How to do the history of male homosexuality

GLQ

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 87-124

  Halperin, David M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0008492260     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-6-1-87     Document Type: Review

References (84)

1. See, e.g., Jacqueline Murray, "Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages," in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (London: Garland, 1996), 191-222;
2. or the otherwise excellent article by Anna Clark, "Anne Lister's Construction of Lesbian Identity," Journal of the History of Sexuality 7 (1996): 23-50.
3. Or so I argue in "Hisloricizing the Subject of Desire: Sexual Preferences and Erotic Identities in the Pseudo-Lucianic Erôtes" in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Jan Goldstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 19-34, 255-61;
4. and in "Forgetting Foucault." For a quite different but powerful and persuasive argument for the importance of emphasizing continuities in women's history see Judith M. Bennett, "Confronting Continuity," Journal of Women's History 9, no. 3 (1997): 73-94.
5. The demonstration of the existence of such an irreducible definitional uncertainty is the central, invaluable accomplishment of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
6. As will become evident, I have taken on board her critique (45-48) of my earlier work, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), applying her lesson about the irresolvable contradictions in what we are too quick to call "homosexuality as we understand it today." At the same time, however, I will continue to insist on documenting the existence of what she terms, sarcastically, "a Great Paradigm Shift" in the history of homosexuality, namely, the emergence of the discourses of homosexuality themselves in the modern period. Far from seeing a conflict between a historical inquiry into the construction of homosexuality and a discursive analysis of the contradictions in the modern notion of homosexuality, I see such a historical inquiry as helping account for the ineradicable incoherence of the modern notion. Sedgwick's own work, in fact, has enabled me to bring the historical and discursive critiques of homosexuality into closer and more systematic alignment.
7. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New American Library, 1989), 8.
8. See Randolph Trumbach, "London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Social History 11 (1977): 1-33;
9. Barry D. Adam, "Age, Structure, and Sexuality: Reflections on the Anthropological Evidence on Homosexual Relations," in Anthropology and Homosexual Behavior, ed. Evelyn Blackwood (New York: Haworlh, 1986), 19-33;
10. Adam, "Structural Foundations of the Gay World," in Queer Theory/Sociology, ed. Steven Seidman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 111-26;
11. and David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 25. Greenberg speaks of "transgenderal," "transgenerational," and "egalitarian" types (the last two terms are, in my view, misleading).
12. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 47.
13. There is a striking irony - no less striking for its having gone, so far as I know, totally unnoticed - in the section of Epistemology of the Closet in which Sedgwick justly criticizes social-constructionist historians of homosexuality because, to call attention to the differences between premodern and modern forms of homosexual expression, they typically draw a sharp contrast between earlier sexual categories and a falsely coherent, homogeneous, and unitary notion of "homosexuality as we understand it today," thereby treating the contemporary concept of homosexuality as "a coherent definitional field rather than a space of overlapping, contradictory, and conflictual definitional forces" (45). Sedgwick argues that it is wrong to suppose that earlier sexual categories are simply superseded or wholly replaced by later ones. Rather, she suggests, earlier sexual categories continue to reappear within later ones, producing an ineradicable instability in those later categories. Moreover, she produces an analysis of homosexual discourse in terms of what she regards as a well-nigh perennial tension among and between four definitional axes: minoritizing/universalizing modes of homosexual definition and gender-transitive versus gender-intransitive or gender-separatist modes of homosexual definition. By that means Sedgwick aims "to denarrativize" the narralives written by social-constructionist historians (including, explicitly, myself) by "focusing on a performative space of contradiction" (48). Although I have embraced Sedgwick's critique, as will be evident from this essay, I find it noteworthy that Sedgwick herself seems to ignore her own lesson in the very act of preaching it. For she announces that her intention is to end the essentialist-constructionist debate, "to promote [its] obsolescence" (40). In this she has been largely successful. As Ross Chambers observes in a superb commentary on this very passage in Sedgwick, "Without quite putting an end to the essentialist-constructivist debate, Sedgwick's move has effectively backgrounded it, and allowed an ongoing conversation to bracket it out by, as it were, changing the subject" ("Strategic Constructivism? Sedgwick's Ethics of Inversion," in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays in Queer Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Stephen Barber and David L. Clark [New York: Routledge, forthcoming]). In other words, Sedgwick deliberately sets aside historical questions about the emergence of modern sexual categories and describes these questions as effectively superseded by her own approach; in a gesture exactly congruent with the one she criticizes, she structures her project in such a way that "the superseded model then drops out of the frame of analysis" (47). But just as the discourses of sodomy or inversion do not disappear with the emergence of the discourses of homosexuality, as Sedgwick rightly argues, so the historical problem of describing the differences between prehomosexual and homosexual formations will not simply disappear with a heightened awareness of the crisis of homo- and heterosexual definition in the present. It is now my turn to insist, against Sedgwick, on her very own axiom: despite her dazzling and important demonstration of the futility of playing the truth game called the essentialist-constructionist debate, the terms of that debate have not been superseded for historians by Sedgwick's "focusing on [homo-heterosexual definition] as a performative space of contradiction." Rather than attempt to reassert the terms of the essentialist-constructionist debate in opposition to Sedgwick, however, I try here to reanimate the constructionist historical project in a more self-aware and theoretical spirit, so as bring the Foucauldian historical and narratival critique of homosexual essentialism into greater harmony with the denarrativizing and performative critique advocated by Sedgwick.
14. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1978-86), 1:101.
15. Rosemary Daniell, Sleeping with Soldiers: In Search of the Macho Man (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 71.
16. Pseudo-Lucian, Erôtes 9, trans. M. D. Macleod, in Lucian VIII (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
17. See, generally, Halperin, "Historicizing the Subject of Desire."
18. Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe 1.4, trans. B. P. Reardon, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B. P. Reardon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 27. Similarly, Artemidorus observes that men who dream that they wear facial makeup, jewelry,
19. or unguents will suffer disgrace (i.e., will be exposed) as adulterers: see 81.15-17, 106.16-107.2, and 269.11-13 Pack, cited with discussion by Suzanne MacAlister, "Gender as Sign and Symbolism in Artemidoros' Oneirokritika: Social Aspirations and Anxieties," Helios 19 (1992): 140-60, esp. 149-50.
20. Cf. the representations of Agathon in Old Comedy: commentary by Froma I. Zeitlin, "Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes' Thesmophorizusae" in Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 375-416;
21. Frances Muecke, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman," Classical Quarterly 32 (1982): 41-55.
22. See Nicole Loraux, "Herakles: The Super-Male and the Feminine," trans. Robert Lamberton, in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 21-52.
23. See Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 25-26.
24. wish to thank Vernon Rosario for suggesting the humoral gloss on this passage. See also Joseph Cady, "The 'Masculine Love' of the 'Princes of Sodom' 'Practising the Art of Ganymede' at Henri III's Court: The Homosexuality of Henri III and His Mignons in Pierre de L'Estoile's Mémoires-Journaux" in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 123-54, esp. 132-33:
25. "However, in the Renaissance the word 'effeminate,' when applied to a man, did not automatically connote homosexuality, but instead had a diversity of meaning it lacks today. For instance, the term sometimes designated a kind of hyper or helpless male heterosexuality, a usage that, of course, no longer exists. Donne's remark that he is called 'effeminat' because he 'love[s] womens joyes,' in his epigram 'The Jughler' (1587?-1596?), belongs to this Renaissance tradition." For further details Cady refers the reader to his earlier essay "Renaissance Awareness and Language for Heterosexuality: 'Love' and 'Feminine Love,'" in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 143-58.
26. Quoted by Davidson, "Closing Up the Corpses," 315.
27. See Randolph Trumbach, "The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660-1750," in Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncey, Hidden from History; 129-40, 509-11.
28. I follow here the arguments of Davidson, "Closing Up the Corpses";
29. and George Chauncey Jr., "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance," in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, with Robert A. Padgug (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 87-117.
30. See, for some recent examples, Thorkil Vanggaard, Phallos: A Symbol and Its History in the Male World, trans. from the Danish by the author (New York: International Universities Press, 1972), 17 and passim;
31. Lionel Ovesey, Homosexuality and Pseudohomosexuality (New York: Science House, 1969);
32. and Richard A. Posner, Sex and Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. 105-7, 152, 296.
33. E.g., Gary W. Dowsett, Practicing Desire: Homosexual Sex in the Era of AIDS (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
34. See Robert B. Koehl, "The Chieftain Cup and a Minoan Rite of Passage," Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986): 99-110;
35. and Koehl, "Ephoros and Ritualized Homosexuality in Bronze Age Crete," in Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 7-13.
36. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4, 96-97.
37. Thus, for example, the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florentine definitions of "sodomy" and "sodomite" refer to the "active" or insertive partner in anal intercourse only (Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence ibid., 14, 110).
