If I Get Her the Wool, Will She Make Me One Too?

I checked William Benemann's Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships (Harrington Park Press, 2006) out of the library after Band of Thebes praised Benemann's work.  I just began reading it, and already he's doing the Foucault Two-Step:

I join my voice to those who have begun to question some of the theories of Michel Foucault concerning the formation of a homosexual identity.  I do not believe that a homosexual orientation was non-existent until it was socially constructed during the late nineteenth century.  From my reading of sources from the colonial, Revolutionary, and post-Revolutionary period, I am convinced that there were men who were homosexual and who -- without the physicians, clerics, legislators, or sociologists -- recognized themselves as different from their comrades, a difference based solely on their sexual response.  I also believe that there were de facto gay communities.  Some of these communities were congruent with specific geographic places.  Others were real but floating, linked to a profession rather than a physical place.  Still others had their existence only on a subconscious level but were nonetheless a powerful impetus to bring men together.  I believe that men loving men in the early years of this country were aware of the concept we now label as "queer space," and that they took active steps to separate themselves from the heterosexual majority in order to join their brothers in an underground community based on a shared sexual response [xv].

Well, that's a mixed bag!  I have reservations about Benemann's ability to read "sources from the colonial, revolutionary, and post-Revolutionary period" if he can't read Foucault, and from this paragraph I conclude that he can't.  I haven't read everything Foucault had to say about the emergence of the Modern Homosexual, but then neither have most people who cite him.  Some of them seem not to have even read the entire first volume of the History of Sexuality, where Foucault made his canonical remarks on the subject; all they seem to know is this one paragraph, and often only the very last sentence of this paragraph:

The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitively active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized – Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on “contrary sexual sensations” can stand as its date of birth – less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration [relaps]; the homosexual was now a species.

This is not a "theory," nor does it say anything about "identity" or "orientation."  It doesn't even use the term "social construction."  It does not say that "a homosexual orientation did not exist until it was socially constructed in the nineteenth century."  (Benemann begs the question whether there is such a thing as "a homosexual orientation" in the first place.)  What it does say is that nineteenth-century doctors interpreted sex between males, or between females, as a "psychological, psychiatric, medical category" involving "a kind of interior androgyny."   This interpretation persists to this day, and underlies most or all of the scientific work done today on sexual orientation.

On the very first page of the second volume of The History of Sexuality, written as Foucault was rethinking his approach under the influence of Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Foucault himself wrote about the word "sexuality,"

The term itself did not appear until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a fact that should be neither underestimated nor overinterpreted. It does point to something more than a simple recasting of vocabulary, but obviously it does not mark the sudden emergence of that to which "sexuality" refers.

So the kind of simplistic linguistic determinism that many Foucauldians fall into was eventually rejected by Foucault himself.

I like Benemann's dismissal of "physicians, clerics, legislators, sociologists," which comes closer to the heart of the matter.  What changed in the nineteenth century was the way such elites thought about sex between persons of the same sex.  Even Foucault, oddly enough, wrote not only as though what physicians, clerics, legislators, sociologists was the truth about homosexuality, but as though their categories were the only categories that existed in society.  He knew better than that, because before The History of Sexuality he'd dated the emergence of 'the homosexual' to the early 18th century English Mollies.  As usual, our information on the Mollies comes from hostile outsiders -- purity crusaders, the courts, newspapers -- so I'm not sure we know as much about them as I'd like.  But it's safe to say that the Mollies created their social forms through practice, not through theory, without the advice of medical professionals.  (There's also a widespread assumption that the classifications the doctors developed were something totally new and alien, as though the doctors were not men of their time and culture.)  When a category -- "Sodomite," say -- did filter down to the hoi polloi, it changed meanings and connotations along the way.  But then, the meaning of "homosexual" as a category was never particularly clear, any more than the meaning of "Sodomite."

