Benkof, who has experience with homosexual behavior, has encouraged
sharing this note.
The Phantom Gay Past
The idea that being gay is a naturally occurring orientation in a minority of the human population everywhere has achieved wide acceptance in our society. Many voters and legislators have been approaching the question of redefining marriage to include same-sex couples with that idea in mind.
The problem is, that idea just isn’t true. And the scholars who have provided us with the data showing that being gay is actually a product of Western society originating about 150 years ago are overwhelmingly gay and lesbian (and supporters of “marriage equality”) themselves.
These intrepid social scientists have examined the evidence of homosexuality in other times and cultures (documents, field studies) to see how the gay minority fared in other milieux. But such historians and anthropologists haven’t found much. Sure, there’s substantial evidence of same-sex relationships, love, and sex in pre-modern times, sometimes in very open contexts. But there’s no evidence of a same-sex oriented minority or even individuals with gay or lesbian orientations in any society before the 19th century.
(There isn’t any evidence of straight people either. As far as we can tell, in societies before the 19th century, even happily married people were assumed to be capable of enjoying intercourse with either sex, and only our own society includes people believed to be unidirectionally oriented. The best book on the recentness of straightness is Jonathan Ned Katz’s
The Invention of Heterosexuality.)
The experts at homosexuality across the centuries and the continents have thus asserted, overwhelmingly, that being gay is a relatively recent social construction first arising in Western culture about 150 years ago. To my knowledge (and I’ve looked), there isn’t a single scholar with a Ph.D. in anthropology or history of any repute writing and teaching about homosexuality at a major American university who believes gays have existed in any cultures before or outside ours, much less in all cultures. These women and men work closely with an ever-growing body of knowledge that directly contradicts the “born that way” ideology that has been key to the spread of the belief that homosexuality is equivalent to heterosexuality in every way.
It can be lonely to be the one of the few people in gay circles with knowledge about the phantom gay past, while everyone else is certain gays have always existed. Professor John D’Emilio (University of Illinois-Chicago), the first scholar to write a doctoral dissertation on American gay history, lamented in the late 1990s that even while the social-construction idea has swept the academic world,
the essentialist notion that gays constitute a distinct minority of people different in some inherent way has more credibility in American society than ever before…. The core assumptions at the heart of [most recent gay] historical studies are ignored, even as the content of the history - the fascinating lives, the heroic struggles, the fierce oppression - are embraced and absorbed.
Historical perspectives
One thing that becomes clear in looking at the historical scholarship about sexuality is that today’s categories are weak tools for describing the past. A few years ago, I spoke with leading gay historian Martin Duberman, the founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in New York City. He put it this way: “Were people always either gay or straight? The answer to that is a decided ‘No.’” Instead, people from other eras who slept with members of their own gender “haven’t viewed that as something exclusive and therefore something that defines them as a different category of human being,” Duberman said.
Many popular attempts to portray an age-old history of homosexuality go back to ancient Greece. We do have a large body of evidence - from the poetry of Sappho to Greek vases that depict two or more men in flagrante - affirming that same-sex love, relationships, and intercourse were common practices in that culture. But did a gay minority exist among the ancient Greeks? The scholars say no.
Rather, the Greeks thought homosexuality was something everyone could and should enjoy, particularly men in the upper classes. In addition to a wife, elite men were expected to take a younger male as an apprentice-lover, with prescribed sexual roles (the younger male was always passive). This system was so different from ours that to describe specific ancient Greeks as gay and others as straight would show profound disrespect for their experiences, and violate the cardinal historical rule against looking at the past only through present-colored lenses.
Another example in which the evidence of same-sex relations has been misinterpreted as a gay minority involves romantic friendships among women in upper-class European and American society in the 18th and early-19th centuries. We have many letters, some explicit, expressing deep love and passion between women, many of whom were also married to men. But the scholars who have examined this body of evidence don’t consider these women lesbians. First, it’s unclear how often the women in romantic friendships had genital relations with each other. But even those who did thought about sex, gender, and intimacy in ways so different from today that scholars have spurned the viewpoint (nearly universal among non-scholars) that two 18th-century women who wrote each other love letters and shared a bed were obviously lesbians.
