>2. Were there homosexuals back then?
>
>I especially enjoyed the posts around the history of homosexuality
>and homophobia. I am vividly reminded about the first time I used
>the word "homophobia" in a lecture sometime in the early 80s. The
>students stopped me and asked me to explain it. When I said
>"Intolerance of homosexuals" they burst out laughing. It was as if I
>had said to a tiger it was wrong to eat meat. Today of course
>students say, "I am no homophobe but..." and proceed to air some
>foul prejudice.
The feelings often described as homophobic are complex & cannot be reduced to the dislike of or hatred for actual or imaginary homosexuals. The feelings seem to be a mixture of the following:
1. Fear of appearing homosexual. 2. Fear of oneself becoming (or turning out to be) homosexual. 3. Fear of being victimized by the homosexual.
1 is quite obvious, in that much of homophobic behaviors originates in the desire not to appear homosexual -- the desire caused by the fact that, in this society, to be or to appear homo carries penalties ranging from mild disapproval to lynching. Since one does not wear one's sexual preferences (actual or imaginary) on one's sleeve, it seems to some (especially some young men) that they need to prove their "normalcy" by creating & oppressing the "abnormals." Because it is impossible to "prove" one's sexuality once and for all, homophobic behaviors tend to assume a character of compulsive repetition that does not achieve its end (= proof of "normalcy").
2 is less obvious, so allow me to quote the late and lamented Quentin Crisp to illustrate my point: "Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can't help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it....That's the famous joke: I don't like peas, and I'm glad I don't like them, because if I liked them, I would eat them, and I would hate them" (_The Celluloid Closet_, dir. Robert Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman [based upon the work of film historian Vito Russo _The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies_], 1995).
As for 3, it is a common ideological inversion of victims & victimizers. The oppressed appear as "victimizers" in the eyes of the oppressors. Gay bashers used to make use of the "homosexual panic" defense regularly; and the "homosexual panic" defense used to allow them to avoid legal sanctions against violence. This defense is still being invoked by the gay bashers today, but nowadays the judges and/or the juries do not necessarily accept it. This may be properly called progress, paltry progress as it is.
>But anecdotes apart there is a good deal at stake. I have snipped
>what I think is the crucial line from Lou's post. Phil like the
>fine polemicist that he is went straight to it.
>
>'Odd that they 'lacked the vocabulary and the constructs necessary. . .'
>
>It is my opinion that there can be behaviour, feelings etc without
>words for them. I think that Phil, Yoshie and others border on what
>Bhaskar terms the linguistic fallacy, that is the claim that
>language calls the world/reality into being.
No, I am not arguing for a nominalist or post-structuralist position. I'm making use of Marx (esp., _Grundrisse_ & _Capital_ Vol. 1), Karl Polanyi, etc. Recall how Marx uses the term "rational abstraction" in _Grundrisse_.
The disembedding of the erotic from the rest of social relations & the creation of "sexuality" & "sexual identities" ("identities" based upon erotic preferences & orientations, mainly now shaped by the sex/gender of the object choice) could _not_ have occurred prior to the rise of capitalism. Consider the "rational abstraction" of "economy": "[B]efore modern times the forms of [human] livelihood attracted much less...conscious attention than did most other parts of...organized existence. In contrast to kinship, magic or etiquette with their powerful [influences], the economy as such remained nameless...Only two hundred years ago did an esoteric sect of French thinkers coin the term and call themselves économistes. Their claim was to have discovered the economy (Karl Polanyi, "Aristotle Discovers the Economy," in _Trade and Market in the Early Empires_ [Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957], p. 71). According to Polanyi, "The prime reason for the absence of any concept of the economy is the difficulty of identifying the economic process under conditions where it is embedded in non-economic institutions" (ibid.). The economy is at once discovered and invented by disembedding it from the total ensemble of social relations.
"Sexuality" is the name given to the "rational abstraction," the product of the disembedding of the erotic from the total ensemble of social relations. Such disembedding was impossible under either pre-capitalist class societies in which surplus was extracted not mainly through the market (as it is now) but through political power justified by patriarchy (= an ideology of general subordination); or pre-capitalist societies like North American tribes', organized on the basis of clans & kinship networks (social relations _unproductive_ of one class dependent on extracting surplus from the other class of direct producers).
>Let us take the instance of a certain tribe in Papua New Guinea.
>This is a classic in the literature but I do not remember their
>names. This tribe apparently believes that to ejaculate causes one
>to lose power. They encourage preadolescent boys to suck off older
>boys so that they can become strong. So off in the bushes there are
>lots of boys sucking off others. (But "Are they happy?, I ask
>myself.)
>
>At a certain age the older boys leave the bushes and get married.
