Towards a brief history of homosexuality

[MadArchitect]

Asana Bodhitharta: The comparison is inappropriate simply because being black or being a women are not issues of "social activity" they are visual and actual states of being.But you do realize, of course, that the whole idea behind sexuality as an identity tends towards the premise that one's sexuality is an inextricable part of their being. If you begin with the premise that your sexuality is an aspect of your identity, then you see the behavior not in isolation from any part of who you are, but rather as an extension of who you are.In one sense, the difference between viewing sexuality as identity and seeing sexuality exclusively as behavior is a difference in the way that people direct their point of view. If you see sexuality as a form of behavior only, then it becomes possible to look at one's behavior from the vantage of retrospect and draw conclusions in that manner. If you see sexuality as identity, then you can view those conclusions from the beginning, before any behavior, because the tendency towards that behavior is a given.Those who hold that sexuality is an inextricable element of identity probably don't see much difference in saying that women will tend to behave in certain ways because they are women and in saying that homosexuals will behave in certain ways because they are homosexuals. It's only when you assume that behavior is the key to defining sexuality that you can say that "social activity" is the feature which distinguishes sexuality from gender.For instance you have no actual way of identifying a gay person. Anyone can be gay without you recognizing it.Anyone can have tourettes without you recognizing it. It's only when they act in a particular way that you have tourettes. That doesn't mean they wouldn't still have tourettes if yoe never happened to recognize it.I don't want to downplay the significance of that particular difference between sexuality and race or gender. Of course it makes a difference that we're able to make certain judgements about a person based on color or gender within the first split second of meeting a person. But I don't think that necessarily discredits the analogy between race/gender and sexuality that's apparantly contributed to the modern notion of sexuality as identity.Me: If the criteria is simply that some aspect of their social persona is being used as a basis for discrimination, then I'd say they've got a pretty good argument on their side.[/i]Asana: The fact is their is no real basis for claiming discrimination.You're probably going to need to clarify what you mean by that. On the face of it, it looks as though you're suggesting that people aren't routinely discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation. In a nation where people have been denied work, denied health benefits, imprisoned and beaten to death on the basis of their professed sexuality, I'd say that's a pretty startling claim.It really doesn't matter how or why someone is homosexual the point is it need not be a socially acceptable behaviour.For that matter, overt heterosexuality need not be deemed socially acceptable behavior.Saint Gasoline: This is because, obviously, the distinction between genders is quite important on a biological level.I think that there are cultural factors that have lead to an emphasis on gender difference that isn't really grounded in biological necessity, but that really falls outside the scope of this discussion.Race has become a method of identification because of its newfound importance once people started organizing themselves into tribes and societies (which usually consisted of people of the same race with similar physical characteristics, naturally).I don't know.... It seems to me that race has taken on a character and importance in recent history that it didn't really have before. I suspect that this may have a lot to do with the rise of nationalism and the appropriation of race as a basis for forging national identity. Whatever the case, it doesn't look as though racial characteristics were as important to previous cultures as it is in modern industrialized nations.I think the problem with sexuality as an identifying characteristic is that it leads to more stereotyping and generalizations.It goes both ways, I suppose. The solidification of sexuality into identity has allowed groups to take control of stereotypes to a degree, to manage their own PR, as I've suggested before. Federika22: What would be an interesting digression to me is to study the impact the bible has had on homosexuality, and sexuality in general.I think there's probably something to the suggestion that Biblical morality (and specifically Christian -- perhaps, more specifically, Protestant) is one of the pressures that ultimately gave rise to the idea of sexuality as identity. One way this could have happened is, that the promotion of viewing a particular sexual act as a basis of judging the entire course of a person's existence (and this pertains more to Christian eschatology than Judaic, I'd say) suggested to some minds the extension of an isolated sex act along the whole line of a person's life. That is, in the interests of summing up a person's moral standing, a single act of sodomy could be seen as permeating the whole of a person's life, despite the act's actual limitation to a particular, brief span of time. I doubt that accounts for much, but it may contribute to our understanding of the reconceptualization of sexuality.

[Federika22]

MadArchitect:Quote:Have there been any such cases, prior to the origination of sexuality as identity, some time in the early days of psychology? None that I know of, but the may be extenuating circumstances. For one thing, the idea of marriage was almost certainly more utilitarian at the time, and the romantic ideal of a marriage premised on sensual love was only just then taking hold. That shifting notion of marriage may have actually played some part in giving rise to the new notion of sexuality. (I'm just tossing out ideas here.)Great ideas...I think this is fascinating stuff! It would be interesting to find out about the sexual habits of married peoples before the idea of marrying for love took root. There must be some information about homosexual behavior during, say, the slavery era? That's not very far back. If marriage was for running a household, breeding little workers, etc perhaps it was common for men to have outside sexual experiences, some of which surely included other men. And since homosexual behavior was frowned upon by the church it would have been very discreet. So if the homosexual identity was created primarily so men could marry their love interest, this would not have proved as troublesome back when marriage had nothing to do with our modern idea of love.