38. See Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 163 n. 53, for an admittedly incomplete list.
39. See Halperin, "Historicizing the Subject of Desire," esp. 24-25, 257-58 nn. 30-32;
40. also Everett K. Rowson, "The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists," in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 50-79;
41. and J. W. Wright and Everett K. Rowson, eds., Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
42. See Cynthia B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the Second Earl of Castlehaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33: "The prosecutions for sodomy about which we have information before the late seventeenth century rarely condemned defendants for effeminate behavior; conversely, reproaches for effeminacy rarely included sexual examples."
43. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 44.
44. For an attempt to document several instances of same-sex sexual object choice, and even of conscious erotic preferences for persons of the same sex as oneself, that nonetheless do not satisfy the criteria for homosexuality, see Halperin, "Historicizing the Subject of Desire."
45. See Halperin, "Heroes and Their Pals," in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 75-87, 176-79.
46. See Alan Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England," in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 40-61. I interpret Bray to provide evidence for this claim,
47. although he does not quite make it himself. See also Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder, 33: "Whether or not actually pederastic, the sodomitical relationships described in the legal records invariably paired authority and dependency - men and boys, masters and servants, teachers and pupils, patrons and clients."
48. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 139.
49. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, Ibid., 139-40.
50. I owe this citation to Haggerty, Men in Love, 25,
51. who interprets it eloquently but almost exactly contrary to the way I do. For a contrasting approach to this topic see C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
52. I overstate for the sake of emphasis. For a more nuanced and complex account of the interrelations of sexuality and gender in transgenderism see Don Kulick, Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
53. See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, esp. 1, 9, 85-86, whence I derive the distinction between "universalizing" and "minoritizing" constructions of sexual identity.
54. For a more detailed contrast between the invert and the sodomite as discursive types see Halperin, "Forgetting Foucault."
55. Cited and translated by Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 68.
56. Quintilian, Institutes 5.9.14, cited and translated by Amy Richlin, "Not before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love between Men," Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1992-93): 542.
57. This is a composite passage by ancient physiognomic writers, assembled by Gleason, Making Men, 63.
58. Another composite passage, Gleason, Making Men, ibid., 78.
59. Aulus Gellius, 6.12.5, cited and translated by Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 23. A measure of the distance between inversion or passivity and male love can be gauged from the fact that Scipio was quite willing to identify himself publicly as bound to his friend Laelius by a "bond of love," according to the Roman historian Valerius Maximus (8.8.1). (I wish to thank Tom Hillard of Macquarie University for this observation and citation.) There would not necessarily have been any inconsistency or hypocrisy in Scipio's attitude.
60. Historia ecclesiastica 8.10, cited and translated by Glenn W. Olsen, "St. Anselm and Homosexuality," in Proceedings of the Fifth International Saint Anselm Conference: St. Anselm and St. Augustine, Episcopi ad Saecula, ed. Joseph C. Schnaubelt et al. (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus, 1988), 110. Note that nothing in this passage establishes that the "effeminates" excoriated in it are being condemned specifically for sexual passivity (although the use of the word catamite clearly points in that direction). It would be easy enough for an incautious (or essentialist) historian to construe Orderic's reference to "the filth of sodomy" as implying the opposite, namely, that the "effeminates" are also being accused of playing an "active" role in homosexual intercourse. There is plainly no way to settle the question definitively, but I hope that the historical typology I am constructing here will help resolve such ambiguities and will aid in the decipherment of historical texts. In Orderic's case, the text's insistence on the visible deviance of the catamites, its ascription to them of an effeminate morphology, situates it in a discursive tradition considerably more specific than that of merely "gay male representation." Instead, Orderic's account would seem to belong to a particular European tradition of discourse, a particular discursive mode of representing male inverts or passives. The more we know about the discursive rules and regularities that control the production of statements about historical sexual actors, the easier it may be to figure out what is going on in a particular passage even in the absence of explicit linguistic indications. In this way, attentiveness to the discursive context of Orderic's text makes it possible, I believe, to extract from his ambiguous and indeterminate language a better idea of the transgression for which the "effeminates" are being condemned than we could ever do on the basis of his words alone.
61. Cited and translated (with slight alterations here) by Cady, "'Masculine Love' of the 'Princes of Sodom,'" 133. Cady, of course, draws a different conclusion about the existence of homosexuality in the Renaissance from this and other comments by Pierre de L'Estoile.
62. The two passages are cited and quoted by Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's, 1982), 81, 87.
63. Quoted and discussed by Lisa L. Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 72-74.
64. C. Westphal, "Die conträre Sexualempfindung, Symptom eines neuropathischen (psychopathischen) Zustandes," Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 2 (1870): 73-108.
