again in his realm. So he decided to salvage the Empire by the methodical suppression of homosexuality.

In Justinian's "new laws" he says: "because of such impious conduct cities have indeed perished. . . . Because of such crimes there are famines, earthquakes, and pestilences" (Novellae 77, AD 538). In 543 a plague swept through the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, and probably as a terrified reaction to this, Justinian the following year issued another "new law," exhorting the "sodomites" to repent: "There will be no relaxation of enquiry and correction so far as this matter is concerned" (Novellae 144).


Castration
Justinian ordered the Prefect to arrest any homosexual who refused to repent, and to subject him "to the extreme punishments." The punitive correction was brutal: first the convicted homosexual's testicles would be cut off. Then sharp reeds would be thrust into his penis. Then he would be led, or dragged, naked through the streets for public humiliation. Finally he would be burned at the stake. The Bishops Isaiah of Rhodes and Alexander of Diospolis were so mutilated, and dragged in agony through the streets before the frenzied populace.
Procopius in his contemporary Anecdota says that Justinian's laws were carried out ruthlessly and recklessly — that slaves were forced to falsely accuse Justinian's political enemies, and that the streets were filled by the mutilated, castrated, and humiliated victims of his fanaticism. The records are too scarce to positively demonstrate a massive persecution, but the scale on which Justinian performed such public services may be imagined by the fact that he once forcibly converted 70,000 people in a single campaign.

The full weight of such cruelty rests not alone on the Emperor's shoulders. His underling bishops exerted equal zeal to gain the favour of this temporary Pope. And his good wife the Empress Theodora indulged in a variety of extraordinary pleasures including masturbating while watching men being castrated and tortured. Homophobia may be primarily a masculine hatred, but not entirely. It is not even entirely a heterosexual hatred, for some of Theodora's relationships were lesbian as well as incestuous.


The Dark Ages
Despite Justinian's "corrections,", the Roman Empire continued to fall for several centuries thereafter, and its Christianized fragments kept on splitting through the period we are about to enter now: the Dark Ages. This ear really is not so dark as we used to believe, but for homosexuals it held out few bright spots. The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were by now irrevocably associated with ideas about the corruption and decay of the state, and "sodomites" were regarded as a threat to unstable medieval societies.
Again, however, written records of persecution are scarce — partly because when a sodomite was burned at the stake, all of his papers and the trial records were burned along with him in order to prevent contagion. Many of the anti-gay laws during this period may be merely re-enactments of older statutes, and theoretically legal dead wood. Occasionally, nevertheless, we find clearly new laws, which probably were applied.

This is especially likely in Gothic Spain, the strongest foothold of Christianity, where, for example, King Kindasvinth in 650 issued an edict against the "execrable moral depravity" and ordered that both partners in a homosexual act either repent or be excommunicated and castrated. It was a very practical law, treating the convicted homosexual as legally dead, and allowing a wife, if any, to remarry, and sons, if any, to receive his property. King Egica at the 16th Council of Toledo in 693 urged further curbing — apparently homosexuality was gaining ground — and the criminal was forced to have his hair shorn and to receive 100 stripes, after which he was castrated and sent into exile.

In due course homosexuality became a civil crime throughout Christianized Europe, a phenomenon aided greatly in the eighth century when the Emperor Charlemagne condemned "sodomy" and Alfred the Great, under pressure from the Church, condemned the "disgusting foulness . . . as contagious as any disease." The real contagion was of course homophobia.


Monastic Vigilance
The most interesting development of homophobia during this period was the Penitential System, which incidentally indicates a better awareness of exactly what homosexuals to in bed, even though the disapproval of such activity is still blinded by prejudice. The authors of the handbooks of penances — written mostly in the puritanical Celtic Churches of Ireland and Wales, then spreading their influence to England, France and Germany from about 569 to 1008 — seem to know what they are talking about, and clearly specify the previously ambiguous "sins" of Sodom.
Every act is ranked according to its degree of sinfulness. The basic penance consists of exclusion from the sacraments, self-mortification (though younger boys were beaten with rods at the hands of older clerics), fasting on bread and water on holy days (which included most days), and general discomfort. The major difference between the penances was the amount of time they were required.

The Penitential of Theodore the Archbishop of Canterbury in 670 required 1 year for inter-femoral contact (penis between thighs); 3 years for all lesbian activity, undifferentiated; 7 to 15 years for anal intercourse; 7 to 22 years for fellatio; and, for comparison, 7 to 10 years for murder; 15 years for infanticide (reduced to 7 years if the mother was a pauper).

If caught kissing, boys under the age of 20 were subject to 6 special fasts; 8 fasts if it was "licentious kissing"; 10 fasts if it was "kissing with emission"; more if it involved mutual masturbation; and much longer if the partners were over the age of 20. Sometimes the penance was greater for the insertor than for the receptor. It should be emphasized that all of these penances are for acts between mutually consenting adults.

