I sign off here today because I'm overposted, but notice that I wasn't offering a generally theory of history in general or sex in history in general. I was addressing the parochial question of whether we could say Michelangelo, a Renaissance Florentine, was homosexual. So no, I wasn't talking about women, or premodernity (except for a side glance at antiquity), or the role of homosexual behavior in the South Pacific or in Japan, etc. And if it is un-PC of me not to offer a general theory of everything but focuses on famous white modern males, well, fuck me. I never was PC anyway.
--- Robert Wrubel <bobwrubel at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> "Older men, through their erotic engagement with
> beautiful young men, aspired
> to be one with Truth, and young men, in turn, were
> to be philosophically instructed by their older male
> admirers. "
>
> I think you meant "aspired to be one with Beauty".
> Who would ever think a young man had any connection
> to wisdom? Plato certainly doesnt portray them that
> way.
>
> BobW
> On 8/28/07, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> > But if Miles thinks it's some sort of profound
> error
> > to raise the question of whether Michelangelo was
> > homosexual, or predominantly so, he's wrong.
> Sodomy
> > was a category well known and well understood in
> his
> > time and not that differently understood from the
> way
> > "we" understand homosexuality -- maybe not in
> Tribeca
> > but in Bensonhurst or Merrillville -- it was
> thought
> > of as unmanly, sinful, perverted, and criminal,
> and
> > associated with child molesting.
>
> That is a very parochial understanding of history,
> which ignores women
> as well as other cultures than those of the region
> that have become
> "the West." Before modernity, a majority of
> societies had no concept
> of sodomy, and acts that would have fallen into the
> category of sodomy
> in the predominantly Christian nations included ones
> that were not
> only permitted but also in some cases exalted (as in
> ancient Greece
> and pre-modern Japan) or mandated in the rest of the
> world.*
>
> Where same-sex sexual acts were permitted or exalted
> or mandated
> before modernity, they were largely pederasty,
> between older men and
> much younger men (often boys before the age of
> majority), and
> pederasty was often associated with pedagogy and
> philosophy. Older
> men, through their erotic engagement with beautiful
> young men, aspired
> to be one with Truth, and young men, in turn, were
> to be
> philosophically instructed by their older male
> admirers. Lovers and
> their beloveds often differed in rank as well as
> age: a good example
> is Sultan Mahmoud and his slave Ayaz (cf.
> ).
>
> In contrast to what we know about men's sexual
> practice before
> modernity, pederasty among women does not appear to
> have been
> institutionalized anywhere, and women were less
> frequently prosecuted
> as sodomites than men, though today everyone
> understands that women as
> well as men can identify themselves as homosexual or
> bisexual.
>
> Pederasty as it was practiced, and sodomy as it was
> prohibited, before
> modernity**, and homosexuality after modernity are
> not the same
> concepts at all, and the majority opinion in
> Lawrence v. Texas took
> note of the differences which outweighed a small
> overlap among the
> concepts: "It should be noted, however, that there
> is no longstanding
> history in this country of laws directed at
> homosexual conduct as a
> distinct matter. Early American sodomy laws were not
> directed at
> homosexuals as such but instead sought to prohibit
> nonprocreative
> sexual activity more generally, whether between men
> and women or men
> and men. Moreover, early sodomy laws seem not to
> have been enforced
> against consenting adults acting in private.
> Instead, sodomy
> prosecutions often involved predatory acts against
> those who could not
> or did not consent: relations between men and minor
> girls or boys,
> between adults involving force, between adults
> implicating disparity
> in status, or between men and animals" (at
> ).
>
> * In anthropological literature, homosexual acts
> that are mandated for
> all men are sometimes called "institutional
> homosexuality." An
> example of it is 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.
>
> --
> Yoshie
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