“El problema de la preferencia (o de la proairesis para los griegos) es un problema candente, por el cual se suele mostrar demasiado poco interés.” Em síntese, o problema monumental para o qual as massas não estão maduras (talvez jamais estejam): a relatividade e o absoluto envolvidos no <gosto>.
A supostamente utópica ou impossível DISCUSSÃO DO GOSTO após a Metafísica.
“Até que ponto e mediante que meios é possível determinar as razões primordiais que me permitem considerar algo como preferível e atribuir um significado a tal preferência?”
Superioridade intrínseca e escala de valores.
Outridade
“mosaico de opções”
“Que peso tem a preferência do indivíduo contra a das massas?”
Se não se pode discutir a arte, não se pode discutir mais nada.
Hume (Of the standard of taste), ensaísta e crítico do lado de lá (metafísico): a moral bíblico-alcorânica e o drama sanguinolento são inaceitáveis.
Zeitgeist da aletheia e do Belo.
SEMÂNTICA AUTOGENÉTICA: Fragmentação pós-moderna. Morte da Zeitgeist. Coabitação virtual de todas as Zeitgeister no mesmo indivíduo. Fim de um ciclo milenar e início do IMPÉRIO DA ESQUIZOFRENIA, que não sabemos quanto tempo durará.
“a necessidade de restabelecer, com critérios diferentes, um critério valorativo [valor dos valores] para aplicação aos fenômenos da vida, da arte e da sociedade.”
“as enquetes de Kinsey, método contestável”
“Vejamos alguns exemplos de vanguardas artísticas consideradas escandalosas quando apareceram: 1) numa galeria romana, o pintor Kounellis apresentou o quadro de uma mulher grávida, nua, por cujo ventre passeavam algumas baratas; 2) o artista americano Acconci, em NY, apresentava-se confinado em uma cabine estreita de madeira dentro da qual se entregava à masturbação; 3) na exposição Documenta de Kassel (1972), o romano Vettor Pisani expôs uma mulher nua (que vinha a ser sua irmã), cujo pescoço tinha uma argola metálica, e Pisani lhe aplicava uma <tortura simulada>, cutucando uma ferida falsa pintada na perna da modelo; 4) a escultora polaca Alina Szapocznikow expunha em Paris (1970) alguns <tumores>, modelados em plástico, hiperrealistas; 5) o artista austríaco Herman Nitsch alugou um castelo nos arredores de Viena (1968-72) para representar seu <teatro das orgias e dos mistérios> (Orgien und Mysterien Theater): tratavam-se de matanças <rituais> de cordeiros e bezerros, com cujo sangue e tripas os expectadores eram banhados; para isso, Nitsch usava condutos especialmente concebidos, que derramavam o sangue e pedaços dos intestinos sobre o público; o roteiro incluía a participação dos expectadores, que deviam, além de receber os restos mortais dos animais, besuntar-se a si mesmos e aos seus vizinhos com seus próprios excrementos; havia uma série de outros <jogos> sado-masoquistas na exposição, como a celebração de missas hereges e a crucificação simbólica de algumas das ovelhas. Aos interessados, uma descrição detalhada e explicação crítica deste evento figuram em PETER GORSEN, Das Prinzip Obszön, Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburgo, 1969,(*) pp. 114-5, que transcreve também um comunicado da polícia austríaca proibindo esse gênero de <espetáculo aberrante>. Segundo Nitsch, em carta ao próprio Gorsen, o cordeiro crucificado representa simultaneamente o Pai, o Rei, a autoridade política, o ídolo estatal, a divindade. Em suma, tratava-se de uma revivificação dos cultos dionisíacos (<A revolução é um fenômeno dionisíaco>, diz Nitsch), conducentes à liberação do homem de seus tabus religiosos e políticos. (…) É típico de nossa época pretender ressuscitar cultos e práticas iniciáticos ou pseudo-mágicos pertencentes a culturas antigas, em que ditas práticas possuíam ou podiam possuir um valor autêntico; hoje sua <imitação> – seja mediante a astrologia, alucinógenos, ritos budistas, mistérios dionisíaco-órficos como neste caso, ginástica iogue, etc. – tende a ser daninha e contraproducente a despeito da intenção autoral.