It is interesting that the penances were usually greater for "those who befouled their lips" (as Columban described fellatio in 600) than for those who used their or others' bums. When Theodore says that fellatio is "the worst of all evils," he quite literally means just that — that it is worse than murder (maximum 15 years' penance) and deserves up to 22 years of penance and even a lifetime for the habitual offender. Probably this severity is due to the belief that the mouth was ordained to receive the eucharist, whereas the arse plays no special role in Christian ritual. Or perhaps it is just a regional Celtic oddity, for it seems that even twentieth-century British men had a greater aversion to fellatio than did American men, and felt that anal intercourse was more normal.

It was not until the eleventh century that Bishop Burchard of Worms gives more detailed penances for lesbians, and even then lesbianism was still regarded from the "penis-sex" male point of view: women who use an artificial penis are given a penance of 1 year if use alone; 5 years if used with another woman; 7 years if used by a nun, who, as a Bride of Christ, would be deemed to have commited adultery by using a dildo.

The Penitential System (of which I have noted fewer than 5 per cent of the handbooks) documents the fact that medieval gay men did virtually the same things as modern homosexuals. It also suggests that medieval gay love was widespread enough to be fairly accurately observed. In the context of a history of homophobia, it demonstrates the official anti-gay attitude of the Christian Church toward brother love (kissing) as well as sex. But there is little evidence that these penances were severely applied in actual practice. In a closed monastic community, the confessor may well be as "guilty" as the confessee; the penances may well have been light. The only real indication that this attitude was effective in suppression homosexuality is the fact that joyful expressions of gay love became increasingly rare in medieval poetry while at the same time anti-gay satire increased. Most of the friendship in literature demonstrates that the clergy followed Augustine's advice and attempted to repress their emotions in favour of "spiritual love." In 960 St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, began a moral reform of the Church and society, and under his influence Church Law became the core of civil law, and "penances" were enforced as punitive sentences through the law courts.



The Penitential tradition itself came to a head in 1051 when Peter Damiani published his Liber Gomorrhianus (derived from the city of Gomorrah), an entire book devoted to condemning homosexuality in the most horrifying rhetoric imaginable, urging the maximum penance for every homosexual activity (except fellatio, which he unaccountably forgot). His exposure of "rampant vice" among the clergy raised a storm of protest, and his intemperate zeal was rebuked by Pope Leo IX. Leo urged the clergy to apply the penances carefully, with attention to the age of the sinner, whether or not the vice was habitual, and similar extenuating circumstances. Leo questioned only the severity of the penances, not the anti-gay attitude itself, so his epistle codified the Church's homophobia rather than challenged it.

The important point to note is that quite ordinary homosexuals — for example, boys who kiss one another, rather than the mythical monsters of Sodom —' came under the vigilance of the Penitential System. Doing penance is a remarkably effective way of internalizing the stigma, and this is one of the origins of the guilt and shame of homosexuals even today. To be castrated is to be a victim of external oppression; to be forced to repent daily is the beginning of self-oppression.

Rictor Norton, A History of Homophobia, "3 The Later Roman Empire & The Early Middle Ages" 15 April 2002; spelling correction 2 October 2003 .
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   The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
Essays by Rictor Norton on the Historical Roots of Homophobia from Ancient Israel to the End of the Middle Ages
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2 The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
The story of these two ill-fated cities of the plain is the single most influential vehicle for the transmission of anti-gay prejudice. The sad irony is that the story originally had nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality.


The Inhospitable Sodomites
The account — told in Genesis 19.4-11, and repeated in Judges 19.22 — in a nutshell goes thus: Lot decided to settle in Sodom, a city reputed to be as wicked as its neighbour, Gomorrah. In order to determine the truth of this reputation, God sent two angels to investigate. These two foreign travellers were met at the gate of the city by Lot, and they accepted his hospitable invitation to sojourn at his home. That night the inhabitants of Sodom clamoured round Lot's house, pounding on his door and demanding: "Bring the visitors out unto us, that we may know them." Lot refused to comply with this "evil" request, and instead offered them his two daughters. When the Sodomites would not relent, the angels smote the crowd with blindness. The next morning Lot fled the city with the angels and his family, and God let loose a torrent of fire and brimstone to consume these wicked cities of the plain.
The difficulty of interpretation is that the "sins" of Sodom and Gomorrah simply are not specified in the Bible. Christians with no linguistic expertise assume that "know" means "engage in coitus." But the term for "know" — yadha — is used in the sexual sense only 10 times in the Old Testament and all of these cases are heterosexual. Yadha is used in the sense of "get acquainted with" 924 times. Thus the odds against the homosexual usage of this term are nearly 1000-to-1, and many modern Biblical scholars have now abandoned this theory.

