David Benkof Continues to Deliver

People like Camille Paglia and David Benkof can tell you what the "homosexual community" is like from the inside. Benkof has long provided thoughtful material when it comes to public policy on things like marriage and family, and homosexuality as an identity.

For several years, Benkof had something online that I found here (bugs in the text... I don't know what to do about them):




https://web.archive.org/web/20120120051523/http://www.gaysdefendmarriage.com/ten-scholars/

Nine Scholars 

In preparing for an April Jerusalem Post column entitled “God didn’t make me gay,” I surveyed twenty experts in gay and lesbian history and eight experts in gay and lesbian anthropology. I asked them whether they agreed with the following statement:

“Being gay is pretty much a naturally occurring sexual orientation that has existed throughout history. Every society and culture has always had a minority of gay and lesbian members, whether they come out or not.”

I call that statement the Essentialist Credo, because I think there’s a broad consensus in the LGBT community that it’s true. I wanted to find out whether there was a similar consensus in the scholarly community of people who study homosexuality across space and time.

Only four of those surveyed (all history specialists) said they agreed with the statement. The other 86% disagreed with the statement.

I’ve included nine of the most interesting explanations below. Please note that most of those surveyed aren’t saying nobody was “called” gay before the 19th century. They’re mostly saying nobody *was* gay, at least as far as sexual orientation and a “gay minority” is concerned. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t same-sex sex, love, and relationships. Everybody agrees about that. But the people engaged in those activities had experiences that were so different that it’s fair to say there weren’t people oriented toward members of the same sex in eras past like there are today.

Note: some of the quotes below have been edited for length.

1. Mary Weismantel, professor of anthropology

Northwestern University

Teaches a course on “Research Methods in the Study of Sexuality”

In the past in Europe, for example, ‘sodomy’ – a broad term that usually referred to anal penetration, but could include all kinds of other things – was thought to be abhorrent. But a person who engaged in it wasn’t demonstrating a specific ‘sexual orientation’, they were just sinning. The notion that there are some people who ‘are’ gay, or ‘have’ a particular orientation, is something specific to the modern era. It’s also confusing for us to realize that in many other countries around the world, people may condemn ‘homosexuality’ or ‘gays’, but think that specific kinds of same-sex activities, such as young men having sexual encounters during sporting events, for example, or wealthy older men keeping a young boy, is just fine and doesn’t mean someone is ‘gay’.

And there are many other examples of sexual variation and the ways that people condemn, condone, or approve of it. Some favorites of the gay community include the idea that Native Americans once had a spritiual category called ‘two spirit’ that recognized androgyny; that some societies in Papua New Guinea had secret religious rituals that involved fellatio; and of course the ancient Greeks with their man-boy love. However, each of these cases are considerably more complicated than the “oh, look, there’s a society that worshipped gays’ gloss that it often gets in popular gay media.
The best way to think about sexual diversity - at least to start with - is with Freud’s idea that babies are born ‘polymorphous perverse’, i.e. able and eager to experience all kinds of bodily sensations, but unable to categorize or understand them. The adults and children around the baby immediately start teaching it how to understand its body, and its physical interactions with the rest of the world: they teach it their culture’s version of what’s normal, or normativity. Almost everyone has to struggle a little bit to get their particular bodily responses to fit into the normal, and for some people it’s harder than others. But whether that means that people are angry with you because you refuse to engage in same-sex sex, or because you want to do it and it’s forbidden ... that really depends on the time and the place you’re in.

2. Claire Potter, chair, American studies

Wesleyan University

Teaches post-Stonewall queer thought

Homosexuality is a product of modern forms of classification, inquiry and identity formation. Homosexuality was not invented until the late 1880′s (preceding by a hair the invention of heterosexuality), and has articulated itself differently in the law, in science, in culture and in politics over the course of the last 125 years. Identities formed around the words “gay” or “lesbian,” while they appear irregularly, are also a product of modern scientific and social classification. If, by gay, you mean expressions of same sex sexuality, or same sex love, the idea that it happened in “nature” is a retrospective view, and not something that was attendant to most of human history…. Bluestockings in the United States (i.e., women who became educated and pioneered higher education for women) sometimes saw their “smashes” as a stopping place on the way to “mature” relations with men.