(*) Até o momento, o volume-resenha mais completo sobre as relações entre arte, pornografia e sociedade.”
“Exemplos como os acima multiplicam-se em outros segmentos: já pude discorrer em outra obra sobre o caso do musicólogo que gravou em fita magnética os últimos gemidos de um homem agonizante após um acidente de trânsito; bastante conhecido é ainda o caso do cineasta japonês que filmou o transcurso dos últimos instantes da vida de seu pai moribundo de câncer.”
“um deslizamento (contínuo) do significado por debaixo do significante” Lacan
Conceito de ASSIMETRIA ESTÉTICA por VON WRIGHT (ou mais bem uma primeira lei da assimetria): “Assimetria significa que se um estado é preferido em relação a outro, necessariamente o segundo estado não é preferido em detrimento do primeiro; i.e., pelo mesmo sujeito na mesma ocasião” Relação subsumida na fórmula-função (pPq) ~(qPp), p≠q.
“O assimétrico é a premissa de qualquer proairesis.” “O simétrico se identifica com a geometrização mórbida da esquizofrenia.” Paradoxo: a ERA DA ASSIMETRIA é a ERA DA ESQUIZOFRENIA. Que seja apenas um estágio transitório entre duas eras mais autênticas, não destrói-se a contradição inerente. Resta saber se ficaremos indefinidamente presos a uma simulação indefinida desta mesma condição, como diz Baudrillard, ou se essa dialética deixa de ser estéril e se torna propulsora da superação em algum momento. Em suma, se o “novo elemento” vitorioso será ou seguirá sendo a esquizofrenia, em seu sentido pejorativo, ou a assimetria. Em busca de uma nova simetria, de um novo pathos normal.
moral corrente: contradição em termos! moral petrificada
PRIMERA PARTE – UN ANÁLISIS PROAIRÉTICO
CAPÍTULO 1. PREFERENCIA, PREVISIÓN Y CAUSALIDAD
“belief is nothing but a strong and lively idea derived from a present impression (perception) related to it” HUME, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739
“A maioria das vezes, os lingüistas realizam o estudo dessas modificações [de significante-significado] exclusivamente por zelo científico e erudito, sem ter em conta adequadamente as premissas socioantropológicas que as originam (ou, se se quer, invertendo ostermos da proposição no sentido de Whorf, até que se vejam as próprias premissas socioantropológicas determinadas por tais modificações!).”
“Quando, p.ex., um termo como o italiano testa (para nos atermos a um dos exemplos oferecidos por Guiraud, La sémantique), originariamente uma metáfora estilística nascida da associação da cabeça (caput) com o vaso de terracota (latim testa), passou a significar cabeça, com o que se semantizou de outro modo, enquanto que – acrescentaria eu – em outras línguas românicas adquiriu um significado mais parcial e setorial: testa em português = <frente> ou, inclusive, permaneceu unido ao lexema antigo (cabeza em espanhol = caput), etc., encontramo-nos perante um exemplo fácil do difícil que resulta <prognosticar> a evolução semântica de um termo – do difícil que resulta a previsão de um significado –, mas ao mesmo tempo da importância que pode ter para os efeitos denotativos e conotativos de uma língua o fato de que se produzam semelhantes transformações.
Outro exemplo: a palavra italiana finestra – em espanhol ventana, em português janela – apresenta, ainda considerando só estes 3 idiomas, conotações completamente diferentes, relacionadas com as condições de <abertura ao exterior> (finestra e também no caso do alemão fenster), de <proteção contra o vento> (ventana e também no caso do inglês window) ou de <porta pequena> (janela, de janua).”