So when in history did the gay minority first appear, and why? Historians have two major approaches to these questions, and there is plenty of room for further exploration of this important question. The first approach (growing out of the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault and reinforced by the 1970s studies of female sexuality by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman) focuses on the late-19th-century medicalization of homosexuality as a mental illness or psychological condition. Psychiatrists and sexologists in Germany, Britain, and the United States began to pathologize patients who expressed same-sex desires or described same-sex experiences. These labels then led to gay or lesbian identity among those stigmatized, which in turn led those not so labeled to take on heterosexual identities. (An unfortunate byproduct of this process has been the diminishment of open non-sexual affection between heterosexuals of the same sex, to avoid suspicion of homosexuality.)
The other approach, which I find more interesting, explains the rise of the gay minority in terms of economic and demographic trends in Western society. D’Emilio’s landmark 1983 essay, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” applied a Marxist analysis to the question, arguing that as subsistence became possible outside the nuclear family, young men, especially in cities, were for the first time able to experience same-sex eroticism in ways that could lead to gay identity. Scholars have also looked at the changes in middle-class mores that sanctioned limits on fertility, thus allowing individuals to envision life outside an opposite-sex marriage. And gay history pioneer Jonathan Ned Katz (formerly of Yale) has pointed to the increased “sexualization of commerce and commercialization of sexuality” during the second half of the 19th century, in which entrepreneurs made money from sex-oriented literature, films, bars, baths, and other merchandise and establishments.
While both major approaches place the rise of the gay minority somewhere in the mid- to late 19th century, it’s clear that in many places gay identity didn’t develop until much later. For example, the studies of Newport, Rhode Island, and New York City by outstanding Yale historian George Chauncey include many individuals involved in same-sex activities in the few decades before the Second World War who cannot fairly be called “gay.” Nationwide and certainly worldwide, there are still places where the age of the gay minority would best be counted in years, rather than decades or centuries. In any event, it seems clear that ours is the most sex-obsessed society in history, so perhaps it makes sense that it’s the first in which people form identities around the sex to which they find themselves most attracted.
But even without terminology or cultural identity, one might object, on a basic level some people in earlier centuries desired their own sex and thus were, essentially, gay or lesbian, right? Katz says no. “The existence of the words and our use of them can’t be separated from the feelings and the acts,” he told me in an interview a few years ago. In his opinion, “it’s literally true that homosexual feelings and acts didn’t exist before those concepts.”
Anthropological perspectives
Lesbian and gay anthropologists report much the same lack of a gay minority in their studies of cultures around the world. In fact, anthropologist Esther Newton (SUNY-Purchase) noted in an essay that in her field, “there is really no essentialist position on sexuality, no notion that people are born with sexual orientations. The evidence, fragmentary as it is, all points the other way.” Thus, Newton wrote, “Western lesbian and gay anthropologists, for the most part, have not run around the world looking for other lesbians and gay men.”
Instead, they have found that different cultures have a panoply of different understandings of sex, gender, and desire specific to their own people. For example, the Native Americans known as berdaches or two-spirits have generally taken on feminine dress and social roles, and almost exclusively partnered with non-berdache men. They also often had prescribed religious and military tasks. To call berdaches a “gay minority” stretches the definition of “gay” to a point where anthropologists refuse to go.
Another good example involves many Arab, African, and Latin American cultures, in which sexuality is organized around the femininity or masculinity of the sex object and/or the active or passive sexual role, rather than the biological sex of the individual desired. Such cultures have plenty of same-sex activity, but many of them didn’t have a gay minority until very recently.
