JakobVirgil wrote:
my view is that no one was gay before 1950 and that no one was homosexual before 1870.
because those are socially constructed identities.
Of course there was tons of man on man doings before that.
and not just in ancient Rome and Greece but consistently and constantly thru the ages.
But the people involved in said man humping did not see it as their primary identity and marriage was about joining families and producing heirs, something that dude who prefer dude love are as interested in as anyone else.
only after the marriage decayed into companionship and something you do for Love
did the Idea of gay marriage even make sense.
So Gay history should start with the sodomy trail of my hero Oscar and go through Stonewall, AIDS, and Gay civil rights and not really go back to biblical times.
I disagree on a number of scores.
Firstly, there were same sex marriages performed in the classical age. There were a sufficient number of them that Constantine saw fit to prohibit them in the Theodosian Code which would not have been necessary had they not been going on (or had there not been significant demand for them).
From my perspective homosexuality exists well before any social coining of the term. But, what I will grant you is that prior to the 19th century the legal view of homosexuality was one of behavioural determinism. It might be that no one conceived of "sexual orientation" prior to that time, but there were no fewer men whose primary sexual attraction was for other men, (and
mutatis mutandis women as well).
The real change comes, I argue, not with psychological understanding in 19th century, but with economic freedom in the 17th century. Up until that point, people were born into their place in the economy. Most wealth was tied up in land, and one was very much tied to the land that one owned, one farmed, or on which one laboured. The merchant class was extremely small, and even here, children born to merchant families had very little mobility.
But with the growth of cities in the 17th and 18th century came the ability for men to leave the places where they were born and to exploit their labour for wages. This gave men, for the first time, the ability to live independently of paternal control, and the need to marry and have children. The growth of "Molly Houses" in London in the 18th century is ample demonstration of a subculture rooted in male-male sexuality that goes beyond simple behavioural determinism.
I think we are not too far away in our understandings of the issue. Maybe I am being a little too much of a hairsplitter.
I feel the percentage of men attracted to men has been constant but that the social constructs in which such attraction has been expressed continually change.
22 Jul 2011, 2:03 pm
