One Hundred Years of Homosexuality

And Other Essays on Greek Love

David M Halperin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136608773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Halperin's subject is the erotics of male culture in ancient Greece. Arguing that the modern concept of "homosexuality" is an inadequate tool for the interpretation of these features of sexual life in antiquity, Halperin offers an alternative account that accords greater prominence to the indigenous terms in which sexual experiences were constituted in the ancient Mediterranean world. Wittily and provocatively written, Halperin's meticulously drawn windows onto ancient sexuality give us a new meaning to the concept of "Greek love."

PART I

1

One Hundred Years of Homosexuality

I

In 1992, when the patriots among us will be celebrating the five-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, our cultural historians may wish to mark the centenary of an intellectual landfall of almost equal importance for the conceptual geography of the human sciences: the invention of homosexuality by Charles Gilbert Chaddock. Though he may never rank with Columbus in the annals of individual achievement, Chaddock would hardly seem to merit the obscurity which has surrounded him throughout the past hundred years. An early translator of Krafft-Ebing's classic medical handbook of sexual deviance, the Psycho-pathia sexualis, Chaddock is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with having introduced “homo-sexuality” into the English language in 1892,¹ in order to render a German cognate twenty years its senior.² Homosexuality, for better or for worse, has been with us ever since.

Before 1892 there was no homosexuality, only sexual inversion. But, as George Chauncey, who has made a thorough study of the medical literature on the subject, persuasively argues, “Sexual inversion, the term used most commonly in the nineteenth century, did not denote the same conceptual phenomenon as homosexuality. ‘Sexual inversion’ referred to a broad range of deviant gender behavior, of which homosexual desire was only a logical but indistinct aspect, while ‘homosexuality’ focused on the narrower issue of sexual object choice. The differentiation of homosexual desire from ‘deviant’ gender behavior at the turn of the century reflects a major reconceptualization of the nature of human sexuality, its relation to gender, and its role in one's social definition.”³ Throughout the nineteenth century, in other words, sexual preference for a person of one's own sex was not clearly distinguished from other sorts of non-conformity to one's culturally defined sex-role: deviant object-choice was viewed as merely one of a number of pathological symptoms exhibited by those who reversed, or “inverted,” their proper sex-roles by adopting a masculine or a feminine style at variance with what was deemed natural and appropriate to their anatomical sex. Political aspirations in women and (at least according to one expert writing as late as 1920) a fondness for cats in men were manifestations of a pathological condition, a kind of psychological hermaphroditism tellingly but not essentially expressed by the preference for a “normal” member of one's own sex as a sexual partner.⁴

This outlook on the matter seems to have been shared by the scientists and by their unfortunate subjects alike: inversion was not merely a medical rubric, then, but a category of lived experience. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, for example, an outspoken advocate for the rights of sexual minorities and the founder, as early as 1862, of the cult of Uranism (based on Pausanias's praise of Uranian, or “heavenly,” paederasty in Plato's Symposium), described his own condition as that of an anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa—a woman's soul confined by a man's body.⁵ That sexual object-choice might be wholly independent of such “secondary” characteristics as masculinity or femininity never seems to have entered anyone's head until Havelock Ellis waged a campaign to isolate object-choice from role-playing and Freud, in his classic analysis of a drive in the Three Essays (1905), clearly distinguished in the case of the libido between the sexual “object” and the sexual “aim.”⁶

The conceptual isolation of sexuality per se from questions of masculinity and femininity made possible a new taxonomy of sexual behaviors and psychologies based entirely on the anatomical sex of the persons engaged in a sexual act (same sex vs. different sex); it thereby obliterated a number of distinctions that had traditionally operated within earlier discourses pertaining to same-sex sexual contacts and that had radically differentiated active from passive sexual partners, normal from abnormal (or conventional from unconventional) sexual roles, masculine from feminine styles, and paederasty from lesbianism: all such behaviors were now to be classed alike and placed under the same heading.⁷ Sexual identity was thus polarized around a central opposition rigidly defined by the binary play of sameness and difference in the sexes of the sexual partners; people belonged henceforward to one or the other of two exclusive categories, and much ingenuity was lavished on the multiplication of techniques for deciphering what a person's sexual orientation “really” was—independent, that is, of beguiling appearances.⁸ Founded on positive, ascertainable, and objective behavioral phenomena—on the facts of who had sex with whom—the new sexual taxonomy could lay claim to a descriptive, trans-historical validity. And so it crossed the “threshold of scientificity”⁹ and was enshrined as a working concept in the social and physical sciences.¹⁰