A lot of the controversy over the nature of the "homosexual" has nothing to do with social constructionism or with Foucault.  There's no question that the fag/ penetrated / passive / bottom is homosexual.  The question is whether the trade / penetrator / active / top is homosexual; and it's disputed everywhere from Latin America to the Philippines to South Asia to right here in the USA.  The current model for scientific research assumes that the homosexual male is feminized and the homosexual female is masculinized, never thinking to ask who these people's partners are; but this model is much older than the 1870s, and appears independently in numerous cultures.

I must also dissent from Benemann's claim that early American buggers and sodomites "took active steps to separate themselves from the heterosexual majority in order to join their brothers in an underground community based on a shared sexual response."  A considerable segment of gay male community requires men who define themselves, and are defined by their queer partners, as normal men.  That includes only some men-loving men, however, but I'm looking forward to see how Benemann constructs his subjects.  And what, may I ask, is a "de facto gay community"?  I didn't know there were de jure gay communities.  Well, I'll see where Benemann goes from here.  His focus on romantic friendships might help him to avoid harping on Foucault.

A 24-Hour Party Person

My Right Wing Acquaintance Number 1 has been having trouble finding good news, I think. He liked the guy who resigned from Goldman Sachs with an op-ed in the New York Times, for example: "extraordinary admission from one who knows about a predatory outfit that should never have gotten off Scot free- and sent high officials to Obama's administration", he added to his link. Well, sure, it's fair to criticize Obama for his coziness with Wall Street, but RWA1 again shows convenient and partisan amnesia. Who was Dubya's Secretary of the Treasury, for example? A former Goldman Sachs CEO. Even allowing for the fact that he wasn't on Facebook during the Bush administration, RWA1 (like so many Republicans) seems to have dumped the years 2001 through January 2009 down the memory hole. A well-controlled memory is a necessity for party loyalists.

Today he linked to a Weekly Standard article by David Brooks about C-SPAN and Brian Lamb, the host of Booknotes, which RWA1 praised highly. I think he'd find that a lot of liberals and leftists would agree about that -- I see a lot of links to C-SPAN and to Booknotes on libby proggy sites too. The Standard is another one of those right-wing fringe publications that RWA1 likes because of their intellectual pretensions, which go well with his own.

Brooks begins the article by quoting this exchange from a 1991 program that featured the author of a biography of Winston Churchill:

GILBERT: When Churchill was 20 and a young soldier, he was accused of buggery, and, you know, that's, you know, a terrible accusation. Well, he ended up prime minister for just quite a long time.

LAMB: Why was he accused of buggery and what is it?

GILBERT: You don't know what buggery is?

LAMB: Define it, please.

GILBERT: Oh dear. Well, I -- I'm sorry. I thought the word we -- buggery is what used to be called a -- the -- an unnatural act of the Oscar Wilde type is how it was actually phrased in the euphemism of the British papers. It's -- you don't know what buggery is?

I hope that Lamb asked for a definition of buggery as a service to his listeners, rather than because he really didn't know what it is. But then, I'm not sure that Brooks knows what it is.

Brooks praises Lamb, and C-SPAN, for focusing on "facts" instead of being all postmodernist. (I think it's a safe bet that Brooks doesn't know what "postmodernism" is either.)

In Edmund Morris's notorious biography Dutch, the facts of what Ronald Reagan did and knew are upstaged by the drama of the author's own quest to "understand" and "capture" his subject. And that is just the tip of the postmodern iceberg. Despite the efforts of E. D. Hirsch and other cheerleaders for fact-based "cultural literacy," school curricula no longer focus on the simple whats, wheres, and whens of history. University historians are even less interested in that stuff -- obsessed as they are with social forces and group consciousness. Even in a publicly funded showcase institution like the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the displays are concerned less with illuminating historical events or history-making individuals than with lionizing aggrieved groups.

Oh, dear. Facts clearly don't matter much to Brooks; does that make him postmodern too? Academic historians have always been interested in "social forces and group consciousness"; there's nothing postmodern about that. The historians Brooks mentions favorably seem generally to be academics, but he leaves out that fact when he gushes over them, like Clara Rising, who "had come to the conclusion that Taylor was poisoned with arsenic. His body was dug up and his fingernails and bones examined, but no sign of arsenic poisoning was found." I guess some conspiracy theories are permissible, if you're David Brooks.