The interpretation now accepted by many Biblical scholars (excluding the most evangelical sects) is as follows: Lot was a ger, a sojourner, a resident alien in Sodom. He had certain civic obligations in return for the protection which the city offered him, and there are indications that he was unpopular in the city. He did not have a right to open his house to foreigners, and the citizens of Sodom were merely demanding to see the credentials of these two foreigners, that is, to "know" whence they came and their intentions. Lot had to refuse, however, because he himself was under the obligations of the Jewish code of hospitality to his guests. He offered the Sodomites his daughters as the first appeasement that came to his mind, not as a heterosexual substitute for a homosexual demand. The cities were they destroyed for not recognizing the obligations of hospitality, and the whole story is a moral allegory on the dire effects of inhospitality.

The sins of the Sodomites may have been great and grievous in the eyes of a wrathful god, but the Bible does not cite homosexuality as one of them (cf. Genesis 13.13, 18.20). Jeremiah 23.14 suggests adultery and lying, and Ezekiel 16.49-50 suggests pride and sloth and idolatry. Since the word for "idolatry" is to-ebhah, and one form of it could have been homosexual temple prostitution, it is remotely possible that homosexuality was included, but it must be emphasized how remote this possibility is. If it was believed to be an example of homosexuality, it is remarkable to the point of being an inconceivable omission that Sodom is never mentioned in any of the Biblical condemnations of homosexuality that I discussed earlier. The Apocrypha demonstrates the standard interpretation: Whereas the men of Sodom received not the strangers when they came among them, so the Egyptians made slaves of the guests who were their benefactors" (Wisdom 10.8, 19.8, and Ecclesiastes 16.8).


Sodomizing the Story
Why is it, then, that the "sins of Sodom" have become the prototype for "sodomy"? Basically it is the result of the same kind of nationalistic fervour that we have seen much earlier. The Palestinian Jews and Jews of the Dispersion during the period from about 100 BC to AD 100, confronted by pagan Hellenistic "immorality" alien to them, deliberately foisted a homosexual misinterpretation upon the story. They began reacting against "the ways of the Gentiles" just as they had earlier reacted against "the ways of Canaan" and "the ways of Egypt."
The Palestinian Pseudepigrapha, particularly the Book of Jubilees, a product of the most rigid and conservative Jewish orthodoxy, specified the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah as fornication, uncleanliness, and "changing the order of nature." The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (109-106 BC), particularly the Testament of Naphtali, says that the Sodomites "changed the order the nature," and Jude says they "went after strange flesh." This is still rather vague, but by 50 BC the Rabbinical interpolators had more or less agreed that the Sodomites were "sodomitical."

The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, written in Egypt before the middle of the first century by a Hellenistic Jew, says that the Sodomites committed "abominable lecheries, namely one with another" and "the sin against nature, which is child-corruption after the Sodomitic fashion, magic-making, enchantments and devilish witchcraft." This is nonsensical embellishment when compared with the actual Biblical text, and obviously a result of coming into contact with the "underworld" of first-century Alexandria, where pederasty and homosexual prostitution existed alongside competing mystical sects, astrology, fortune-telling, and cults involving castration and transvestism.

Philo during this period gives us the full-blown story we are familiar with today: "Not only in their mad lust for women did the Sodomites violate the marriages of their neighbors, but also men mounted males without respect for the sex nature which the active partner shares with the passive; and so when they tried to beget children they were discovered to be incapable of any but a sterile seed. . . . little by little they accustomed those who were by nature men to submit to play the part of women" (De Abrahamo, 26). A similar account of the Sodomites is related by Josephus (who died around AD 96), who emphasizes the rape of beautiful boys. In very short order this false story superseded the original.



Tortures for the sin of Lust, from Taddeo di Bartolo's fresco of Hell at San Gimigniano, Italy. An adulteress is lashed by a demon, while a sodomite (wearing a hat labelled 'Sodomitum') is impaled on a stake from anus to mouth, one end held in the mouth of another homosexual, while a devil turns the spit over the fire.

Rabbits and Weasels
The Fathers of the Christian Church would eventually adopt this homosexual misinterpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah lock, stock, and barrel, and when the first Christian Emperors formulated it into the highly influential Roman Law Code, we arrive, by AD 600, at the anti-gay legal attitude that is still in effect today in most Western societies.
It is a bit misleading to suggest that the homophobia of the Christian-Roman Empire was the direct result of adopting this attitude of the Jews of the Dispersion, for there is plenty of anti-gay satire in works by Juvenal, Suetonius, Martial and others, particularly criticism of the cult of Cybele which first entered Rome in 204 BC. Quite independent of the Jews, the early Romans had the similar beliefs that copulation was an expression of violence that had to be controlled, that the "active" partner somehow conquered over or perpetrated a crime upon the "passive" partner. Women were "protected" — that is, oppressed — as "defenceless creatures," and men who assumed a so-called "passive" sex role were often ridiculed.

