Kevin White, University of Portsmouth:
Stephen O. Murray's Homosexualities is a remarkable book that promises to deliver a lot, and even more extraordinarily succeeds in its lofty aims. In the flood of works on this subject over the last ten years it still manages to be both original and refreshing.
Murray attempts nothing less than to account for and to count the wide variety and diversity of both male and female homoerotic experience in human cultures in all human history. He gives us a rich account. Few cultures miss his gaze from the Araucanian Machi to North-eastern Siberia's transformed Shamans to better known societies such as ancient Greece and Rome and modern American society.
Murray's wide-ranging work recalls (deliberately) two late and great scholars whose work on sexuality first appeared 20 years ago in the United States: John Boswell and Michel Foucault. In recent years, Foucault's “social constructionist” vision that there is no real continuity between modern and premodern sexualities and that the homosexual as a “species” dates back only a little more than a hundred years has won out utterly against John Boswell's argument in Christianity, Homosexuality and Social Tolerance (1980) that there was much that was “essentialist” that is the same about male / male, female / female erotic experience through the ages. So complete has been the victory of Foucault's followers that it is now hard to believe that the “essentialist” / “social constructionist” debate raged in the US. through the mid-1980s. It is Murray's achievement that in Homosexualities he shows the debate has only been dormant, for he opens it up all over again. Some achievement.
Murray's argument is deceptively simple. There have been throughout history three basic types of male and female homosexuality: age-structured homosexualities, gender-stratified homosexuality, and egalitarian homosexuality. These three types have existed throughout the world throughout history, according to Murray.
Most readers are likely to be surprised by some of Murray's findings. Age-structured homosexualities involve warrior reproduction but are not necessarily gender-stratified as there have been boy “tops.” Gender-stratified homosexual organisation has less surprisingly been pervasive from the “activos/passivos” of Latin America to Polynesian gender-defined homosexual roles. Herein is included the celebrated North American butch / femme role play and religious incorporation of what Murray calls “sacralised” homosexual roles such as those of temple prostitutes.
Murray's discussion of his third category, egalitarian homosexuality, is simply stunning. Of course this is the category that we associate with post-Stonewall gay America. But Murray points out that egalitarian homosexuality is not new at all and was present in ancient Greece and Rome and China as well as in Muslim societies. Murray's conclusion is not that egalitarianism characterizes modern American society but that “diversification” rather than “homogenization” characterizes it (p. 393): “There is a range of homosexuality in a society”(p. 422). It follows that the impact of urbanisation, industrialisation, and capitalism, and therefore of social construction and of historical change itself, is not nearly as great as we have been thinking. What does seem to have an impact on historical change is the extent of egalitarianism in a society: Murray concedes that “relatively egalitarian societies are more likely to have male homosexual relations not structured by differences in age and gender status” (p. 434), so he certainly has not abandoned social constructionism. Yet he is adamant about the importance of constancy and continuity in homoerotic roles, and this is his great contribution.
This is therefore a sensational book, part of what I see emerging as a new commonsense revolution within academe. Murray knows his work will stir up controversy, but I expect this book's influence to grow as the dogmatism and orthodoxies of queer theory are replaced by fresher perspectives more amenable to the complexities of human experience. Here is something that we historians can applaud.
commenting closed for this article