It's no accident that on a recent C-SPAN program both Jefferson biographer Joseph Ellis and Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald confessed they were frustrated novelists. Ellis went on to note that none of the reviewers of his Jefferson biography, American Sphinx, noted the literary device of which he was most proud. He wanted to convey a certain image of his subject, so in every chapter Jefferson is described entering the scene on horseback.

By contrast, turn to the Web site of the American Historical Review (indiana.edu/ahr) and look at the list of articles the prestigious academic review is publishing or about to publish: "Feminism, Social Science and the Meaning of Modernity"; "The Sensibility of Comfort"; "Culture, Power and Place: The New Landscape of East Asian Regionalism"; "Domesticity and Difference: Male Breadwinners, Working Women and Colonial Citizenship in the 1945 Nigerian General Strike." The list goes on, a stifling progression of abstruse tedium. A few of the topics might sound interesting -- "The Sensibility of Comfort" strikes my fancy -- until you remember that most academic historians face professional pressures to write as turgidly as possible, and to excise or exile to the footnotes any of the interesting anecdotes they would use as dinner table conversation. The contrast between the C-SPAN historians and the academic establishment historians is breathtaking.

This is like complaining that if you read a musicological journal, it will be full of arcane theoretical discussion of counterpoint instead of pretty tunes. Writing a biography is a very different kind of project than writing a paper for a journal. Brooks is evidently aware that academic historians write for other historians rather than for the general public in those journals, which aren't meant to contain "dinner table conversation." Since many of "the C-SPAN historians" are "academic establishment historians," Brooks's observation is just plain stupid. He's also in no position to make fun of anyone's else's prose style, though his is gaseous punditry instead of "abstruse tedium." But he's not done yet.

And it's important to remember that the academics took this turn intentionally. The great postmodern hero Michel Foucault mocked what you might call the ethos of the C-SPAN historian: "To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth . . . to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can only answer with a philosophical laugh -- which means, to a certain extent, a silent one."

Not silent enough.

I feel pretty sure that David Brooks (and probably RWA1) has never read Foucault. If he had, he would know that Foucault did a great deal of archival research. He didn't simply spin theories about "social forces and group consciousness." The first volume of the History of Sexuality is also quite chatty, recounting anecdotes that might not be good dinner table conversation, but would be suitable for the gentlemen when they withdraw to smoke after the meal.

Brooks also likes the people who call in to the program, though he's a bit critical on one point:

For example, callers have continually forced the historians to deal with racial matters, so that race has become the major subtheme of the series. The presidents who owned slaves or who tolerated slavery are castigated, and the historians often struggle to suggest that viewers shouldn't rush to impose modern standards on earlier times -- with little success.

Ironically, the suggestion that we "shouldn't rush to impose modern standards on earlier times" is usually trotted out by conservatives as postmodernist relativism -- except where race is concerned. In general the Right would prefer not to remember the role of slavery, or racism, in American history, and if possible to minimize or eliminate it from history courses altogether. Even though they keep reminding us that slavery was abolished long ago, it's evidently too close for comfort where white reactionaries are concerned.

The trouble with complaining that castigating presidents who owned slaves constitutes "rush[ing] to impose modern standards on earlier times" is that at least some of those presidents paid lip service to the wrongness of slavery. Calling slavery immoral is not a modern standard. (We moderns should be circumspect in judging our forebears, though, considering how many of us condemn war, for example, but are still willing to let it happen, or even to cheer it on when it begins.)

One question that keeps coming up on Andrew Ti's tumblr Yo, Is This Racist? is how to deal with racist "old" people. When I see references to grandparents, I automatically think of my grandparents, who were probably born just before 1900, and then I realize that at least some of the time, these racist grandpas and grandmas are probably my age or a little older: people who grew up during the peak of the Civil Rights movement, people who have no excuse for being racist, people who can't claim that they never heard that it was wrong to discriminate against people because of the color of their skin. People of my own grandparents' generation shouldn't get a free pass either, though. I like to ask apologists for racism when white people discovered that black people were human beings, because it's certain that black people knew it all along.

