The propulsion of revulsion

Romans took the derision of effeminacy to newer and more vicious heights. It was masculine to enjoy penetrating or receiving oral sex from another man. It was effeminate to enjoy being penetrated or giving head. Being penetrated was a necessary indignity boys had to put up with to attain civic manhood. It was the price they paid to become a man, but once they became men they were to give up the passive role. Funny thing was, a lot of those men didn't want to give up the passive role, infuriating Roman society.

And herein lies one of the truly startling points in Fone's book: Greeks and Romans at first feared effeminacy not because it threatened family values or the social order, but because -- are you ready for this? -- it threatened to take the masculinity out of gay sex, making the act incompatible with the nobility of the male citizen. If effeminacy were associated with homosexual acts, as detractors were increasingly charging, then real men would have to stop enjoying it. The rising condemnation of effeminacy was, at first, an attempt to preserve the privilege of having sex with boys.

The contempt for effeminacy in men became increasingly rabid in later antiquity and set up a harbinger of the persecutions to come for any homosexual act, be it receptive or not.

The ascension of Christianity snatched same-sex desire off its historically noble pedestal and flung it into the fiery pit of hell. Christianity separated what antiquity united -- flesh and spirit. Abstinence and celibacy, not pleasure and sex, were the road to the hereafter. Now, procreation was the only justification for sexual desire. Same-sex acts could not result in children; therefore they became the enemy of all that is good.

By the fourth century the Roman Empire officially became Christian. Fone does a great job of not only tracing the birth and direction of Christian laws against homosexual acts, but provides the law verbatim from historical tracts, making for unstoppable reading. For example, in 342 a new anti-homosexual edict became law: "When a man submits to men, the way a woman does ... We order the statutes to arise, and the laws to be armed with an avenging sword, that those guilty of such infamous crimes ... be subjected to exquisite penalties."

Christianity cemented the transformation of what was once a noble ideal to an infamous crime, what was once enraptured pleasure to an "exquisite" penalty.

And that was just the beginning.

In 533 the emperor of Constantinople extended the death penalty to homosexual acts, translating Judeo-Christian condemnation into legal punishment and institutionalizing homophobia into law.

Soon, sodomy became the worst of all sexual sins. In the definitive canonical statement on sodomy, Thomas Aquinas in the mid-1200s said sex with the wrong gender is second only to murder in its seriousness, suggesting that men preferring sex with other men are a species apart, what Fone calls "a race of sinners." Aquinas felt adultery, incest and rape were preferable to men loving each other because at least those sins result in procreation, God's intention.

The biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah became the basis for the torture, imprisonment and murder of men with same-sex desires. Fone's take on the story is one of the high points of the book. He presents clear and reasoned evidence that the interpretation of one single and very disputed word in the story of Sodom became a license to harvest so much of humanity from the church's killing fields.

The dawn of the 14th century saw Europe's first execution for sodomy. A knife maker was burned alive for engaging in what the church called an act "detested by God." Thousands of executions followed in the next centuries, especially with the Inquisition. In France, officials burned records of sodomy trials along with the perpetrator because the sin was "so hideous that it should not be named."

Fone's biggest flaw, and it is big, is that he writes as if his themes were allergic to chronology. He often jumps back and forth between timelines, an annoying device for the linearly limited. For example, he'll end a chapter on the Middle Ages, skip a couple of centuries ahead, then spend a considerable amount of time back on the Middle Ages again. Somebody needs to take the reverse thruster out of his time-machine rocket.

This back-and-forth may have even confused the author. What else could explain ending Chapter 8 with "... sodomy was increasingly taken to mean sexual acts between persons of the same sex ..." and starting Chapter 9 with "... the Church introduced a powerful new word -- 'sodomy' to name any non-procreative sexual act."

Huh?

At any rate, "sodomite" became an all-purpose epithet to disparage the church's enemies, of which it had many. When Arab armies captured Jerusalem, they labeled Muslims with it. Whole cities would be accused of sodomy. One writer noted that "All Tuscans are drawn to cock." Germans thought Italy, especially Florence, was the "mother of sodomy" and called sodomites "Florenzers."

The church often used the charge of sodomy to acquire wealth and property. Laws were formulated so that conviction of the charge forfeited the perpetrator's assets to the church. In a classic turnabout, King Henry VIII consolidated England's power over the Roman church in much the same way. He created sodomy laws, charged Roman-controlled English churches with the vile practice and shut them down, conveniently forfeiting their wealth to his empire. Charging somebody with sodomy wasn't just an ecclesiastic cleansing, it was a get-rich-quick scheme.

England's shift of authority from church to state meant the adjudication and punishment of sodomy was now a government, not a religious, matter. The unmentionable sin was now a state-defined crime, and it offered up sodomites as a new class of villain -- Enemy of the State.

The Enlightenment saw the European decriminalization of sodomy. Voltaire publicly opposed the death penalty, arguing sodomy was harmless and the Marquis de Sade was one of the earliest and most articulate defenders of tolerating sodomites.

In the late 1800s England reduced the death penalty for sodomy to life in prison. They also removed mention of sodomy and replaced it with "gross indecency," a term with which Oscar Wilde became intimately familiar. England's refusal to even name the act provoked Wilde's lover to write the most famous description of homosexual love: "The love that dare not speak its name."

By the early 1900s the words "homosexual" and "heterosexual," coined by a journalist, became common. Conceptions of homosexuality as a medical problem also emerged then. Now the homosexual wasn't just a sinner and a criminal, he was also medically sick.

After World War I, the military became obsessed with rooting out homosexuals from its ranks. In a 1918 essay, "Homosexuality -- A Military Menace," the writer states "... from a military point of view the homosexualist is not only dangerous but ineffective as a fighter." It wasn't explained then or even now how a homosexual is too weak to fight against the enemy, but too dangerous for his fellow soldiers.

In 1948 the Kinsey Report put homosexuality squarely in the mainstream consciousness of homophobic America, announcing that 37 percent of American males had some homosexual experience and that 4 to 10 percent of American men were exclusively homosexual. The report cleared the benches for a rumble in which Time and Newsweek led the pile-on.

Soon, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that "sexual perverts have infiltrated our government" and were "perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists." By 1950 the federal government had issued a document, "Employment of Homosexuals and other Sex Perverts in Government," setting the stage for yet more labels for homosexuals: Communists, security leaks and, most of all, traitors.

The McCarthy trials, oddly enough, helped spur the creation of the modern homosexual rights movement in the United States. Harry Hay, the founding father of the American homosexual liberation movement, formed the Mattachine Society in 1951 as a response to the trials.

Fone's book pretty much falls apart after that, replacing rigorous research with admonishments and hopes. His take on late 20th century events becomes a list without the fist of insight. Luckily, we're at the end of the book when this happens.

Despite its flaws, "Homophobia: A History" is a major addition to the understanding of the calamity that befell what Greeks thought of as the highest love possible. It's destined to become the tarmac for reconnaissance missions into the future of one of history's longest-running hatreds.

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