3. Nancy Unger, associate professor of history

Santa Clara University

Author, “Teaching ‘Straight’ Gay and Lesbian History”

I wouldn’t describe all people throughout history who carried out same-sex sexual relations as “gay” or “lesbian” because those terms indicate a relatively recent identity and sensibility.

I don’t think it’s just a matter of semantics when a person says the ancient Greeks weren’t gay. By that, they don’t mean to deny that Greek men had sex with other Greek men, but are making the point that in their society, that didn’t make them “gay” in the current sense of the term. That is, if an older man had a relationship with a younger man that included sex, he wasn’t then identified as a “homosexual.” Same sex relations between men were based in a complicated series of factors including age and social and military status. They bore no relation to what we would call today a “gay lifestyle.”

As early as the 1600s, we have evidence of same-sex relations between colonists, but no one identified them as “homosexuals,” nor did they identify themselves that way. It was more something that they DID, it did not define who they WERE. American society, like most agrarian societies, was based on the heterosexual family as the economic as well as social foundation. The modern notion of “gay” and “lesbian” really wasn’t possible before the wage system and the development of an urban industrial society.

One more thing–early in the HIV/AIDS crisis in the US, the distinction between “gay” and “same sex activity” led to the virus’s spread. The warning by the CDC said that gay men spread the disease. Men who didn’t consider themselves gay, because they were married to women, didn’t live the gay lifestyle, and only occasionally had sex with another man, then figured they weren’t at risk. So they kept have same-sex sex, then had sex with their wives (and/or other women) and so the disease spread. The CDC changed its language to the more explicit “exchange of bodily fluids” and that made a real difference. So identity, semantics – it all matters.

4. Laura Doan, professor of cultural history and sexuality studies

University of Manchester

Author, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture

As a scholar of identity-based sexual history, this sentence is problematic because of its ‘presentist’ assumptions and formulations. Notions such as "gay," "sexual orientation," or minority do not begin to circulate in public culture until the middle of the 20th century, and we are already witnessing a decline in their usefulness.  My current students, by and large, would opt for other labels to characterize their sexuality—and many students who once would have identified as ‘gay’ no longer see themselves as part of a minority culture.  The notion of ‘coming out’ assumes that one possesses an identity that can or cannot be disclosed to others—and again, I think this cultural idea will come to be associated with a particular cultural era of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The proposition that ‘sexual orientation’ is natural is somewhat oxymoronic.  ‘Orientation’ takes place within culture, so it’s already ‘social/cultural’ rather than ‘natural.’ Â

It is evident that there have always been same-sex erotic attractions, and individuals of the past have had sexual relations with others same sexed (or apparently same sexed). To characterize these experiences as ‘gay’ is to lock them down to one formulation that resonates for us now, but may not have signified in similar ways then.

5. David K. Johnson, professor of history

University of South Florida

Expert, gays and the Cold War

To say that “gay” people or a “gay minority” has always existed in every society is simplistic and ahistorical. The whole notion of sexuality as a constitutive part of our being – something that defines who we are and therefore might set us apart from others – is a modern, Western notion. Gay behavior has always existed in all societies, but the way people think about it has varied tremendously. Only in the last century or so has it become the basis for a minority identity.

6. Benjamin Junge, assistant professor of anthropology

SUNY-New Paltz

Expert at cultural anthropology and Brazil

“Naturally occurring” takes you into deep waters – If you are arguing a biological basis for same-sex desire, you are making a claim which would be controversial to social constructionists. Also, I would advise against applying the concept of “coming out” to pre-modern cultures – the whole idea of sexuality as the key to one’s true/essential self (a la, “I came out of the closet to acknowledge who I really am”) is a distinctively modern and western trope.

7. Judith Bennett USC, professor of history

University of California

Expert at feminism and history

Valerie Traub, writing about 17th-century “tribades”  has perhaps most succinctly problematized the assumption of a transhistorical lesbian identity, as follows:

How is the tribade not like a contemporary lesbian? … Lesbians today are not assumed to be marked by anatomical deviation. (Such marking, rather, is reserved for a discourse of intersexuality.) Their erotic practices are not assumed primarily to take the form of vaginal penetration. (Quite the contrary; oral sex is widely assumed to be “what lesbians do.”)  Nor are lesbians believed to be more lustful than heterosexual women. (Even within the lesbian community, jokes about “lesbian bed death” abound.)  Most importantly, according to the logic of modern homophobia, lesbians hate (or fear) men; in contrast, according to the Renaissance psychomorphology of the clitoris, the tribade enacted that sincerest form of flattery: emulation.

