I wonder whether we can distinguish between these two hypotheses:
Formerly, no one (or very nearly no one) regarded homosexuality as a matter of personal identity.
Formerly, people writing books didn’t (openly, at least) regard homosexuality as a matter of personal identity.
I have the impression that until recently most cultures have either (1) regarded same-sex sex as abominable and shameful, or (2) regarded it as a perfectly normal activity for anyone (at least in certain circumstances). In case 1, a few percent of (what we would now call) homosexual people would be best advised to try to avoid being noticed. In case 2, they might be lost in the noise. In neither case is it clear that we’d expect to see much written about (what we would now call) actually homosexual people.
(I am vastly ignorant of history, and would not be very surprised to find that the impression reported in the previous paragraph is wrong.)
We do have writing about people who engage in homosexual activity.
Today being homosexual doesn’t mean “having sex with people of the same sex or even enjoying having sex with people of the same sex”. It’s something much more abstract.
In the middle of the 20st century we seeing a bunch of gay people speaking their own language with Polari. That’s something very strange from many view points of history and given today’s situation of Polari, I don’t think it will take that much time till we’ll also find it strange. At the height of Polari, homosexual activity was illegal.
We do have writing about people who engage in homosexual activity.
Sure. What did I say that suggested I thought or expected otherwise?
being homosexual doesn’t mean “having sex with [...]”
You put that in quotation marks as if I said it or something like it; I didn’t. Of course there is more to being homosexual than having same-sex sex; at the very least homosexuality as understood nowadays involves (1) romantic love as well as sex and (2) a sustained preference for same-sex partners. I’m not sure whether that’s all you’re saying, or whether you’re also saying that (e.g.) there’s a whole lot of history and culture too. If the latter: I agree that there is, but I wouldn’t regard that as strictly part of “homosexual identity”, exactly, nor would I say it seems “obvious” in the same kind of way as the mere existence of homosexuality does (even though maybe in fact until recently there wasn’t any such phenomenon).
Polari
Yes, I agree that that’s a peculiar phenomenon. I think it’s part of the transition from “abominable, shameful and illegal” to “accepted and normal”, via “accepted and normal within a somewhat cohesive albeit marginal group”.
I’m not sure whether any of what you wrote is intended as support for the claim that until recently no one regarded homosexuality as a matter of personal identity (as opposed to the weaker claim that until recently people didn’t record instances of homosexuality being regarded as a matter of personal identity). If it is, I’m afraid I’m not seeing how it works. This may indicate that I’m misunderstanding exactly what meaning the term “homosexual identity” has in your original comment.
Being homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual.
So. Imagine someone—let’s say a man—who is in a long-term romantic and sexual relationship with another man, who has never felt romantically or sexually attracted to women but often has to men, but for whom “identifying as homosexual” is exactly as major a part of his life as “identifying as heterosexual” is for most heterosexual people.
Would you say that that person is, or isn’t, homosexual?
I ask because it’s still not clear to me which of two things you’re saying is now regarded as “obvious” but formerly was largely unknown: (1) homosexual orientation—i.e., people regarding themselves, and being regarded, as primarily attracted to others of the same sex; (2) some stronger notion of homosexual “identity” that involves (e.g.) that identity being a central part of how one consciously identifies oneself, a label that one wears with pride, etc.
I think #1 is certainly widely regarded as “obvious” now and may well have been extremely rare in the past, though for the reasons I’ve given above I am not yet fully convinced that it was extremely rare in the past. I think #2 is certainly a thing that happens now but I’m not sure it’s regarded as “obvious” in the same way (and suspect that if “homosexual identity” is a bigger thing than “heterosexual identity” it’s largely because that’s what often happens with persecuted minorities, and that if—as currently seems likely—society moves further in the direction of treating homosexuality as no weirder or worse than lefthandedness then “homosexual identity” will become less of a big deal). So #2 may be a transient thing.
