First published May 11, 2005, in the Chicago Free
Press.
Every once in a while you hear some half-educated person
announce ostentatiously that there were no homosexuals before the
late 19th century, or even that there was no homosexuality before
then.
When you hear that you know you have encountered someone who has
read one or another of a small group of gay academics called
"social constructionists." SC (for short) claims that since our
sexual "identity" (watch this tricky word!) is created by our
social and linguistic context no one could have been "homosexual"
before the term was invented in the late 19th century.
But there is something fishy about saying there were no
homosexuals before the late 19th century. It is easy enough to
point out that there were people who engaged in same-sex acts. When
the SC theorist replies "Oh, but they didn't understand themselves
to be homosexual," we can respond that they certainly knew they
desired same-sex partners. If the SC theorist replies, "But they
didn't have the specific identity of 'homosexual' because the word
didn't exist," the response has to be, "Well, duh!"
So what starts out looking like a fascinating claim about the
history of sexuality turns out be a much less interesting claim
about language. The assertion makes a much weaker claim than it
pretends to. It is a kind of bait and switch game. It is as if
someone offered to sell you an airplane, but it turned out to be a
model airplane.
As sociologist Stephen O. Murray commented in
American Gay about SC theorists, "I can think of no
other group whose academic elite is so bent on challenging the
masses' quest for roots as gay and lesbian historians are."
The late Yale University historian John Boswell was a favorite
target of SC theorists because he gave his book
Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality the
subtitle "Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the
Christian Era to the 14th century." Gay!
There are problems with Boswell's effort to exculpate the
Catholic church from its responsibility for fomenting homophobia,
but some of the criticism centered instead on the objection that
there could not have been any "gay" people before modern times
since the term "gay" was not widely used for homosexuals before the
20th century.
In two long, later articles Boswell cited copious evidence from
classical and medieval sources of widespread awareness that some
people had primarily same-sex desires, were fully aware of their
predominant desire for same-sex partners and that people were
sometimes categorized in terms of their desires.
As Boswell summarized:
"While ... premodern societies did not employ categories fully
comparable to the modern 'homosexual/heterosexal' dichotomy, this
does not demonstrate that the polarity is not ... applicable to
those societies. ... A common thread of constructionist argument
... is that no one in antiquity or the Middle Ages experienced
homosexuality as an exclusive, permanent or defining mode of
sexuality. This argument can be shown to be factually
incorrect."
Although Boswell originally defined gays as people "conscious of
erotic inclination toward their own gender as a distinguishing
characteristic," Boswell later concluded that not all earlier gay
people necessarily saw their sexuality as something that
distinguished them from others in their society, so he revised his
definition of "gays" to the simpler "those whose erotic interest is
predominantly directed toward their own gender."
That is, after all, pretty much what we all mean when we say
someone in the past was homosexual or gay. We could add that many
such people were surely aware of their desire as a distinguishing
characteristic, even if it was not always the primary one.
Historian Louis Crompton agreed with Boswell in his
comprehensive gay history,
Homosexuality and Civilization:
"Michel Foucault and his followers have argued that the
'homosexual' is a modern invention, a mental construct of the last
hundred years. That is, of course, true of homosexuality as a
'scientific' or psychiatric category. But it is a mistake to
presume that earlier ages thought merely of sexual acts and not of
persons."
We can go further. There is good evidence not only that people
knew they had predominant or exclusive homosexual desires and that
fact was important to them, but that there were homosexual
sub-cultures in earlier times - in the 18th century London, in
Renaissance Italian cities such as Florence, and perhaps even in
12th century London. As for someone's having a homosexual identity,
the 16th century gay Italian artist Gianantonio Bazzi adopted the
nickname "Sodoma." That sounds like a fairly assertive homosexual
identity to me.
Academic fads generally last 15-20 years and social construction
is arguably on the decline. It was based on a limited knowledge of
history and a wildly exaggerated notion of the power of language to
control and limit people's understanding.
It inhibited gay historical research because it assumed a priori
that evidence for meaningful historical continuity was not there to
be found, so no one needed to look for it. As Crompton's own recent
book shows, they are beginning to look again.
***
Author's Note: In response to post-publication queries,
the two John Boswell articles the column refers to are:
- "Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories," in
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian
Past, ed. Martin Duberman, et al. (New York: New American
Library, 1989), pp. 17-36. This article is mostly a reprint of an
earlier article in the journal _Salmagundi_ 58-59 (1982-83), pp.
89-114, but adds short postscript (pp. 34-36) from which the column
quotes.
- "Concepts, Experience and Sexuality," in
Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social
Constructionist Controversy, Edward Stein, ed. (New York:
Garland, 1990), pp. 133-173.