But I digress. Once again it's informative to see what RWA1 considers good serious conservative punditry: it's badly written, anti-intellectual, and incoherent, though superficially less demented than your average Republican presidential candidate. That's the best, apparently, that the Right has to offer.

The Way of a Man With a Lad ...

There are three things too wondrous for me, yea, four things which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way people keep talking about homosexuality as an "identity," though they have no idea what an identity is. Or homosexuality, for that matter.

I've just begun reading the new, uncensored, annotated edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, published this year by Harvard University Press. The editor, Nicholas Frankel, has gone back to the magazine publication and Wilde's typescript, which apparently contain more obviously homoerotic content than the book version. That should be interesting, since even some very sensible queer scholars have doubted that Wilde intended sodomitical interpretations of his characters.

But so far I'm still in the introductory material, and damned if Frankel didn't put his foot in it almost immediately. From page 7:

It is worth bearing in mind, however, that in the Victorian era, sexual preference was less clearly seen as an identity; indeed, the word homosexual did not enter the English language until 1892, when it was used adjectivally in a translation of Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis (it was first used as a noun in 1912). Wilde and the other men who participated in London’s homosexual subculture, many of them leading secret double lives, would have been viewed by the majority not as homosexuals per se but as men indulging in “unclean” vices. Even so, homosexual acts were generally considered repugnant and deviant – and for the first time, with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, sexual activities of any nature between men were not merely sinful but unlawful. (The criminalization of homosexuality and the example of Wilde’s life and work are widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity.)

Here we have the usual confused and contradictory thrashing around. If it is so significant that "the word homosexual did not enter the English language until 1892," if it marks some kind of sociocultural watershed, how could London have had a "homosexual subculture" before 1892? How could "homosexual acts" be considered repugnant if they didn't exist before they bore that name, and how could "homosexuality" be criminalized by a law passed seven years before the word entered the language?

Yes, I'm being deliberately pedantic here, but I think it's justified. If "homosexual" uniquely denotes "identity" (a word that neither Frankel nor most other scholars who use it bother to define), it can't be applied to anything that occurred or existed before it passed into the language. It would also be nice if someone explained how the advent of the word "homosexual" magically produced "homosexual identity." As I've said before, talk like this is generally based on a misreading of Michel Foucault, and is more of a genuflection to his influence than a well-founded historical statement.

And no, I'm not being too hard on Frankel. Look again at the latter part of the quotation above:

... for the first time, with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, sexual activities of any nature between men were not merely sinful but unlawful. (The criminalization of homosexuality and the example of Wilde’s life and work are widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity.)

This is clumsily written, but on its face it's false. What changed with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (often called the Labouchere Amendment after the Member of Parliament who introduced it) was that a wider range of genital contact between males became unlawful. Henry VIII's statute made "Buggery either with Mankind or with any Animal" a capital crime; there wasn't absolute agreement as to what constituted buggery, whether it extended to oral-genital contact or was limited to anal penetration -- the law required proof of penetration, and was generally interpreted to refer to the latter. The death penalty was abolished for most crimes in 1828. (I'm drawing here on H. Montgomery Hyde's The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A Candid Look at Homosexuality in Britain [Little, Brown, 1970], pages 91-93 and 134-136.) If by "homosexuality" Frankel means "sexual relations between males," then homosexuality had been criminalized centuries before Labouchere; if he means "acts labeled 'homosexual,'" then Labouchere didn't even touch on them.

It can be, and has been, argued that buggery doesn't equal "homosexuality," so under that rather strained interpretation "homosexuality" wasn't criminalized before the Labouchere Amendment. But it it wasn't criminalized after it, either: what the Amendment criminalized were acts, however vaguely specified, not identities. And so matters remained as far as the law was concerned: the "sodomy" laws overturned by the US Supreme Court in 2003 also were about acts, not identities. Most of these laws penalized sodomy between males and females, as well as between males, so they didn't criminalize homosexuality either.