Incidentally, I see my comments here are getting some downvotes. If whoever’s making them would like to tell me why, there’s a better chance of fixing whatever (if anything) is broken; on rereading what I wrote, I don’t see anything obviously stupid or objectionable in it.
Would you say that that person is, or isn’t, homosexual?
I’m not talking about whether or not the person is homosexual but as whether the person identifies as homosexual.
exactly as major a part of his life as “identifying as heterosexual” is for most heterosexual people.
Of course heterosexual identity mirrors homosexuality identity. Those are two sides of the same coin.
Heterosexual is a word invented in the 20st century.
It also comes with some baggage that considers male to male physical intimacy like hand holding abnormal while that kind of physical intimacy between friends was perfectly normal before the 19st century.
In the 19st century males started to stop engaging in actions such as hand holding with male friends to signal that they aren’t homosexual. There’s frequently latent homophobia that get’s triggered via male to male physical intimacy.
In the contact improvisation scene most people don’t have that. Male to male physical intimacy is perfectly fine in that scene. There you have people who value authentic expression instead of playing out roles.
In the contact improvisation scene most people don’t have that. Male to male physical intimacy is perfectly fine in that scene. There you have people who value authentic expression instead of playing out roles.
Authentic expression, or just different roles? I’m fairly sure that if I was involved in contact improvisation, it would be the latter for me. That is, these are the customs I see here, so while I am here, I will adopt these customs.
It seems to me that authentic expression is not in opposition to roles, but is orthogonal to them, just as in speech, truthfulness is orthogonal to the language being spoken.
Authentic expression, or just different roles? I’m fairly sure that if I was involved in contact improvisation, it would be the latter for me. That is, these are the customs I see here, so while I am here, I will adopt these customs.
The contact scene does value authenticity very much. If you simply go there, you might start out with trying to copy a role but you would be doing things wrong.
Authenticity is also not something that’s easily faked if you dance with people with good physical perception.
Being authentic changes the presence that you have.
I’m not talking about whether or not the person is homosexual but whether the person identifies as homosexual.
But what you said was: “Being homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual.” and that’s what I was asking about. Did you actually mean “Identifying as homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual”? ’Cos if so, it’s probably true but doesn’t seem very interesting.
It seems to me that the idea of homosexual identity and the idea of homosexual orientation should be expected to have opposite effects on how much men with an insecure sense of their own masculinity would worry about physical contact with other men.
The concept of homosexual orientation gives them the ability to worry that they might be homosexual, not merely that they might have some attraction to men.
The concept of homosexual identity, on the other hand, gives them the ability to say “well, yes, I’m doing this, but I’m not one of Them” on account of “Them” having a clear boundary rather than just a matter of having one or another set of propensities.
Empirically, it does indeed seem that the emergence of both those things has come along with a new reluctance on men’s part to engage in nonsexual physical intimacy with other men; I suggest it’s the idea of homosexual orientation, not the idea of some stronger sort of homosexual identity, that’s more likely a cause.
(Does anyone have good estimates of (1) when men started being reluctant to engage in physical contact with other men, (2) when the idea of homosexual orientation first emerged, and (3) when the stronger notion of homosexual identity first emerged? According to the OED, the English word “homosexual” seems first to have appeared in 1892, in an English translation of Krafft-Ebing. According to Wikipedia, K-E’s use of the term (in German) is anticipated by a an anti-anti-sodomy pamphlet in 1869. Of course the word and the concept may have different histories.)
On this topic, “Love Stories” by Jonathan Katz is an informative source of western social developments around sexual orientation in the 19th century. There’s a particular focus on Walt Whitman (I think it was developed from a paper or lecture on the guy), but with plenty of focus on wider social mores and changes therein.
(1) I believe the turn of the century is when it started shifting in a big way in the United states, but this is a particularly finicky thing to measure and really contingent on geography. In the 1880s, it was still routine for a male visitor to a house to share his bed with other male residents in most places in the US. I am pretty sure it was unusual in by World War 2.