[Dissident Heart]

Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family[/u] by Rosemary Radford Ruether Quote:From BooklistIn lucidly accounting for the social construction of the modern family and its sacralization by the Christian right, Ruether is characteristically direct. She begins by juxtaposing a Focus on the Family description of Jesus as "founder of homes" and "creator of families" with Jesus' insistence, in Luke's Gospel, that any disciple of his must hate father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, and even his or her own life. She concludes by articulating a reimagining of families as structurally diverse "redemptive communities," grounded in friendship, in which making love is "a means of grace for redemptive life." In between, she surveys the transformation of early Christianity's socially critical, politically subversive perspective on the family into the Christian right's defensive regard for the Victorian family as normative. Ruether combines careful scholarship, theological reflection, and passionate vision, and her suggested alternative to the family model that the Christian right favors and would make injunctive will ring true to those living in a world where both Christianity and families are diverse. Steven SchroederCopyright

[Federika22]

Dissident, this looks like a very interesting book. Thanks for posting the info. Another one to add to my list!

[Magnolia42]

Wow, what an interesting discussion. I can't pretend to know the complete origins of sexuality as a "fixed identity," but I do have some thoughts on the origins of personal identity, and maybe that's where it starts, grass roots.When people feel like they don't fit in, they tend to gravitate toward others they think are like them. There is strength in numbers. When people start to realize that they are not alone, that there are others out there like them, they begin to identify with that group. It's partly a defense mechanism.MadArchitect mentioned nationalism before, and you can partly relate it to that. You could also relate it to kids joining street gangs and neo-Nazi groups, even sororities and fraternities (in whose subculture a "Beautiful" can indeed be called an identity). _____________Trip with me...www.readertravels.com

[MadArchitect]

Interesting that you should bring up neo-Nazism. I'm currently reading a book about the rise of neo-Nazi "gangs" in modern America (specifically in the Portland, Oregon area). The author's biographical sketch of several of the group's members does seem to indicate that their affiliation as skinheads is related in part to their isolation as individuals. But I don't know how well we can relate that to homosexuality as a fixed identity.For one thing, fixed sexuality was not, initially, a voluntary form of identification. As far as I know, the idea that sexuality was a part of a fixed identity was originally put forward by psychologists, which makes it something of an academic -- perhaps even scientific -- hypothesis.

[Magnolia42]

Of course, I prefaced my post with a disclaimer that I wasn't really talking about fixed identity but personal identity. Just offering food for thought.The notion that psychologists started it sure makes a lot of sense. Psychology has a tendency to brand, diagnose and label all sorts of behaviors. And by labeling their philosophies as "science" they have greatly impacted the way we think in more areas than sexuality. _____________Trip with me...www.readertravels.com

[MadArchitect]

This conversation -- which several people have said is of interest to them -- seems to have ground to a halt, so I thought I'd throw out a rather random thought, one that doesn't have me entirely convinced, but which might serve as food for thought.I can't recall who made the suggestion, but someone on BookTalk, in another thread, once suggested that rise and fall of the homosexual percentage of a population might be related to the stresses of over- and under- population. In other words, that when a given society is over-populated, some environmental cue might activate some genetic predisposition to homosexuality in a certain percentage of the population. That would ease the reproductive burden to some extent since there would be fewer "breeders," to co-opt a derogatory term, and would conceivably shift the emphasis towards the care of the infants that were being born -- assuming that Richard Wright is correct that non-reproducing kin tend to divert their energy towards the offspring of their family members. Likewise, during period of underpopulation (however you might determine "underpopulation"), some environmental catalyst would decrease the percentage of homosexuals in the population, thereby diverting manpower to the task of repopulating.There are all sorts of difficulties with that scenario -- for instance, what sort of environmental catalyst would cause such changes? -- but I does have a certain gleam of reason to it. The suggestion I want to make is that these shifts don't necessarily have to happen on the genetic level.Suppose, rather, that sexuality is more fluid than we generally conceive it in the modern era -- that is, people typically will not tend towards absolute heterosexuality or absolute homosexuality. The corollary might be that sexuality is, in some part, responsive to social pressures. As such, shifts over time in the percentage of a population which is consistently homosexual might occur in response to social pressures. That is, a person who, under other social circumstances, might display any range of sexual behaviors, might adopt a fixed homosexual identity in response to social conditions x, y and z. Some of those conditions might include a general social anxiety caused by the perception of overpopulation.As I said above, I'm not entirely convinced of that myself, but one advantage of that formulation over the genetic formulation, as I see it, is that the social explanation provides a clearer mechanism. To wit, what biological or environmental processes could be expansive and sensitive enough to determine overpopulation, and how would the "message" that a society is overpopulated trigger a gene for homosexuality? It seems a great deal simpler to suppose that social triggers could be at play, particularly since a society is capable of articulating the notion of overpopulation.

[Magnolia42]

I've heard of studies with mouse populations where a higher percentage of mice started having sex with mice of the same gender when lower resources and over-population were introduced. I don't know the facts about said studies, but I have often thought of sexuality in terms of chemistry, specifically secretion of and reaction to pheromones. Pheromones can be very powerful. For instance, groups of women who live together will often start menstruating on the same cycle as a reaction to each other's pheromones.Though I'm no biologist, I would suspect that pheromones could change as a reaction to certain environmental and emotional factors. Just follow your nose. _____________Trip with me...www.readertravels.com

[shawnrohrbach]

I enjoy talking with the intolerant bible thumpers who quote the few mis-translated passages that reference what we moderns have come to think was abject homosexuality, but really do not. I allow them to pass anyway at face value and then ask them how many references are there in the Old and New Testaments to the spiritual merits (NAY demands for) poverty, and how many in comparison are there in reference to the sinful nature of homosexuality. The last time I went through this I believe the ratio is 15 (for poverty) to 1 (stating homosexuality is specifically wrong) My conclusion has always been amassing wealth was a bigger negative to Jesus than two guys falling in live and living together.