>The whole practice is obviously designed to keep young males away
>from the wives. It is obvious that this behaviour cannot be covered
>by the words homosexual, gay or bisexual. It is a specific form of
>same sex behaviour. By any standards it is normal within this
>community.
>
>Now there is apparently an instance in the literature when a young
>man from the same tribe, who had married, kept sneaking out to the
>bushes to indulge in a spot of fellatio. How does one describes
>this behaviour? Is it deviant? Is he a pervert? Or could he be a
>homosexual for whom the tribe lacks the "vocabulary and the
>constructs"? Carroll. Phil and Yoshie would presumably argue that
>he could not be a homosexual because the word does not exist for
>that tribe. being good liberals of course they would not describe
>him as a "deviated prevert". But what other explanation is possible
>for them given their equation of "language = reality", with "the
>corollary of "no language = no reality"?
In anthropological literature, the former (young men sucking older men in Papua New Guinea as a part of the prescribed coming-of-age rituals, the symbolic power of semen thus being passed from the older to the younger generation, without it being lost aimlessly) is called "institutional homosexuality," and the latter (your example of a married young man sneaking out & indulging in fellatio in bushes) "spontaneous homosexuality," for the lack of better terms. Such "spontaneous homosexuality" was known to take place in most pre-capitalist societies, _whether or not_ such societies had "institutional homosexuality" a la ancient Greece, Papua New Guniea, Native North America, or Japan.
That "spontaneous homosexuality" in pre-capitalist societies went unrecognized, existing beyond the tribes' vocabulary (though most often without sanctions against it), means that such societies thought of it as "unremarkable." What is not "remarkable" in a given culture does not become an "identity," for "identities" are relational constructs, not names given to so-called "individual traits."
Why did pre-capitalist societies often have elaborate rituals of "institutional homosexuality" without thinking of "spontaneous homosexuality" as "remarkable"? Is it because such societies were "backward" & did not "progress" toward our modern understanding as they should have? Were they "destined" in a Hegelian sense to "progress"? I think not. "Spontaneous homosexuality" was "unremarkable" because in pre-capitalist societies one's "identity" was based first upon one's "place" in society, primarily in terms of occupational pursuits & secondarily in terms of gender (in the case of the so-called "biological female," however, gender generally mattered more than occupational pursuits).
***** For the American Indians, occupational pursuits clearly occupy the spotlight, with dress/demeanor coming in a close second. Sexual object choice is part of the gender configuration, but its salience is low; so low that by itself it does not provoke the reclassification of the individual to a special status [Yoshie: as it does under capitalist modernity]. In the Western system [Yoshie: which I call capitalist modernity, so as not to be Eurocentric], the order of salience is virtually the reverse. (Harriet Whitehead, "The Bow and the Burden Strap: A New Look at Institutionalized Homosexuality in Native North America," _The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader_, eds. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, & David M. Halperin, NY: Routledge, 1993, p. 513) *****
It is capitalist modernity that has made "sexual object choice" more salient, creating "sexual identities" such as gay & straight. Our modern "sexuality" is not just a name or "construct" but a result of "rational abstraction" wrought by capitalism (which abstracted "economy," "labor," etc. too).
>So then there is for me something essential in certain types of
>sexuality. I think of the term 'homosexual' and believe that it
>manifests itself differently over the dimensions of time, culture
>and space. One of the contemporary manifestations is 'gay' and it
>is a homogenising movement. It is assimilating and by and large
>eliminating traditional homosexual behaviour throughout the world.
>Gay Bars in Bangkok look remarkably like Gay Bars in Brisbane.
>
>Now I am not arguing that all people who indulge in same sex
>behaviour are homosexuals. Prisons are full of examples of
>heterosexual men who turn to same sex behaviour because there is no
>alternative. But I am saying that there have always been men who
>however they indulged their sexual preference, were homosexual
>whether the words or concepts for their preference existed or not.
With your additional distinction between "gay" (= self-consciously foregrounding one's erotic preference & creating a "sexual identity" based upon it in contrast to other "sexual identities," in part in response to the ruling ideology foregrounding erotic preferences, creating "sexual identities," & imposing one on everyone) and "homosexual" (= possessing a stable sexual preference either for a biologically "same sex" or for a sociologically "same gender" without this fact becoming "remarkable" & institutionalized in his/her culture & society), I think we are not in disagreement.
You are quite right to say that your "position is just as historical as that of my good friends Phil, Yoshie & Carroll." And you correctly observe that "[o]ne of the contemporary manifestations is 'gay' and it is a homogenising movement." That is because capitalism cannot exist without imperialism. Therefore, modern "sexual identities" -- one of which is "gay" -- cannot but exert cultural hegemony over older understandings of sex, gender, & eroticism, reducing them to residual ideologies in the sense that Raymond Williams used the term.
in queer solidarity,
Yoshie