(2)The word was invented by what we would now think of as pro-gay activists in mid 19th century Germany, with the specific goal of creating a concept to describe people with innate, enduring preferences for both sexual and romantic couplings with the same sex. (There was also a fair bit of conflation with what we would now call transgenderism or intersex individuals, with homosexual men having a ‘feminized seed’.) The concept didn’t really cross the language barrier or the Atlantic ocean until about the last decade of the 19th century.
(3)The oldest real example I can think of is Plato’s symposium, the myth of Aristophanes. This myth (purporting to explain the origins of romantic love) describes an ur-human race with two faces, four arms, four legs, etc. Some of these had two male or two female, and some had one of each. The gods, being wrathful blokes, cut these ur-humans down the middle, and the two halves are reborn and spend their lives looking for the rest of their body- literally, their ‘other half’. Those with originally all-male or all-female bodies look for the match among members of the same sex, providing a mythological basis for a positive identity much like modern homosexuality. (Note that ancient Greeks in general didn’t seem to take this view as a consensus, often outlawing homosexuality between adult men even as they endorsed homosexual pederasty.)
I believe the turn of the century is when it started shifting in a big way in the United states, but this is a particularly finicky thing to measure and really contingent on geography. In the 1880s, it was still routine for a male visitor to a house to share his bed with other male residents in most places in the US. I am pretty sure it was unusual in by World War 2.
That’s mostly a function of society becoming affluent enough that people could afford to have a spare bed for when visitors come over.
as major a part of his life as “identifying as heterosexual” is for most heterosexual people.
That’s a much more major part of certain heterosexual people’s life than of others, and I’m not sure where the median is (assuming you mean “most” literally).
Agreed. (I agree it varies, and I too am not sure where the median is.) But I take it that if ChristianKI is arguing #2 rather than #1 then he sees “homosexual identity” as a bigger thing than “heterosexual identity” in some sense, and my wording was intended to invite him to consider someone for whom that isn’t so. I can’t nail down the details because I don’t know in exactly what sense Christian (conditional on his intending #2 not #1) does consider homosexual identity a bigger thing than heterosexual identity.
Eric Raymond has a fairly good description of historical attitudes towards homosexuality here.
Edit: here is the key paragraph:
But in the other, older model, pederasty and domination sex are considered more “normal” than romantic homosexuality. In cultures with this model, the “top” in an episode of pederasty or domination sex is not necessarily considered homosexual or deviant at all; any stigma attaches to the passive partner. Romantic homosexuality is considered far more perverse, because it feminizes both partners. I think of this as the “classical” construction of homosexuality, as it describes the attitudes of ancient Rome – but it persists in cultures as near to our own as South America and the Mediterranean littoral.
First, let me be clear that I’m deriving my tentative conclusions from considering (translated) primary sources – graffitti preserved in Pompeii, descriptions of the penalties for cross-dressing in Norse sagas, the lampoons of Catullus, and Japanese accounts of homoeroticism among the samurai are among those I’m familiiar with. Closer to the present day, I have read ethnological sources on homosexuality among the Afghans and in the modern Arab world, and made at least one relevant observation first-hand a few years back, in the red-light district of Bangkok.
There are plenty of comprehensive histories of queerness. ESR just won’t read or believe any of them.
I’m emphasizing primary sources because this is one of many, many areas where contemporary scholarship is severely corrupted by politics; it is probably no longer possible to achieve tenure at a major American university after giving offense to the homosexual-activist lobby.
If you have enough primary sources relative to what the secondary sources have, and if your overall grasp of the issue is as good as that of the authors of the secondary sources.
On the other hand, if what you have is what the paragraph quoted by paper-machine suggests, and if you’ve not devoted months of thought and study to the issue (which ESR may or may not have done), it could easily be the case that you’d learn a great deal more if you paid attention to some good secondary sources.
If you have enough primary sources relative to what the secondary sources have, and if your overall grasp of the issue is as good as that of the authors of the secondary sources.
Assuming the authors of the secondary sources are interested in presenting an accurate account, as opposed believing it is there duty to lie for the “greater good”.