Besides, "bugger" is also an identity. I think it was in a biography of Virginia Woolf that I read that when she began meeting her brother's male friends who did the nasty with other males, she had to learn to refer to them as "buggers," not "sods." Despite their bugger identity, several of them married and sired children; despite their heterosexual marriages, most of these men continued having it off with other men. Probably "sodomite" had functioned as an identity long before that, as Mark Jordan suggested in his The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997).

Nor is it clear what homosexual or gay "identity" means today, or why it matters. That's what bothers me about discussions like Frankel's: there doesn't seem to be any point in invoking identity here. It doesn't explain anything, and it doesn't make much sense.

I Am the Very Model of the Modern Homosexual; or, Queer Foucauldians Say the Darnedest Things!

Almost any book you read about homosexuality nowadays will pause at some point to retell the Creation Myth of the Homosexual, from the Gospel According to Saint Foucault. (Which, like the Christian Bible, most who refer to it haven’t read. But I digress, and not for the last time.)  This myth tells how the Modern Homosexual sprang fully grown (or erupted, like a zit?) from the foreheads of 19th century European doctors, a new creation, never seen before under the sun, then spread like a radioactive virus until it had infected the whole world with its evil, modern, Western, positivistic hegemony.

When I first thought of this metaphor, I doubted its aptness, but on second thought I realized I had builded better than I knew. As with the creation myths of Genesis, this myth is not a single coherent story, but two or three, harmonized by fundamentalist theologians who mistake a fable or a wisecrack for a literal historical statement. In both cases, the myth’s advocates are ambivalent about Science: on one hand they covet its prestige, on which they seek to found their own institutional status and privilege, but on the other they distrust the hegemonic power of the Enlightenment and its works. The creation myth of the modern homosexual is at once an episode in the triumphal epic March of Progress, and a cautionary tale of sinful human pride.

But I myself should stop speaking in parables, and turn to Foucault’s own, the famous passage from the first volume of his History of Sexuality that became the John 3:16 of queer theory:

The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitively active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized – Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on “contrary sexual sensations” can stand as its date of birth – less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration [relaps]; the homosexual was now a species.

The most striking thing about this passage, to my mind, is what it does not say. It says nothing about identity, for example, though many writers have quoted or cited it to support their claims about “gay identity.” It says nothing about “orientation,” which many pro-gay writers confidently assert is the ‘modern’ understanding of homosexuality. (For example, Dale Martin quoting Martha Nussbaum on “our modern concept of ‘sexuality’ -- a deep and relatively stable inner orientation towards objects of a certain gender” [207f; though that is not, as it happens, the modern concept of “sexuality,” it’s the modern medical concept of “sexual orientation”].) It says nothing about how “homosexuals” thought of themselves, but only describes how they were seen by medical doctors who were not themselves inverts.

Also, the passage doesn’t put much emphasis on the word “homosexual”: Foucault treats Westphal’s “contrary sexual instinct” as its equivalent. He doesn’t even mention the invention of the word itself, by Kertbeny in 1867, which most people who refer to Foucault give as the ‘actual’ birth date of The Homosexual.

In his closing witticism about the homosexual’s being “now a species,” Foucault did not suggest that “homosexuals” themselves had changed their behavior, let alone their nature. What changed was the way sodomites and sapphists, mollies and tribades were thought about – theorized, if you like – by the emerging medical profession. I have encountered people who believed that, whether or not Foucault thought so, “the homosexual” was a new genetic mutation which first appeared in 1870, and spread around the world in a few decades. (That’s not possible, not remotely enough time; maybe homosexuality is not a gene but, like language in William S. Burroughs’s mythos, a radioactive virus from outer space.) This is what happens when people take a sacred text literally.

