[lbo-talk] Globalizing Homophobia

Ferenc Molnar ferenc_molnar at hotmail.com
Thu Dec 9 10:10:47 PST 2010


The first Western figures who sought to create a "binary homo/hetero identity", as Klauda puts it, were Classicists who shared similar narrative patterns as the Orientalists. "Uranians" in England like Symonds and Carpenter and "Urnings" in Germany located much of their identity in classical Greek and Roman history. Edward Carpenter located homoerotic culture in places like the military and the pagan priesthood. Their work was both an appeal for tolerance and an appeal to the snobbery of the classically educated elite. Aside from Carpenter who mixed socialism with homoeroticism it was essentially an enclosed reform movement within a privileged world and thus tends to be ignored by contemporary LGBT historians. Uranians might work very well as the originalists for Klauda's idea of "homo/hetero binary" globalization. ......

My sense is a little more reciprocal even though I'm aware that relationships between the colonizer and the colonized are not on an equal plane. The case of American Christian evangelicals involvement in creating Uganda's 2009 death penalty for gay sex is an interesting case. In that case you see the West exporting not only its allegedly liberatory idea of gay identity but its clearly persecutorial one. The American Christian's idea of the corrupting influence of homosexual identity on American culture found a harmonic chord with a group of Ugandan politicians idea of the "corrupting influence on the African family". ......

I'd like to add another layer of complexity to Klauda's already complex take on gay globalization and that is that Western hetero/homo binary identity carries within it and around it struggles between different sectors of culture, religion, class and race; so many different struggles that that binary can easily find its echo within struggles in other global cultures.



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