Jesse Monteagudo: Jesse Monteagudo is a free-lance writer and book lover. Reach him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com online. This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VIII Issue 38). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.com online.
One of the first “world histories” of homosexuality was “The Other Face of Love” (1964) by the Frenchman Raymond de Becker. De Becker's history was followed by Arno Karlen's “Sexuality and Homosexuality” (1971) and Vern L. Bullough's “Sexual Variance in Society and History” (1976).
But the time has come for a comprehensive history of same-sex relations and society's attitudes towards them; one written by a distinguished historian who would cover various “Western” and “non-Western” cultures and benefit from the last two decades' wealth of scholarship. Louis Crompton, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, is such a historian. Though he has made major contributions to gay studies (especially his book “Byron and Greek Love”), “Homosexuality & Civilization” is his masterpiece. Unfortunately, its publication late in 2003 kept it from appearing in various “year end lists,” my own included.
Professor Crompton's original plan, he wrote, “was to trace the religious beliefs that shaped European opinion in the Middle Ages and their punitive consequences. But first it seemed appropriate to begin with Greece and Rome, if only to demonstrate that such negative views were not the universal judgments of mankind…. The material soon filled two chapters and spilled over into two more - on Rome and early Christianity - since Greek documents, far from being limited to the classical age, turned out to be abundant well into the Common Era.”
Just a roll call of chapters gives us an indication of the scope of this book: (1) Early Greece 776-480 bce; (2) Judea 900 bce-600 ce; (3) Classical Greece 480-323 bce; (4) Rome and Greece 323 bce-138 ce; (5) Christians and Pagans 1-565 ce; (6) Darkness Descends 476-1049; (7) The Medieval World 1050-1321; (8) Imperial China 500 bce-1849; (9) Italy in the Renaissance 1321-1609; (10) Spain and the Inquisition 1497-1700; (11) France from Calvin to Louis XIV 1517-1715; (12) England from the Reformation to William III 1533-1702; (13) Pre-Meiji Japan 800-1868; (14) Patterns of Persecution 1700-1730; (15) Sapphic Lovers 1700-1793; (16) The Enlightenment 1730-1810.
Like “The Story of Civilization” by Will and Ariel Durant - listed in Crompton's bibliography - “Homosexuality & Civilization” ignores Africa and the Americas and ends with the Age of Napoleon (1789-1815); a time when the Napoleonic Code (1810) abolished sodomy laws in continental Europe and philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued for England to do the same.
“Homosexuality & Civilization” begins with Classical Greece, a “golden age” for homosexuality. “In Greek history and literature…the abundance of accounts of homosexual love overwhelms the investigator….Greek lyric poets sing of male love from almost the earliest fragments down to the end of classical times. Five brilliant philosophical dialogues debate its ethics with a wealth of illustrations, from Plato and Xenophon to Plutarch and the pseudo-Lucian of the third century ce. In the public arena of the theater we know that tragedies on this theme were popular, and Aristophanes' bawdy humor is quite as likely to be inspired by sex between males as by intercourse between men and women. Vase-painters portray scores of homoerotic scenes, hundreds of inscriptions celebrate the love of boys, and such affairs enter into the lives of a long catalogue of famous Greek statesmen, warriors, artists, and authors.”
Unfortunately for European gays, Western attitudes towards homosexuality are not the positive views of Classical Greece but the negative ones of Biblical Judea. As Crompton put it, “it is an irony of history that the two cultures which have done most to shape Western civilization should have adopted antithetical views on homosexuality at about the same time. In the sixth century…a few hundred miles away [from Greece] in ancient Palestine, a law was incorporated into the Hebrew scriptures which was ultimately to have far greater influence and, indeed, to affect the fate of homosexuals in half the world down to our own day.” Jewish homophobia, as we all know, influenced the world indirectly, through its unruly children Christianity and Islam. Christian theologians misinterpreted the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah to “prove” that homosexual behavior, if unpunished, led to all sorts of natural and unnatural disasters. Persecution of homosexuals became state policy after the Christian takeover of the Roman Empire (325 ce); as the law codes of Theodosius (390) and Justinian (534) decreed the death penalty for “sodomy.”