Yup, assuming that. Or at least assuming you can discern any lies well enough that on balance you still benefit from reading. Which is the same thing as you have to assume when reading anything else.
Just out of curiosity, have you made a careful examination of primary sources in order to tell us that
Eric Raymond has a fairly good description of historical attitudes towards homosexuality
(as opposed to, e.g., a plausible-sounding description that has been fudged “for the greater good”, or that is inaccurate because the selection of sources Eric Raymond happens to have encountered gives a misleading picture, or that is inaccurate because Eric Raymond has misunderstood something or jumped to conclusions that fit his own biases, or whatever)?
… Or is it only people on one side of any argument who should be expected to lie for the greater good, expected not to be interested in truth, and so forth?
Homosexual identity. Over much of human history men and woman did engage in homosexual activity but they didn’t made it a matter of personal identity.
I wonder whether we can distinguish between these two hypotheses:
Formerly, no one (or very nearly no one) regarded homosexuality as a matter of personal identity.
Formerly, people writing books didn’t (openly, at least) regard homosexuality as a matter of personal identity.
I have the impression that until recently most cultures have either (1) regarded same-sex sex as abominable and shameful, or (2) regarded it as a perfectly normal activity for anyone (at least in certain circumstances). In case 1, a few percent of (what we would now call) homosexual people would be best advised to try to avoid being noticed. In case 2, they might be lost in the noise. In neither case is it clear that we’d expect to see much written about (what we would now call) actually homosexual people.
(I am vastly ignorant of history, and would not be very surprised to find that the impression reported in the previous paragraph is wrong.)
We do have writing about people who engage in homosexual activity.
Today being homosexual doesn’t mean “having sex with people of the same sex or even enjoying having sex with people of the same sex”. It’s something much more abstract.
In the middle of the 20st century we seeing a bunch of gay people speaking their own language with Polari. That’s something very strange from many view points of history and given today’s situation of Polari, I don’t think it will take that much time till we’ll also find it strange. At the height of Polari, homosexual activity was illegal.
Sure. What did I say that suggested I thought or expected otherwise?
You put that in quotation marks as if I said it or something like it; I didn’t. Of course there is more to being homosexual than having same-sex sex; at the very least homosexuality as understood nowadays involves (1) romantic love as well as sex and (2) a sustained preference for same-sex partners. I’m not sure whether that’s all you’re saying, or whether you’re also saying that (e.g.) there’s a whole lot of history and culture too. If the latter: I agree that there is, but I wouldn’t regard that as strictly part of “homosexual identity”, exactly, nor would I say it seems “obvious” in the same kind of way as the mere existence of homosexuality does (even though maybe in fact until recently there wasn’t any such phenomenon).
Yes, I agree that that’s a peculiar phenomenon. I think it’s part of the transition from “abominable, shameful and illegal” to “accepted and normal”, via “accepted and normal within a somewhat cohesive albeit marginal group”.
I’m not sure whether any of what you wrote is intended as support for the claim that until recently no one regarded homosexuality as a matter of personal identity (as opposed to the weaker claim that until recently people didn’t record instances of homosexuality being regarded as a matter of personal identity). If it is, I’m afraid I’m not seeing how it works. This may indicate that I’m misunderstanding exactly what meaning the term “homosexual identity” has in your original comment.
Being homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual.
I have a sustained preference to wear glaces but wearing glasses isn’t part of my self identity. I don’t think of myself as a glass wearer.
So. Imagine someone—let’s say a man—who is in a long-term romantic and sexual relationship with another man, who has never felt romantically or sexually attracted to women but often has to men, but for whom “identifying as homosexual” is exactly as major a part of his life as “identifying as heterosexual” is for most heterosexual people.
Would you say that that person is, or isn’t, homosexual?
I ask because it’s still not clear to me which of two things you’re saying is now regarded as “obvious” but formerly was largely unknown: (1) homosexual orientation—i.e., people regarding themselves, and being regarded, as primarily attracted to others of the same sex; (2) some stronger notion of homosexual “identity” that involves (e.g.) that identity being a central part of how one consciously identifies oneself, a label that one wears with pride, etc.
