Friday, Jul 25, 2008
The history of homosexuality, from Greece to the McCarthy hearing, in the new book "Homophobia: A History."
Aug 15, 2000 | Other epithets may bring out fists, but "fag" often brings out guns. Homosexuality, as City University of New York historian Byrne Fone notes in his new book, "Homophobia: A History," is the most powerful slur and "the last acceptable prejudice."
His book, a history of homophobia beginning with antiquity and ending with the passage of the first civil union law for gays in Vermont, is without question the preeminent historical account of the hate that dare speak its name.
How did love and sex between men start out as a noble ideal, practiced by the majority of the population and approved for centuries by both religion and law, and turn out to be one of the most vicious and sustained persecutions in recorded history?
How did sex between men start out as an admired act of masculinity and end up as a shameful badge of effeminacy? How did homosexual love and sex, which were seen as important to the development of virtue, nobility and the foundation of a strong society, become an enemy of the state?
Fone answers these questions in exquisite detail with a masterful command of history, a balanced interpretation of contradictory documents and an explosive set of assertions that fly against the conventional view of not just homophobes but of gay people themselves.
This is the kind of work that, despite some enormous flaws, marks the beginning of a new understanding of history's oldest hate -- its ignition, trajectory, growth and, recently, its attenuation.
Fone begins his epic in antiquity, where the words "homosexual" or "homosexuality" did not exist, despite the fact that man-to-man sex was ubiquitous. Sexual identity didn't exist, but sex between men did. In fact, "paiderastia" was a Greek philosophical concept idealizing same-sex desire. It was expected for older men to mentor younger men, teaching them how to hunt, fight and take their place as noble citizens. This teacher/student, love/beloved relationship was as sexual as it was social.
Paiderasty was governed by centuries of tradition and substantiated by scores of paintings (showing older and younger men copulating) and literature (poems in "Book Twelve of the Greek Anthology" are almost exclusively devoted to the love of young men). Fone paints antiquity with an expert hand, using chisel-trim brushes for corners and edges, and rollers for the flat areas that don't need much detail.
The book is peppered with small examples of nearly every assertion he makes. For instance, proving Greece's elevation of man-boy love to nobility, he quotes Phaedrus, a character in one of Plato's greatest works, "Symposium." Phaedrus declares "there can be no greater benefit for a boy than to have a worthy lover ... nor for a lover than to have a worthy object of his affection." Greeks saw love between men as a way to acquire virtue and "ambition for what is noble."
Greek law and religion didn't mention homosexual acts, but Greek society passed harsh judgment on them if they defied accepted norms. There were homo do's and homo don'ts: Don't shtup the underage, don't rape, don't prostitute yourself; and no congress with slaves.
Both homophobes and gay activists today would be shocked at the history Fone uncovered. The former because gay sex was revered as a way of building, not destroying, family values, and the latter because homosexual sex was reviled if the participants were effeminate.
Historians rarely discover rock-like truths. Truth comes in pebbles, in layer upon layer of sediment that often rises to the level of agreed-upon fact. Fone's meticulous book, weighted down with 38 pages of footnotes, makes the ground of his asserted truths safe to walk on. There is no major or minor assertion that isn't backed up with acres and acres of evidence.
Fone sprinkles his opinion like a gourmand -- a pinch here, a pinch there -- but at times he sounds like he's writing a polemic rather than an account of history. You start wondering if he's bending facts to fit his view. To his credit he avoids this through most of the book until he reaches the 1980s, where he starts sounding like a P.R. flack for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
Fone is at his best when he lets the facts speak for themselves. And one inescapable fact is that the greatest civilization on Earth, the civilization we still hold in awe several millennia later, was founded in part by a belief in the nobility of homosexual love. Today, society thinks men who engage in sex are fairies and sinners. Greeks thought they were masculine and virtuous. Warrior, hunter, citizen, husband and boy-lover: These were the characteristics of masculine identity.
Greeks didn't care whether the object of desire was male or female. What they cared about most was upholding the status of the adult male, which could only be done if the object of his penetration was passive (women or boys).
Antiquity's growing condemnation of effeminacy in males foreshadowed the historical construction of homophobia. It wasn't gay sex that repulsed Greeks; it was effeminate men, who they believed subverted masculinity.
As the Roman Empire ascended, they too celebrated love and sex between men. Roman art pictured homosexual desire openly on wall paintings, coins, artifacts, jewelry, terra cotta lamps and flasks. The propriety of homosexual acts, as in Greece, was predicated more on the power and status of the penetrator and penetrated than with gender. Romans had an exalted term for men who properly engaged in homosexual acts: "vir." It symbolized the ideal man, who penetrates other men but himself is not penetrated.
The biggest difference between Roman and Greek perceptions of same-sex desire is that the Romans didn't believe sexual relations between men was a path toward political, spiritual and ethical ideals. They just thought it was a great way to get off.
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