“Our ideia of necessity and causation arises entirely from the uniformity observable in the operations of Nature.” Hume
“Max Müller, para quem a própria interpretação falsa ou aberrante de algumas normas é a que abre caminho para muitas interpretações míticas destinadas a se consolidar depois com o hábito e a adquirir valor de norma. Müller explica as razões do mito de Deucalião e Pirra, que fazem nascer os homens das pedras, pela analogia entre as expressões laoi e laas; e o mito de Dafne, transformada em planta de laurel, pelo fato de que a palavra dafne tem a mesma raiz sânscrita ahana, que significa aurora, etc.” “Pouco tempo depois Cassirer viria a refutar tal teoria, detalhadamente.”
“Segundo Julius Schwabe (em seu riquíssimo volume sobre os signos do zodíaco, Archetyp und Tierkreis. Grundlinien einer kosmischen Symbolik und Mythologie, 1951), a constelação de Gêmeos conotava no passado um elemento masculino em Pólux e outro feminino (ou fracamente masculino) em Cástor. Prova-o o fato de que entre os romanos os homens <juravam a Pólux> e as mulheres a Cástor. Outra prova desta masculinidade duvidosa de um dos gêmeos da constelação seria seu próprio nome, que apresenta um evidente significado castratório, como, além do mais, a própria lenda sobre o animal castor. De acordo com a lenda, esse animal, quando caçado, preferia autocastrar-se antes que ver-se privado de seus testículos pelo caçador: segundo os antigos, nestes órgãos encontrava-se uma substância utilíssima para o preparo de medicamentos contra a histeria, o tifo e outras doenças.”
“Segundo a concepção da alternância de grandes ciclos temporais (que alguns chamam de <grande ano platônico>), à medida que avançam as diferentes constelações no céu, entra-se ou sai-se de uma era determinada. Cada grande era <cósmica> pertenceria a uma constelação zodiacal determinada e se veria influenciada por ela. Pois bem: podemos comprovar então que o nascimento de Cristo se produziu ou coincidiu com a passagem do sol da constelação de Áries para a de Peixes (e temos de sobra exemplos e conotações, não só astrológicos, como geofísicos, geográficos e lingüísticos para a sucessão dos <anos platônicos>), o que nos levaria a reconhecer uma razão muito mais profunda e <oculta> para o uso do nome e da imagem do peixe como símbolo de Cristo, além da aparição do nome peixe em grego para se referir algumas vezes a Jesus Cristo no Novo Testamento. A passagem da Era de Áries à Era de Touro, e desta à de Peixes (que coincide precisamente com o cristianismo e, portanto, com nossa era), à qual sucederá a de Aquário, aparece agora ilustrada com muitos dados inéditos a respeito dos já conhecidos à época de Schwabe. A propósito da denominação das <eras cósmicas> a partir dos signos do zodíaco, consultar o referido autor.”
“Ist es nötig noch darauf hinzuweisen, dass die Urchristen, als sie das uralte Fischsymbol aufgriffen, sich damit eben als eine Gemeinschaft kennzeichnen wollten, die an Wiedergeburt im Geiste, Auferstehung, und Unsterblichkeit glaubte? Sie knüpften damit an die orphischpythagoreische Vorstellung der delphinischen Menschenseele an.” Schwabe “Is it necessary to point out that when the original Christians picked up the ancient fish symbol, they were trying to identify themselves as a community that believed in rebirth in the spirit, resurrection, and immortality? In doing so, they followed up on the Orphic-Pythagorean concept of the Dolphinic human soul.”
“Quanto à relação entre peixe e golfinho, considerado como animal fundamental, veja-se KARL KERÉNYI, Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie.”
“as discussões sobre a importância que esses deslocamentos das constelações no firmamento poderiam ter para a confecção do horóscopo, segundo se tenha ou não em conta a posição astronômica e real do sol com respeito ao zodíaco, foram e seguem sendo numerosíssimas e encarniçadas: alguns astrólogos sustentam que o horóscopo não deveria considerar deslocamentos puramente físicos; outros afirmam que tais modificações contam também para fins astrológicos. Vemos que até o possível aspecto premonitório, presente nas práticas astrológicas, se encontra subordinado a um aspecto puramente semiótico, ou pelo menos se discute a partir dele – algo no mínimo curioso para uma crença esotérica!”