A scientific advance of such magnitude naturally demanded to be crowned by the creation of a new technical vocabulary, but, unfortunately, no objective, value-free words readily lent themselves to the enterprise. In 1891, just one year before the inauguration of “homosexuality,” John Addington Symonds could still complain that “The accomplished languages of Europe in the nineteenth century supply no terms for this persistent feature of human psychology, without importing some implication of disgust, disgrace, vituperation.”¹¹ A number of linguistic candidates were quickly put forward to make good this lack, and “homosexuality” (despite scattered protests over the years) gradually managed to fix its social-scientistic signature upon the new conceptual dispensation. The word itself, as Havelock Ellis noted, is a barbarous neologism sprung from a monstrous mingling of Greek and Latin stock;¹² as such, it belongs to a rapidly growing lexical breed most prominently represented by the hybrid names given to other recent inventions—names whose mere enumeration suffices to conjure up the precise historical era responsible for producing them: e.g., “automobile,” “television,” “sociology.”

Unlike the languages of technology (whether of production or of knowledge), however, the new terminology for describing sexual behavior was slow to take root in the culture at large. In his posthumous autobiographical memoir, My Father & Myself (1968), J. R. Ackerley recalls how mystified he was when, about 1918, a Swiss friend asked him, “Are you homo or hetero?”: “I had never heard either term before,” he writes. Similarly, T. C. Worsley observes in his own memoir, Flannelled Fool (1966), that in 1929 “The word [homosexual], in any case, was not in general use, as it is now. Then it was still a technical term, the implications of which I was not entirely aware of.”¹³ These two memoirists, moreover, were not intellectually deficient men: at the respective times of their recorded bewilderment, Ackerley was shortly about to be, and Worsley already had been, educated at Cambridge. Nor was such innocence limited—in this one instance, at least—to the holders of university degrees: the British sociologist John Marshall, whose survey presumably draws on more popular sources, testifies that “a number of the elderly men I interviewed had never heard the term ‘homosexual’ until the 1950s.”¹⁴ The Oxford English Dictionary, originally published in 1933, is also ignorant of (if not willfully blind to) “homosexuality”;¹⁵ the word appears for the first time in the OED's 1976 three-volume Supplement.¹⁶

It is not exactly my intention to argue that homosexuality, as we commonly understand it today, didn't exist before 1892. How, indeed, could it have failed to exist? The very word displays a most workmanlike and scientific indifference to cultural and environmental factors, looking only to the sexes of the persons engaged in the sexual act. Moreover, if homosexuality didn't exist before 1892, heterosexuality couldn't have existed either (it came into being, in fact, like Eve from Adam's rib, eight years later),¹⁷ and without heterosexuality, where would all of us be right now?

The comparatively recent genesis of heterosexuality—strictly speaking, a twentieth-century affair—should provide a clue to the profundity of the cultural issues over which, hitherto, I have been so lightly skating. How is it possible that until the year 1900 there was not a precise, value-free, scientific term available to speakers of the English language for designating what we would now regard, in retrospect, as the mode of sexual behavior favored by the vast majority of people in our culture? Any answer to that question must direct our attention to the inescapable historicity of even the most innocent, unassuming, and seemingly objective of cultural representations.¹⁸ Although a blandly descriptive, rigorously clinical term like “homosexuality” would appear to be unobjectionable as a taxonomic device, it carries with it a heavy complement of ideological baggage and has, in fact, proved a significant obstacle to understanding the distinctive features of sexual life in non-Western and pre-modern cultures.¹⁹ It may well be that homosexuality properly speaking has no history of its own outside the West or much before the beginning of our century.²⁰ For, as John Boswell remarks, “if the categories ‘homosexual/heterosexual’ and ‘gay/straight’ are the inventions of particular societies rather than real aspects of the human psyche, there is no gay history.”²¹

II

Boswell, of course, argues the contrary. He maintains, reasonably enough, that any debate over the existence of universals in human culture must distinguish between the respective modes of being proper to words, concepts, and experiences²²: according to this line of reasoning, people who lived before Newton experienced gravity even though they lacked both the term and the concept; similarly, Boswell claims that the “manifest and stated purpose” of Aristophanes's famous myth in Plato's Symposium “is to explain why humans are divided into groups of predominantly homosexual or heterosexual interest,” and so this text, along with a number of others from classical antiquity, vouches for the existence of homosexuality as an ancient (if not a universal) category of human experience—however new-fangled the word for it may be.²³ Now the speech of Plato's Aristophanes would seem indeed to be a locus classicus for the differentiation of homo- from heterosexuality, because Aristophanes's taxonomy of human beings features a distinction between those who desire a sexual partner of the same sex as themselves and those who desire a sexual partner of a different sex. The Platonic passage alone, then, would seem to offer sufficient warrant for positing an ancient concept, if not an ancient experience, of homosexuality. But closer examination reveals that Aristophanes stops short of deriving a distinction between homo- and heterosexuality from his own myth just when the logic of his analysis would seem to have driven him ineluctably to it. That omission is telling, I believe, and worth considering in greater detail.*