Louis Crompton disagrees with the late John Boswell, whose classic “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality” (1980) was one of the first major works of gay scholarship. “Boswell's thesis,” Crompton writes, “was that the Christian church did not develop markedly hostile views of same-sex relations until the twelfth century. But a candid examination of the evidence soon indicated that, from the very birth of Christianity, a hatred existed fully comparable to the hatred directed at pagans and Jews in the first millennium and at heretics, Jews, and witches in the first seven centuries of the second.”
Crompton's gay history of Europe is a chamber of horrors for lesbians and gay men: “Justinian's castrated bishops; the dangling corpses of Almería; the burning of the “married” couples in Renaissance Rome; the priests starved to death in cages in Venice's Saint Mark's Square; women burned, hanged, or beheaded on the charge of lesbianism; men tortured and burned by the Spanish Inquisition; Indians savaged by Balboa's mastiffs or burned in Peru; the deaths of the quemadero in Mexico City; the men and boys of Faan; and the scores of men and adolescents hanged in Georgian England,” just to name a few.
One of the more striking features of “Homosexuality & Civilization” is “the divide between those [societies] that called themselves Christian and those that flourished before or independently of Christianity. In the first we find laws and preaching which promoted hatred, contempt, and death; in the second, varying attitudes, all of them (barring Islam, which, like Christianity, inherited the lethal tradition of the Hebrew scriptures) to a radical degree more tolerant.”
In China, the “love of the cut sleeve” was practiced and condoned at all levels of society, even by emperors. The name itself came from an incident in the life of the Han Emperor Ai who, we are told, “once sought to rise when his lover Dong Xian had fallen asleep on the sleeve of his robe. Rather than disturb him, he cut off his sleeve and appeared in public in this mutilated state. Thereafter, reputedly, his courtiers adopted similar abbreviations of clothing to celebrate the love affair.”
In Japan, the wakashudo (“way of youth”) and nanshuko (‘love of males”) traditions governed Japanese society, from Buddhist monks to samurai warriors. During the 18th century, Crompton notes, “as concern about male effeminacy grew in England, ambiguously gendered performers reigned as popular favorites at the Peking Opera and in the kabuki theaters of Tokyo. And as the English middle class organized to hang sodomites, a passion for handsome youths became fashionable in the middle class of urban Japan. Cultural traditions and religious influences could hardly have diverged more dramatically.”
In spite of Christianity's unrelenting hatred, homosexual men and women were able to create a gay counterculture in the unlikeliest places. Here Crompton disagrees with the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, who “argued that the “homosexual” is a modern invention, a mental construct of the last hundred years. This is, of course, true, of homosexuality as a “scientific” or psychiatric category. But it is a mistake to presume that earlier ages thought merely of sexual acts and not of persons. Medieval literature speaks not only of sodomy but also of “sodomites,” individuals who were a substantial, clear, and ominous presence.” Homosexuality & Civilization notes the existence of various gay subcultures in Renaissance Italy, 16th century Portugal and Spain, and 18th century England, France and Holland, among others.
“Homosexuality & “does not neglect the “great gays in history,” whose lives have been a favorite subject of gay studies. Here we meet a whole bunch of them, not just the Classical Greeks but also Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Thomas Gray and others. Gay and lesbian monarchs take a major part of Crompton's narrative.
As he writes, “in modern democracies homosexuals have rarely governed. But in monarchies where power was hereditary, there was always the possibility that a ruler would turn out to be homosexual or bisexual. A man or woman whose behavior the church and state damned might hold supreme authority.” Though Europe in 2004 has a gay mayor in Paris and a gay mayor in Berlin, it cannot compare to Europe in 1610, when the “sodomites” James I, Louis XIII and Rudolph II ruled Great Britain, France and the Holy Roman Empire, respectively. Other queer monarchs whose lives are dealt with in this book include Edward II of England, Christina of Sweden, William III of Britain, and Frederick the Great of Prussia. “Modern research now makes us able to understand in some detail the role homosexuality played in their varied destinies and, when they were rulers, in the politics of their reigns. At last we can move beyond silence and obfuscation.”
“Homosexuality & Civilization” is not an easy book to read. Even an avid reader like yours truly could not read more than a chapter a day. But Professor Crompton is as good a writer as he is a scholar, and his compelling narrative is never dull. “Homosexuality & Civilization” is well-researched and well-presented, with numerous illustrations and footnotes, and an extensive bibliography that encourages further reading. It is an excellent resource for home study and an ideal text for a gay studies course. I recommend it.
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