Nor did Foucault say that the change came about because “the early sexologists were witnessing the emergence of new kinds of erotic individuals and their aggregation into rudimentary communities” (Rubin 1984: 285). The early sexologists did not think of the cases they described as something new; they explicitly saw them as (figurative) descendants of ancient Greek and Roman pederasts. Those “rudimentary communities” had been observed in European cities for centuries before 1870; Foucault himself had previously dated the emergence of The Homosexual to the Mollies in England in the late 1600s. One very odd thing about all this is that the same sort of “aggregation into rudimentary communities” has been observed in far-flung parts of the world, outside the 19th-century medical paradigm Foucault described: in India, in Indonesia, and elsewhere – but it is taboo to recognize this because, following the anthropic principle, “the homosexual” does not exist unless he is subject to the 19th-century European medical gaze, or better yet the 21st-century queer-theoretical gaze.

Though Foucault didn’t say so here, he knew (and had already written on the theme) that the same doctors were reinterpreting madness, crime, poverty, race, and other human phenomena in exactly the same way: a thief was not just a person who engaged in criminal behavior, he was a thief to the roots of his being, to the core of his brain and body. A runaway slave wasn’t morally wicked, he was suffering from a disease called drapetomania which made him try to escape from the loving care of his lawful owner. A Jew was not just a person who followed certain religious teachings, rather he was Jewish by nature, by blood, in all aspects of his life. Foucault’s description of “the homosexual” also echoes – I’d bet deliberately – the 19th-century model of The Masturbator, who also carried the signs of his deviation “written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away.”

Foucault was also tracing the course of a contest for authority among elite groups in Europe, the UK, and the US. Doctors vied with religious authorities and with secular lawmakers to claim the power to understand, explain, and correct social problems. Was homosexuality a sin, as the Church claimed, to be controlled by religious institutions? Was it a crime, to be punished by state violence or imprisonment? No, said the doctors, these are old-fashioned, unenlightened attitudes. Homosexuality is a disease, which we will treat: by confinement in asylums, by talking cures, by injection of hormones, by electroshock, and so on. This is not to say that these authorities adopted their positions cynically, purely to justify their quest for power; they believed sincerely that they knew the proper way to deal with the problems they addressed. Being children of their cultures, they took for granted that homosexuals, drunkards, masturbators, women – especially uppity feminist “New Women” – Jews, runaway Negroes, opium eaters, etc., were problems that needed to be fixed. Each way of thinking about “the homosexual” was a claim to possess knowledge, and a demand for the recognition of that profession’s claim to knowledge; but it also served to justify the exercise of power over other people: the sinner, the criminal, the patient.

I want to stress too that the medicalization of homosexuality (like the medicalization of masturbation, crime, race, and so on) was not based on new evidence comparable to that which produced germ theory; it was closer to phrenology and to anthropometry, the related measurement of skulls and other body parts that was used to “prove” the distinctiveness of The Criminal, The Negro, The Woman. These doctors knew nothing about genetics, hormones, or other disciplines that bore on biological aspects of human nature. The absence of any real evidence for the grandiose claims these doctors made, followed by a scramble to produce such evidence, is one of the most notable things about them. Except for the rote accounts of history (Socrates, Plato, Julius Caesar, Michelangelo, certain notorious Popes), the doctors ignored historical, cultural, and social factors in favor of the case history; it’s highly ironic that their work is used to bolster social constructionism, considering that they were dedicated essentialists and individualists. This absence of evidence continues to the present: first came the claim that “we’re born gay”, then came attempts – still unsuccessful so far – to find evidence for the claim.

The claim that “we’re born gay,” in fact, is much older than “the homosexual.” When sodomites were arrested in the 16th and 17th centuries, they often made just that claim to their interrogators and judges. In the 18th century their captors assumed that a man who sought out other men to penetrate him must be odd physiologically, so accused sodomites were sometimes examined medically for hermaphroditism. (Craig Williams [211] reports an ancient Roman fable which provided a pseudo-anatomical explanation for men who wanted to be penetrated by other men.) The men who penetrated them, though they risked prosecution for sodomy, were not seen as odd, just normally horny men unable to resist the tempting offer of an available orifice.