According to Aristophanes, human beings were originally round, eight-limbed creatures, with two faces and two sets of genitals—both front and back—and three sexes (male, female, and androgyne). These ancestors of ours were powerful and ambitious; in order to put them in their place, Zeus had them cut in two, their skin stretched over the exposed flesh and tied at the navel, and their heads rotated so as to keep that physical reminder of their daring and its consequences constantly before their eyes. The severed halves of each former individual, once reunited, clung to one another so desperately and concerned themselves so little with their survival as separate entities that they began to perish for lack of sustenance; those who outlived their mates sought out persons belonging to the same sex as their lost complements and repeated their embraces in a foredoomed attempt to recover their original unity. Zeus at length took pity on them, moved their genitals to the side their bodies now faced, and invented sexual intercourse, so that the bereaved creatures might at least put a temporary terminus to their longing and devote their attention to other, more important (if less pressing) matters. Aristophanes extracts from this story a genetic explanation of observable differences among human beings with respect to sexual object-choice and preferred style of life: males who desire females are descended from an original androgyne (adulterers come from this species), whereas males descended from an original male “pursue their own kind, and would prefer to remain single and spend their entire lives with one another, since by nature they have no interest in marriage and procreation but are compelled to engage in them by social custom” (191e–192b, quoted selectively). Boswell, understandably, interprets this to mean that according to Plato's Aristophanes homosexual and heterosexual interests are “both exclusive and innate.”²⁴

But that, significantly, is not quite the way Aristophanes sees it. The conclusions that he draws from his own myth help to illustrate the lengths to which classical Athenians were willing to go in order to avoid conceptualizing sexual behaviors according to a binary opposition between different-and same-sex sexual contacts. First of all, Aristophanes's myth generates not two but at least three distinct “sexualities” (males attracted to males, females attracted to females, and—consigned alike to a single classification, evidently—males attracted to females as well as females attracted to males). Moreover, there is not the slightest suggestion in anything Aristophanes

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* Here follows a close reading of two ancient texts. Some readers may wish to skip ahead to section III.

says that the sexual acts or preferences of persons descended from an original female are in any way similar to, let alone congruent or isomorphic with, the sexual acts or preferences of those descended from an original male;²⁵ hence, nothing in the text allows us to suspect the existence of even an implicit category to which males who desire males and females who desire females both belong in contradistinction to some other category containing males and females who desire one another.* On the contrary, one consequence of the myth is to make the sexual desire of every human being formally identical to that of every other: we are all looking for the same thing in a sexual partner, according to Plato's Aristophanes—namely, a symbolic substitute for an originary object once loved and subsequently lost in an archaic trauma. In that respect we all share the same “sexuality”—which is to say that, despite the differences in our personal preferences or tastes, we are not individuated at the level of our sexual being.

Second, and equally important, Aristophanes's account features a crucial distinction within the category of males who are attracted to males, an infrastructural detail missing from his description of each of the other two categories: “while they are still boys [i.e., pubescent or pre-adult],²⁶ they are fond of men, and enjoy lying down together with them and twining their limbs about them, … but when they become men they are lovers of boys. … Such a man is a paederast and philerast [i.e., fond of or responsive to adult male lovers]”²⁷ at different stages of his life (191e–192b, quoted selectively). Contrary to the clear implications of the myth, in other words, and unlike the people comprehended by the first two categories, those descended from an original male are not attracted to one another without qualification; rather, they desire boys when they are men and they take a certain (non-sexual) pleasure in physical contact with men when they are boys.²⁸ Now since—as the foregoing passage suggests—the classical Athenians sharply distinguished the roles of paederast and philerast, relegatin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I
• 1 One Hundred Years of Homosexuality
• 2 “Homosexuality”: A Cultural Construct An Exchange with Richard Schneider
• 3 Two Views of Greek Love: Harald Patzer and Michel Foucault
• Part II
• 4 Heroes and their Pals
• 5 The Democratic Body: Prostitution and Citizenship in Classical Athens
• 6 Why is Diotima a Woman?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Addendum
• Index
• A Note on the Author