I think #1 is certainly widely regarded as “obvious” now and may well have been extremely rare in the past, though for the reasons I’ve given above I am not yet fully convinced that it was extremely rare in the past. I think #2 is certainly a thing that happens now but I’m not sure it’s regarded as “obvious” in the same way (and suspect that if “homosexual identity” is a bigger thing than “heterosexual identity” it’s largely because that’s what often happens with persecuted minorities, and that if—as currently seems likely—society moves further in the direction of treating homosexuality as no weirder or worse than lefthandedness then “homosexual identity” will become less of a big deal). So #2 may be a transient thing.
Incidentally, I see my comments here are getting some downvotes. If whoever’s making them would like to tell me why, there’s a better chance of fixing whatever (if anything) is broken; on rereading what I wrote, I don’t see anything obviously stupid or objectionable in it.
I’m not talking about whether or not the person is homosexual but as whether the person identifies as homosexual.
Of course heterosexual identity mirrors homosexuality identity. Those are two sides of the same coin. Heterosexual is a word invented in the 20st century.
It also comes with some baggage that considers male to male physical intimacy like hand holding abnormal while that kind of physical intimacy between friends was perfectly normal before the 19st century.
In the 19st century males started to stop engaging in actions such as hand holding with male friends to signal that they aren’t homosexual. There’s frequently latent homophobia that get’s triggered via male to male physical intimacy.
In the contact improvisation scene most people don’t have that. Male to male physical intimacy is perfectly fine in that scene. There you have people who value authentic expression instead of playing out roles.
Authentic expression, or just different roles? I’m fairly sure that if I was involved in contact improvisation, it would be the latter for me. That is, these are the customs I see here, so while I am here, I will adopt these customs.
It seems to me that authentic expression is not in opposition to roles, but is orthogonal to them, just as in speech, truthfulness is orthogonal to the language being spoken.
The contact scene does value authenticity very much. If you simply go there, you might start out with trying to copy a role but you would be doing things wrong.
Authenticity is also not something that’s easily faked if you dance with people with good physical perception. Being authentic changes the presence that you have.
But what you said was: “Being homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual.” and that’s what I was asking about. Did you actually mean “Identifying as homosexual is today about making a choice to identify as homosexual”? ’Cos if so, it’s probably true but doesn’t seem very interesting.
It seems to me that the idea of homosexual identity and the idea of homosexual orientation should be expected to have opposite effects on how much men with an insecure sense of their own masculinity would worry about physical contact with other men.
The concept of homosexual orientation gives them the ability to worry that they might be homosexual, not merely that they might have some attraction to men.
The concept of homosexual identity, on the other hand, gives them the ability to say “well, yes, I’m doing this, but I’m not one of Them” on account of “Them” having a clear boundary rather than just a matter of having one or another set of propensities.
Empirically, it does indeed seem that the emergence of both those things has come along with a new reluctance on men’s part to engage in nonsexual physical intimacy with other men; I suggest it’s the idea of homosexual orientation, not the idea of some stronger sort of homosexual identity, that’s more likely a cause.
(Does anyone have good estimates of (1) when men started being reluctant to engage in physical contact with other men, (2) when the idea of homosexual orientation first emerged, and (3) when the stronger notion of homosexual identity first emerged? According to the OED, the English word “homosexual” seems first to have appeared in 1892, in an English translation of Krafft-Ebing. According to Wikipedia, K-E’s use of the term (in German) is anticipated by a an anti-anti-sodomy pamphlet in 1869. Of course the word and the concept may have different histories.)
On this topic, “Love Stories” by Jonathan Katz is an informative source of western social developments around sexual orientation in the 19th century. There’s a particular focus on Walt Whitman (I think it was developed from a paper or lecture on the guy), but with plenty of focus on wider social mores and changes therein.