But early Roman anti-gay attitudes were not so sever as to require official condemnation or legal sanction. It is not until 226 BC that we come across the first anti-gay law, the Lex Scantia, so-called because a tribune of the plebs named C. Scantinius Capitolinus was charged with homosexuality before the Senate and heavily fined. The meaning of the law and the tale of its origin is open to dispute. It really seems unlikely that a law would take its name from a criminal defendant. Be that as it may, the law was several times invoked against political enemies, particularly during the reign of the Emperor Domitian (AD 81-96), but there seem to have been no convictions, and it seems to have been obsolete by the late fourth century. Most important, it forbade homosexual intercourse between freeborn men and slaves, an indication that it merely regulated relations which crossed class barriers rather than totally condemned all homosexuality.

During the first four centuries AD it is difficult to differentiate between the anti-gay attitudes of the Church Fathers and the Roman Emperors. St John Chrysostum emphatically denounced male homosexuals for having "devised a barren coitus, not having for its end the procreation of children," and he equally denounced lesbians, "for women ought to have more shame than men." Discussion about this "barren coitus" is really interesting when we understand the folklore origin behind such prejudice.

For example, Clement of Alexandria condemned homosexuality because it means coitus per anum, and he justified his condemnation by referring to Moses's injunction against eating the flesh of the hare (Deuteronomy 14.7). It was a commonplace belief that every year the hare acquired an additional anus, and its superabundance of orifices led to its proverbial promiscuity. The Epistle of Barnabas condemns pederasty for the very same reason about the hare, and proceeds to condemn fellatio by referring to Leviticus 11.29 wherein the weasel is described as an unclean animal because it was believed to conceive through its mouth. If homosexuals were compared to such mythical hares and weasels, little wonder that we were called "unnatural". Today we have lost the folklore, but retained the epithet.

The supposed relationship between homosexuals and hares and weasels is broadly relevant. "Sodomy" is usually condemned in the same breath as bestiality. And the Jewish/Christian/Roman view that male homosexuals resemble women is related to the view that women are mere animals. St John Chrysostum said: "among all savage beasts, none is found so harmful as woman." Even as late as AD 585 the Council of Macon debated the question "Are women human?" — an affirmative answer won by a majority of only one vote. One of the roots of sexism is not so much a separation between men and women as a separation between men and animals (in which latter category are placed homosexuals and hares, women and weasels).

To this list of unclean animals must be added the dog. The Jews called the Gentiles "dogs," kunes (from Greek kuon, "dog," modern term: canine), and the priests of Cybele were called "Gallic hounds," or cinaedus, from canus, "dog." The frequent Renaissance epithet was "you Sodomite dog" — and the modern equivalent is "you son of a bitch."

So again, as demonstrated in Part 1 of this series, we find the very same combination of religious and political motivations behind anti-gay prejudice, determined primarily by the need of the Jews to assert their separateness from foreign cultures. There were three important additions to the repertoire of homophobia illustrated in Part 1: First, the belief that homosexuals are pederasts and child-corruptors. Second, a pronounced anti-feminism: an explicit degradation of women, the first explicit condemnation of lesbians, and the view that male homosexuals are "deformed" by assuming a "woman's role" in "passive" intercourse. And third, the first direct equation of "unnatural" with "non-procreative" — but not so much a refusal to procreate as an attempt to procreate like the hares and weaseles were supposed to do.

The major point here, of course, is that what amounts to a deliberate lie — about Sodom and Gomorrah — was created in order to justify such prejudices. That story has not changed much since AD 100, except that the man carrying the sign "Repent Ye Sinners" probably believes that sodomites lived in Sodom and lesbian lived in Gomorrah.

Rictor Norton, A History of Homophobia, "2 The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah" 15 April 2002 .


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You are Pan Jin Lian! The Chinese goddess of fornication and
prostitution. According to myth, she was a
young widow caught making love by her
brother-in-law. He killed her lover. The widow
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their places of business.

Which Chinese Mythological Being Are You?
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Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Your soul is broken.
You are living through a lot of pain everyday
that you have to deal with, which is making you
sorrowful. No one ever stays by your side when
you truly need them and no one ever will.
Everything is hopeless and tragic and you keep
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pain. Love is unlikely to happen to you because
you isolate yourself and are suspicious of
peoples motives. You stand in the shadows of
the world, watching what you can never have.
The bruises you carry never seems to heal, your
mind is dark and no one seems to understand or
wants to help. As always, you will be alone in
the world, fighting your dark thoughts by
yourself.

How is your soul?(pics)
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