65. Arrigo Tamassia, "Sull' inversione dell' istinto sessuale," Rivista sperimentale di freniatria e di medicina legale 4 (1878): 97-117.
66. Of course, the molly himself is a complex figure, already verging on the homosexual, as Trumbach and others have shown. I do not mean to skip over the vexed interpretative issues, merely to make the point that the figure of the molly - however forward-looking he may be in other respects - retains many of the features traditionally ascribed to male inverts or passives.
67. The basic study is Hubert Kennedy, Ulrichs: The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson, 1988).
68. See Chauncey, "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality."
69. My account derives from Chauncey, Chauncey, "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality." ibid.
70. Westphal, "Die conträre Sexualempfindung," 107n; my emphasis.
71. Westphal, "Die conträre Sexualempfindung," 82-84,
72. cited, translated, and discussed by Robert Grimm, "The Dawn of Contrary Sexual Sensitivity," unpublished manuscript.
73. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948), 615.
74. For a detailed elaboration of the distinction between homosexuality and inversion see C. A. Tripp, The Homosexual Matrix (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 22-35.
75. In this one respect, at least, Kinsey proves a more reliable historian than Foucault. In The History of Sexuality Foucault dated the birth of homosexuality (as a discursive category) to Westphal's article: "We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized - Westphal's famous article of 1870 on 'contrary sexual sensations' can stand as its date of birth - less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" (1:43). I believe Foucault was right to see in Westphal the emergence of a modern psychiatric notion of erotic orientation, which brought with it a specification of deviant individuals and a shift from a juridical discourse of prohibited acts to a normalizing discourse of perverted psychology. But I also believe Foucault was wrong to identify Westphal's category of "contrary sexual feeling" with homosexuality. In Epislemology of the Closet Sedgwick ingeniously argued that my "reading of 'homosexuality' as 'we currently understand it' . . . is virtually the opposite of Foucault's," insofar as Foucault has a "gender transitive" understanding of homosexuality, whereas I have a "gender intransitive" one (46). That may well explain why Foucault did not take what I regard as the historically necessary step of systematically differentiating "sexual inversion" from "homosexuality." Still, the ultimate issue here may not be a difference of opinion about what homosexuality is so much as an uncertainty about whether it is possible to draw a meaningful distinction in the history of modern European discourses between an "orientation" and a "sexuality."
76. Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, Sexual Behavior, 616, 623.
77. The aptly chosen word fades here derives from Adam, who writes that in homosexuality "sex-role definitions fade from interpersonal bonding" ("Structural Foundations," 111). This paragraph and much of what follows have been inspired by Adam.
78. Quoted by Dan Savage, Savage Love: Straight Answers from America's Most Popular Sex Columnist (New York: Plume, 1998), 189-90.
79. See, in addition to Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, Sexual Behavior,
80. the following: George Chauncey Jr., "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War One Era," in Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncey, Hidden from History, 294-317, 541-46;
81. and Michael Bartos, John McLeod, and Phil Nott, Meanings of Sex between Men: A Study Conducted by the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations for the Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health, 1993 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994).
82. See Barry D. Adam, "Age Preferences among Gay and Bisexual Men," GLQ (forthcoming).
83. See, once again, Adam, "Structural Foundations."
84. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 182-84: "In short, under a régime of disciplinary power, the art of punishing . . . brings five quite distinct operations into play: it refers individual acts, performances, and conducts to a group ensemble that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation, and a source of the rule to be followed. It differentiates individuals in relation to one another and in terms of that group rule, whether the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be looked to, or as an optimum to be approximated. It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level of attainment, and the 'nature' of individuals. It imposes, through this 'valorizing' measurement, the constraint of a conformity to be achieved. Lastly, it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal. . . . [To recapitulate, it] compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In a word, it normalizes. . . . Like surveillance and together with it, normalization becomes one of the great instruments of power at the end of the classical age. The marks that once indicated status, privilege, and group membership come to be replaced, or at least to be supplemented, by a whole range of degrees of normality: these are signs of membership in a homogeneous social body, but they also play a part themselves in classification, in hierarchization, and in the distribution of ranks. In one sense, the power of normalization enforces homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure deviations, to set levels, to define specialties, and to render differences useful by calibrating them one to another. The power of the norm functions easily within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative and as the result of measurement, all the gradations of individual differences." Translation extensively modified.