In Annals of Homosexuality: From Greek to Grim to Gay (note: annals, two ns), Edward Rothstein reviews Louis Crompton’s Homosexuality and Civilization:
It begins in the gladness of early Greece, where homosexuality had an “honored place” for more than a millennium and concludes with the madness of 19th-century Europe. In between is what Mr. Crompton calls a “kaleidoscope of horrors” lasting more than 1,500 years. In the 13th century, a French law stated: “Whoever is proved to be a sodomite shall lose his testicles. And if he does it a second time, he shall lose his member. And if he does it a third time, he shall be burned.” Beginning in 1730 in the Netherlands, 250 trials of “sodomites” took place, followed by at least 75 executions. Between 1806 and 1835, 60 homosexuals were hanged in England.
I guess those first two punishments make it clear what role the “criminal” plays in his third offense…
But what led to this “kaleidoscope of horrors”? In ancient Greece, homosexuality was philosophically praised and institutionally sanctioned, associated with virtues of courage and mentorship. In ancient Rome, it was primarily cultivated in relationships between masters and slaves, but homosexual behavior was common to Pompey, Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavius. “Of the first 15 emperors,” Gibbon pointed out, “Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct.”
I’m having trouble looking beyond my 21st-century American worldview.
Mr. Crompton argues that Christianity created the most radical change in attitudes toward homosexuality. “The debt owed by civilization to Christianity is enormous,” he writes; but so, he believes, have been Christianity’s sins. In Japan, for example, before the mid-19th-century Western influence, homosexuality was “an honored way of life among the country’s religious and military leaders so that its acceptance paralleled, and in some respects even surpassed, ancient Athens.” It was common among Buddhist sages, part of samurai culture and an accepted aspect of the Kabuki theater world.
Homosexuality common in monasteries, the army, and the theater? No! Christianity demonized homosexuality? Seriously, I find it hard to consider Crompton’s theory groundbreaking.
Mr. Crompton traces Christian hostility to Leviticus, which may have been written around 550 B.C., at the very time that homoerotic poetry was thriving in Greece. It mandated death for homosexual acts. Mr. Crompton suggests that this law was an attempt to differentiate the Jews from Mediterranean cults in which transvestite priests, eunuchs and sexual activity played a central role in ritual and worship.
At least church was entertaining back in the Mediterranean cults…
Here’s some history I never read in high school:
Judging from this history, though, prohibition seems to have been unable to quash the practice in any social class; in the European aristocracy, at any rate, it flourished. In 1610, when Louis XIII came to the French throne, Mr. Crompton notes, “one `sodomite,’ James I, ruled England, Scotland, and Ireland; another, Rudolph II, presided over the Holy Roman Empire; and France had its second homosexual king within a generation.”
I suspect the French and English have been saying that about one another’s rulers for a long, long time.