Research on sexuality in such cultures rarely reaches the popular press. Columbia University anthropologist Carole S. Vance has pointed out that we see headlines announcing a “gay brain” but no similar reporting of the social science that shows sexual orientation to be uniquely Western.
Vance has a helpful model for thinking about same-sex behavior across cultures. She told me in an interview that she sees being gay or lesbian in American culture as a “package” that includes at least three elements beyond sexual practice: erotic attachment, emotional interest, and cultural membership. But in other cultures, she says, “same-sex sexual behavior can happen without these other elements, or with only some of them.”
Our gay/straight (or gay/straight/bisexual) system can seem logical and obvious to us because we exist within it, but anthropology provides an important corrective to our ethnocentric assumptions. Newton asserted without hesitation that she knows of no non-Western cultural system that divides people into four categories (i.e. men who like women, men who like men, women who like men, and women who like women) as ours does.
The social scientists I spoke with in preparing this essay spoke disparagingly about the natural-science studies purporting to show sexual orientation as “hard-wired.” Newton considers a study showing a link between sexual orientation and blinking rates to be ludicrous: “Any anthropologist who has looked cross-culturally (knows) it’s impossible that that’s true, because sexuality is structured in such different ways in different cultures.” And Duberman told me that in his opinion “there’s no good scientific work that establishes that people are born gay or straight.” While a Ph.D. in history or anthropology does not make a scholar an expert at hard science, these academics’ comments do demonstrate how strongly gay and lesbian social scientists reject of the “born that way” viewpoint.
Nonetheless, the gay community and the wider society increasingly hold the opposite view. In particular, organizations promoting gay equality have promoted “truths” about gay history and culture that have no scholarly basis. For example, pro-gay and coming-out literature tends to make a big deal of the supposed ubiquity and timelessness of the gay minority. Perhaps the most outrageous example is on the Web site of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (pflag.org). One Q and A in the Frequently Asked Questions section reads as follows:
Is there something wrong with being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender?
No. There have been people in all cultures and times throughout human history who have identified themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (GLBT). Homosexuality is not an illness or a disorder….
The fact that the leading organization coordinating straight support for the gay community, in its basic introductory document, completely misrepresents the known facts about history and anthropology before even addressing what we know about medicine and psychology shows how powerful, and important, social science is in shaping people’s attitudes toward homosexuality.
Can the gap be bridged?
It’s no small problem. The gay community - and to a growing extent the wider society - believes that all societies have included some gays and lesbians, which makes sense because being gay is supposedly something hard-wired to turn up in some fixed percentage of our species. Yet despite serious searching, scholars (most of whom would love to be the first to find a gay minority outside our era) have come up empty. If there’s no evidence of gays and lesbians in other societies, how can being gay or lesbian be something that happens naturally?
There are at least four ways to try to defuse the tension between the community view and the scholarly view, but I’m satisfied by none of them:
The difference is just semantics. It’s really not. Gay and lesbian historians aren’t just claiming that before the 19th century nobody was called “gay” or “lesbian.” They’re saying nobody
was gay or lesbian (or straight). While various societies had different ways of thinking about and expressing maleness, femaleness, love, and sexual desire, the most common approach to homosexuality seems to be a belief that it was something one could do, not something one could be.
Gays existed in other cultures but couldn’t come out because of homophobia. But we have loads of evidence of same-sex intercourse and love, which would be unlikely if the problem was homophobia and coming out. We have no convincing evidence that any of the people leaving such records were unresponsive to the opposite sex or considered themselves to be oriented differently from those who expressed passion for opposite-sex individuals.
Other societies had gay minorities, but they left no records. Doubtful. We actually have more evidence that dragons and unicorns existed in earlier history - because they show up in literary and other historical documents - than we do of gays and lesbians. We have records of so many aspects of people’s public and private lives, that it seems clear that if there were long-ago gay people, we’d know about them. For example, there are thousands of 20th-century letters and novels and speeches and diary entries that say some version of, “My parents want me to marry an opposite-sex person, but I don’t want to, because I only like my own sex.” But to my knowledge, there are no such 15th-, 10th-, or 5th-century documents.