This connects to something else in the paragraph I quoted above. Foucault says that “homosexuality was constituted … less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself.” He’s referring here to the widely held belief that the problem lies in the man who likes to be penetrated, ‘like a woman.’

Foucault thought he was the invert, as the 19th century doctors construed him: the woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body, who sought a “normal” partner. There was a competing construction in those days, whose advocates relied on Greek models, of the homosexual as a manly man who desired other manly men – often, as Didier Eribon shows, expressing a horror of penetration. Post-Stonewall scholars tend to speak of “the modern homosexual” as more or less gender-conformist, egalitarian, twins or clones. Gendered role-playing (let alone age-stratified patterns) far from being “modern,” is seen as either hetero-imitative false consciousness or a pre-modern, traditional, indigenous model. Like the blind men and the elephant, each writer speaks of “homosexuality as we know it today” without realizing that he or she “knows” it differently than other moderns do.

A major difficulty we face is that most of the historical information we have about people who had sex with partners of their own sex comes not from them, but from the authorities who disposed of them. We have more material on medieval and later sodomites from the hands of Church officials denouncing this horrific vice than we have from sodomites themselves; and most of what we have from the sodomites is filtered through Church documents, their words uttered under interrogation and trial. (Imagine what it would be like if all we knew about twentieth-century gays were the writings of psychiatrists recounting the trials and tribulations of trying to treat these psychopaths, even when those writings purport to quote our actual words.) This was even more true in 1976, when the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality was originally published in French. Since 1980 there’s been an explosion of research and publication, heralded and inspired by John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, which Foucault liked so much that he contributed a blurb for its original edition, and it led him to rethink his own work.

We’re in a better position with the world today; academic observers from the West have published vast amounts of material based on observation of people who interact erotically with persons of their own sex in many different countries, including migrants from one country to another, and have also documented the histories of same-sex eroticism in the West itself, in different regions and classes and periods. We can see that while one model or another may be “hegemonic,” paid lip service even by people who don’t fit it, there are always different configurations of erotic practice in any period or locale. Yet most of these writers try to force this data into a distorted or misunderstood theoretical model based on this single paragraph from Foucault, “especially in the United States, where what were for Foucault simply working hypotheses have been transformed into veritable dogmas -- that it has not been sufficiently noticed that Foucault himself rapidly abandoned those hypotheses and quickly reformulated his entire project, almost before the first volume had even been published” (Eribon xiii).

Even those mavericks who resist this tendency spend a lot of energy distancing themselves from it, which deforms their work in other ways. Stephen O. Murray, for example, finds it necessary to refer at least once per publication to Volume One of The History of Sexuality, usually in order to sneer at its devotees, even though he has written about his respect for Foucault and his work. Samar Habib, who flirts with essentialism in her Female Homosexuality in the Middle East, does so by focusing on one model of eroticism between women, the butch-femme model, as though there were not others active at the same time and in the same cultures.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pointed out in The Epistemology of the Closet that there’s a lot of scholarly confusion about what “the modern homosexual” is, that scholars who use this term “underwrite the notion that ‘homosexuality as we conceive of it today’ itself comprises a coherent definitional field rather than a space of overlapping, contradictory, and conflictual definitional forces” (44). I know I’ve quoted this passage before, but I’ll probably have to quote it again because so many scholars make this mistake in the name of Foucault.

Boswell, John. Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Eribon, Didier. Insult and the making of the gay self. Durham NC: Duke UP, 2004.

Foucault, Michel. History of sexuality, volume I: introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House / Vintage Books, 1978.

Habib, Samar. Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: histories and representations. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Martin, Dale. Sex and the single savior: gender and sexuality in biblical interpretation. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.

Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality.” In Carole Vance (editor), Pleasure and danger: exploring female sexuality (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 267-319.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.

Williams, Craig. Roman homosexualities: ideologies of masculinity in classical antiquity. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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