(1) I believe the turn of the century is when it started shifting in a big way in the United states, but this is a particularly finicky thing to measure and really contingent on geography. In the 1880s, it was still routine for a male visitor to a house to share his bed with other male residents in most places in the US. I am pretty sure it was unusual in by World War 2.
(2)The word was invented by what we would now think of as pro-gay activists in mid 19th century Germany, with the specific goal of creating a concept to describe people with innate, enduring preferences for both sexual and romantic couplings with the same sex. (There was also a fair bit of conflation with what we would now call transgenderism or intersex individuals, with homosexual men having a ‘feminized seed’.) The concept didn’t really cross the language barrier or the Atlantic ocean until about the last decade of the 19th century.
(3)The oldest real example I can think of is Plato’s symposium, the myth of Aristophanes. This myth (purporting to explain the origins of romantic love) describes an ur-human race with two faces, four arms, four legs, etc. Some of these had two male or two female, and some had one of each. The gods, being wrathful blokes, cut these ur-humans down the middle, and the two halves are reborn and spend their lives looking for the rest of their body- literally, their ‘other half’. Those with originally all-male or all-female bodies look for the match among members of the same sex, providing a mythological basis for a positive identity much like modern homosexuality. (Note that ancient Greeks in general didn’t seem to take this view as a consensus, often outlawing homosexuality between adult men even as they endorsed homosexual pederasty.)
That’s mostly a function of society becoming affluent enough that people could afford to have a spare bed for when visitors come over.
Also, see Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heteroxexuality by Hanne Blank.
After all, if homosexuality wasn’t a mental category, heterosexuality couldn’t be, either.
That’s a much more major part of certain heterosexual people’s life than of others, and I’m not sure where the median is (assuming you mean “most” literally).
Agreed. (I agree it varies, and I too am not sure where the median is.) But I take it that if ChristianKI is arguing #2 rather than #1 then he sees “homosexual identity” as a bigger thing than “heterosexual identity” in some sense, and my wording was intended to invite him to consider someone for whom that isn’t so. I can’t nail down the details because I don’t know in exactly what sense Christian (conditional on his intending #2 not #1) does consider homosexual identity a bigger thing than heterosexual identity.
Um, those kinds of low status with shades of criminality subcultures have had separate dialects for quite a long time.
Note: I found the above link as the first link from Wikipedia’s article on Polari.
Eric Raymond has a fairly good description of historical attitudes towards homosexuality here.
Edit: here is the key paragraph:
ESR’s not basing his “analysis” on anywhere near enough evidence. His claim that he is working from “primary sources” is laughable at best.
And your criticism of his analysis is based on...
Would be improved by more explicit comment on what for you would count as enough evidence and using primary sources.
(That isn’t a coded way of saying you’re wrong.)
There are plenty of comprehensive histories of queerness. ESR just won’t read or believe any of them.
Yes, primary sources screen out secondary sources.
If you have enough primary sources relative to what the secondary sources have, and if your overall grasp of the issue is as good as that of the authors of the secondary sources.
On the other hand, if what you have is what the paragraph quoted by paper-machine suggests, and if you’ve not devoted months of thought and study to the issue (which ESR may or may not have done), it could easily be the case that you’d learn a great deal more if you paid attention to some good secondary sources.
Assuming the authors of the secondary sources are interested in presenting an accurate account, as opposed believing it is there duty to lie for the “greater good”.
Yup, assuming that. Or at least assuming you can discern any lies well enough that on balance you still benefit from reading. Which is the same thing as you have to assume when reading anything else.
Just out of curiosity, have you made a careful examination of primary sources in order to tell us that
(as opposed to, e.g., a plausible-sounding description that has been fudged “for the greater good”, or that is inaccurate because the selection of sources Eric Raymond happens to have encountered gives a misleading picture, or that is inaccurate because Eric Raymond has misunderstood something or jumped to conclusions that fit his own biases, or whatever)?
… Or is it only people on one side of any argument who should be expected to lie for the greater good, expected not to be interested in truth, and so forth?
Not as careful as Eric but what I have seen agrees with him.
And what sources do you have?