By definition, people who want or have same-sex love and sex are gay, and people who don’t are straight, both today and in the past. It’s tempting to look at the past and see versions of our own lives and identities, but responsible history tries to understand the past on its own terms. Asking whether Shakespeare was gay or straight makes about as much sense as asking whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. Of course, none of this means that people don’t have sexual orientations today; it means sexual orientations are a result of our specific culture, and thus not basic human nature. Perhaps a good analogy is to computers: being gay or straight is the software and even the operating system of many people’s lives in today’s highly sexualized culture, but it’s not in anybody’s hardware.
Then what should we make of all the hoopla over various biological studies that point in the other direction? Most of those studies (few of which have been replicated) do little more than suggest that gay men are similar to straight women, and lesbians are similar to straight men in a variety of measurements - from finger lengths to blinking rates. The conclusions are tentative, and no “gay gene” has been found. While biology certainly plays a role in sexual behavior (as it does in every aspect of life), the natural-science data for a biological basis for sexual orientation is all preliminary and mostly disputed. Contrast that to what social scientists have discovered, with very little dissent: century after century and culture after culture with no gay minorities to be found, outside the recent West.
Clearly, all the research taken as a whole suggests that being gay or straight arises out of our specific social context, rather than being etched into our DNA. Of course, given the scant popular awareness about this situation, the idea that gays haven’t always existed can be completely unsettling. Many gays and lesbians have experienced their sexual orientations as unchosen and unchangeable, and therefore they are skeptical - and even hostile - toward anything that implies being gay isn’t part of human nature. And even lots of nongay people and organizations have built outlooks about homosexuality around a belief that the gay minority occurs naturally.
For example, the American Psychological Association (APA) argued in its Supreme Court brief in the landmark 2003 sodomy case of
Lawrence v. Texas that “the sexual orientation known as homosexuality - which is based on an enduring pattern of sexual or romantic attraction exclusively or primarily to others of one’s own sex - is a normal variant of human sexual expression.”
Since the specific sexual orientation described is a recent, culturally driven phenomenon, it cannot be a “normal variant of human sexual expression.” Had the APA argued that homosexual orientation “appears to arise involuntarily among some people in our society,” it would have been closer to the mark. There were good, legitimate reasons (such as privacy) to oppose anti-sodomy laws. The supposed natural occurrence of homosexual orientation in the human species, however, was not one of them.
Nonetheless, the Supreme Court seems to have been reading more gay history than the APA, because the majority decision by Justice Anthony Kennedy shows familiarity with social-construction scholarship and to its credit cites both Katz and D’Emilio.
Such awareness is still rare, though, which raises an interesting question: How would the homosexuality debate change if both sides were to jettison the idea of a timeless gay sexuality and to incorporate the social-science perspective into their arguments?
A few possibilities:
The gay community can certainly make a case that non-discrimination policies and laws are justified whether being gay is natural or socially constructed. The fact that people didn’t have sexual orientations a thousand years ago doesn’t necessarily mean that people today shouldn’t have whatever family structures and consensual bodily pleasures they desire. Many left-wing gays already take this sort of stance, rejecting “born that way” as condescending and narrow. And several gay historians and commentators have noted the radical, liberationist implications of the viewpoint that, given the right historical or cultural environment, anyone could enjoy same-sex activity.
Advocates of the traditional nuclear family may, instead, fight for their preferred social construction in the public square. More broadly, religious and other groups who oppose homosexuality on moral grounds might move away from attacking individual gays with “it’s a choice” rhetoric and instead aim at changing the socio-cultural aspects of our society that not only encourage people to build identities around sex, but that also block them from imagining life any other way.
It’s a whole new conversation, one that’s touchy and hard to predict but long overdue.
