Thesislog

[or, I found it!—in other news, hope you guys don’t mind that I’m totally posting manuscript. These are half-thought-through, oh-so-totally-off-the-record pensées.]

“More Problems in Greek Ethics,” after the title of a critical 1883 essay by John Addington Symonds on sexuality in ancient Greece, is thesislog’s recurring feature on questions of close-reading and interpretation in the history of sexuality.

I hate to do this, given that experts usually tend to be better-informed and know what they’re talking about more than I do, but I think there’s a great deal of nuance and context missing from HNN’s writeup of Prof. Cott’s and Prof. Chauncey’s evidence in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. The passages from the historians’ testimony which the article quotes emphasize the idea that widespread, conservative-social-values-based prejudice against gay people was an invention of the second half of the twentieth century, and this was of course the right way for Profs. Cott and Chauncey to approach the issue in the context of the Perry trial. Of course it was right for Prof. Cott to point out that the repeal of coverture laws and anti-miscegenation laws, and the introduction of no-fault divorce, demonstrate how much marriage has changed in the course of the United States’ history, and how it is not the static religious institution which those who support Prop. 8 would like to suggest it is. And of course Prof. Chauncey was right to note the sharp rise in homophobia which began after World War II, so very different from the vibrant and open world of sexual inversion and homosexuality which he described in Gay New York.

But what’s missing here is that, as reading Gay New York will tell you, the rise in “homophobia” accompanies the rise in “homosexuality.” The pre-WWII period was characterized by a variety of competing theories of sexual identity: every demographic group, whether broken down by race or ethnicity, class, gender, profession, nationality, urban-/rural-dwelling, etc. had a different theory of what constituted sexual identity, and I’d say the rise of modern homophobia to which Prof. Chauncey alludes—the rise of specifically anti-gay sodomy laws, the rise of state-sanctioned institutions which deliberately exclude gay people, etc.—coincides with the rise of modern homosexuality and heterosexuality themselves. You can’t have homophobia until you can have a homo/hetero binary which grounds sexuality in orientation, in sexual object choice. I feel like the blockquote the HNN article uses suggests that Prof. Chauncey believes homosexuality is immutable, while homophobia is not—but Gay New York suggests the contrary, that he believes (as do most historians of sexuality today) that people’s cultural identities and affiliations are historically as mutable as their prejudices.

This is not to say, however, that there was an absence of sexuality-based prejudice in America before the rise of modern homosexuality. The blockquotes might have you believe that, too—while we know very well the extent to which Puritans and their descendants condemned all forms of non-procreative sex (the origin of the first round of American sodomy laws) and how insistently suspicion of the “sodomite” as a cultural degenerate started to heat up in the second half of the 19th century. Long before modern homosexuality solidified as a concept, Jonathan Katz tells us, Americans regarded sexual abnormality with suspicion; slowly, over the course of the long 19th century, they began to regard male intimacy with an attitude of moral dubiousness which they hadn’t attributed to it before. The language of “crimes against nature” is most certainly not a modern invention. But a language of “crimes against nature” which speaks entirely to sexual object choice is, even as it incorporates many of the same tropes which have accompanied moral attitudes to non-normative sexuality throughout western history—the modern religious right casts spurious aspersions on modern gay men for their supposed status as pedophiles and members of NAMBLA (the Family Research Council loves to trot that one out!); Socrates may have lived a couple thousand years and a bit before the invention of homosexuality, but he sure as hell was accused of corrupting the youth, and (if Plato is to be believed) he sure as hell didn’t seem to mind too much Alcibiades’ eye-batting advances at dinner-parties.

My point is really that all this is more nuanced and more complex and, indeed, less political than it is possible to put in a headline, even a HNN headline. The more I read about the history of sexuality—especially that history before 21st-century identity categories were established, and that history which documents the beginnings of attempts to establish those categories—the more I become concerned about just how difficult it is, but also how necessary it is, to use history in the service of current affairs. Demonstrating the balance of continuity and change brings a much-needed careful consideration to the heatedly ideological debates about civil rights and American freedoms which shape today’s (and indeed yesterday’s) political environment, but blockquotes always risk leaving something out. Like the testimony Profs. Cott and Chauncey stepped forward to give, in which they were able to outline only the barest précis of their lives’ work, J.A. Symonds’ A Problem in Modern Ethics is far from a comprehensive understanding of the culture and morals of classical Athens. It’s a 100-something page essay in which all the citations of Greek poets and careful analogies to later European culture are geared toward a political goal of demonstrating how the things which change are religiously- or culturally-based moral prohibitions, while the things which continue are a common human respect for dignity and personal freedom. One subtext (of many subtexts) of Symonds’ Greek Ethics is that the ancient Greeks may have described their desire differently from fin-de-siècle “inverts,” but they too loved men—their culture just gave them the freedom to do so. I haven’t read Prof. Cott’s work, but this seems to be one of the subtexts which also underlies Chauncey’s—otherwise, after all, why would he come forward repeatedly to defend to the courts the historian’s creed of continuity and change?

All this is so tricky, and I am only learning how challenging it can be to create one complicated picture of the past for one’s small group of colleagues, and another for popular, non-expert readers and listeners. Last night, I was trying to explain parts of the thinking this thesislog documents to my father, finding myself confronted in every sentence by the fact that even a sympathetic audience not only does not know some of the background information I’ve begun to take for granted, it needs some other concessions too. Like Chauncey in the HNN blockquote, I used the words “gay” or “homosexual” to describe to my father the love and desire between men in the 19th century which didn’t go by those names or those theoretical constructions then; absent the space of a book’s discursive prose, it is near-impossible to explain to an audience not used to thinking that definitions change that they do. Considering this, I find it difficult to find fault with Chauncey and Cott for sticking to just a few changes: it’s hard enough to explain that marriage has changed, that homophobia has changed. Do we really expect them to tackle homosexuality too?

I did find myself moved by the last paragraph of the HNN article:
So here’s to the role of history as a prominent agent of reason, grounded in experience, and assessed with the eyes of professional historians. The next time someone asks, “Why study history?”, try a new answer: “Why, to help make reasonable laws.”
I think Symonds would have sympathized—and that particular piece of continuity is enough for me.