If it makes you feel better to imagine that there is a huge gulf between sodomite and queer please be my guest. That does not mean anyone who disagrees with you is conflating the two just that the differences are markedly less than the similarities in those categories. To believe that there is not enough commonality between the past and present to make meaningful analogies between the two is a big mistake. I'm surprised Miles seems to want to make this mistake. Or perhaps Miles just thinks the rest of us are too dumb to see the obvious differences and need him to point them out?
> Thought experiment: Michaelangelo (or whoever) 500 years ago in Europe
> has sex with a man. Does he wonder about his "real" sexual identity?
> Does he fear or hope that he is a gay man? No, because he does not
> draw any implications about his personality from the type of sexual
> behavior he engages in. People can just fuck--and do in many
> societies!--without labelling themselves or the people they have sex
> with as stable sexual types of people. I know this is hard to imagine
> in our society, but that's my point: we're socialized to automatically
> jump from saying that people carrying out sexual acts to saying that
> people have specific, stable sexual categories. This social process
> of labelling people as stable sexual types is not a cultural or
> historical universal; it is a social practice that has emerged in
> specific types of human societies.
>
> So the whole issue of sexual identity is a far more complex and social
> process than you suggest.
>
> Miles
Why would it be hard to imagine that people can just fuck without labeling themselves as a specific stable sexual type? People do it today and I assume they have throughout human history. It sounds to me like you are one who has a hard time imagining such things please don't assume the rest of us suffer from your limitation.
John Thornton