Traub, p. 220 in The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002).  Lovely stuff.

8. Ellen Herman, professor of history

University of Oregon

Author, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Homosexuality

Since I’m a historian engaged in research and teaching about how and why human experiences, identities, and communities have changed dramatically over time and culture, I cannot agree with the two basic premises of your statement: 1) that “being gay” is a singular thing, and 2) that it is a relatively static product of nature rather than society.

9. David Serlin, associate professor of communications

University of California -San Diego

Expert, gender/sexuality studies and queer theory

The notion of a homosexual person did not even exist before the 1870s.  What I think is that people have had same-sex sexual desire since the beginning of time, but that at different moments this desire has been manifest in ways that would be somewhat, but not entirely, recognizable to us in the early 21st century.

More recently, Benkof has has been published at dailycaller.com with two things I want you to see.

This first one is on the "born this way" mantra.

Thus, if it’s proven sexual orientations are not innate, much of the scaffolding upon which today’s LGBT movement has been built would begin to crumble. Given the stakes, most gays and lesbians are dismissive or hostile toward anyone who doesn’t think being gay is an essential, natural characteristic of some members of the human race.

That's for sure!

But a surprising group of people doesn’t think that – namely, scholars of gay history and anthropology. They’re almost all LGBT themselves, and they have decisively shown that gayness is a product of Western society originating about 150 years ago.

Using documents and field studies, these intrepid social scientists have examined the evidence of homosexuality in other times and cultures to see how the gay minority fared. But they’ve come up empty. Sure, there’s substantial evidence of both discreet and open same-sex love and sex in pre-modern times. But no society before the 19th century had a gay minority or even discernibly gay-oriented individuals.

(There weren’t straight people, either. Only our society believes people are oriented in just one direction, as gay history pioneer Jonathan Ned Katz, formerly of Yale, explained in his book The Invention of Heterosexuality.)

Benkof asks a very important question:

How can gayness be natural, if it is also culturally specific?

He then considers, and exposes as deficient, the responses we often hear.

In this other writing, he goes over the "gay parenting" studies.

Indeed, media and LGBT organizations have repeatedly declared the Regnerus study to be “flawed,” which it is.

But all the gay parenting studies to date have been flawed, some even deeply flawed in their objectivity, methodology, and focus. In preparing for this essay, I read more than 50 studies that supposedly “prove” same-sex parenting is completely equal to opposite-sex parenting. Every single bit of research had at least one of the substantial drawbacks I outline below.

Benkof notes that the people behind some studies might have a bias.

The principal researcher for the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, often considered the “gold standard” of this kind of research because of its longevity and scope, is Dr. Nanette Gartrell. She’s married to a woman. And in the Michigan decision, the judge called one of the main witnesses for the plaintiffs, demographer Gary Gates, a “highly credible witness.” Yet Gates is so prominent in the LGBT community he was named to OUT magazine’s 2010 list of the “OUT 100” top gays and lesbians.
Beyond Gartrell and Gates, the list of LGBT scholars on this topic who have a personal vested interest in validating gay Moms and Dads is long. It includes Lee Badgett, Jerry Bigner, Rachel Farr, Steven Forssell, Shawn V. Giammattei, Naomi Goldberg, Gregory M. Herek, Joan Laird, Arlene Istar Lev, Valory Mitchell, Betty Morningstar, Charlotte J. Patterson, Heidi Peyser, Stacey Shuster, and Dava Weinstein.
But, one might object, nobody accuses heterosexual researchers of bias when they write about opposite-sex parenting. But there is no “straight agenda” for those scholars to bolster. Besides, they generally work at universities, where only a small percentage of faculty members are conservative on social issues.

He notes the starting observation that men and women are different.

Some of them make comparisons based on the sexual orientations of the parents, instead of the presence or lack of a mother-father family format. Personally, I believe a lesbian can make a perfectly good mother, so studies that reinforce that point are irrelevant to me. But I don’t think a lesbian can ever be a good father. That means my opinion can only be swayed by research that suggests mothers and fathers provide nothing uniquely important to their children.

Other studies consider children in lesbian households without regard to their origins. That means some of them actually have dads, but don’t live with them. Since the question most relevant to me is whether children deserve both moms and dads, all those studies need to be disqualified from serious public policy consideration.bot

Both of those recent writings are very much worth a read.