“Só a arte está em condições de propor os invólucros vazios de um significado ainda não exposto à luz do dia.”
“Por lo demás, estudios recientes sobre el factor tiempo, sobre su base fisiológica, biológica, patológica, han demostrado de sobra la posibilidad de una dilatación o de una restricción de lo <vivido> temporal y la posibilidad de obtener (mediante drogas, medicamentos y ejercicios especiales del tipo del Yoga, como el <training autógeno> de J.H. Schultz) las modificaciones más variadas de la temporalidad.”
CAPÍTULO 2. EL SIMBOLISMO DEL TIEMPO EN EL ARTE DE HOY
“Mucho más evidente es el aspecto simbolizador del tiempo en la categoría limítrofe del arte óptico-cinético (op art) en la que nos encontramos con obras inmóviles en realidad, pero que <sugieren> el movimiento (Bridget Riley, Alviani, Soto, Cruz Díez, etc.). En dichas obras – que hace unos 10 años [1962] aproximadamente estuvieron muy en boga – el tiempo existe <potencialmente>”
“Por que o ritmo é tão importante para nossa existência e por que uma alteração daquele se reflete num mal-estar profundo?”
“No me parece que haya otra forma de explicar la razón por la que muchas creaciones de nuestros días – basadas en tiempos alterados (en sentido psicodélico, en sentido musical-aleatorio, en sentido poético, etc.) – conducen a otras tantas situaciones de malestar físico y psíquico.”
“Así, pues, esa sensación de ligereza y de <ausencia de tiempo> que se puede experimentar en un rápido vuelo transoceánico (en el que la única sensación experimentada es, no la de la velocidad, sino la de la lentitud, dado que así se nos aparece el movimiento del avión frente a la vastedad y a la inmovilidad del paisaje de nubes y del océano situado debajo) corresponde a la ausencia de tiempo de muchos ejemplos de música moderna y de algunas situaciones de las artes visuales que hoy utilizan la dimensión temporal para expresarse.”
“la obsolescencia de la obra (de arte o producida por la industria) – hoy tan aguda, tan paradigmática – demuestra tangiblemente la invasión y la acción de la <consunción> [destruição lenta mas progressiva], del factor temporal, sobre las obras del hombre y la necesidad de su simbolización por parte de las diferentes artes”
“la marcada separación entre mentalidad y comportamiento juvenil y senil encuentra una contrapartida en una diversificación igualmente marcada en la mentalidad y en las actitudes de quienes tienen 16, 25, 30 años. Así, pues, existe una diferenciación destacada entre grados que todavía pueden referirse a una edad juvenil, cosa que no me parece sucediera con igual relieve hace 20 o 40 años.” [!]
“En mi opinión, ese hecho significa que se está produciendo una aceleración del tiempo <existencial> con respecto al fisio-patológico. El tiempo – como símbolo de un devenir que no se detiene – ha invadido estructuras todavía ayer sólidas y consistentes.”
“la sensación de una <amenaza temporal>, propensa a resquebrajar la seguridad de la existencia, está presente por todas partes y la simbolizan los aspectos artísticos y pseudoartísticos a los que he aludido”
O conceito de tempo “SAE (Standard Average European” de Whorf.
“No hay duda de que el fenómeno de la progresiva desaparición o atrofiamiento del pretérito indefinido en lenguas como el italiano (a excepción del toscano) y el francés (y NO en el español), o como la eficacia cada vez menor del futuro (en lenguas que lo presentan, p.ej., en forma compuesta exclusivamente: alemán, griego moderno, croata, esloveno) o <asimilado> al presente (como el ruso y otras lenguas eslavas, cuando utilizan el presente del aspecto perfectivo para indicar el futuro) o recurren a construcciones complejas en lugar de utilizar la forma originaria del futuro (como el francés: je vais faire, el español: voy a hacer, y el propio italiano: conto di fare, sto per fare, mi accingo a fare, por no hablar del futuro japonés, que muchas veces se puede identificar con el presente), demuestra que la actitud del hablante tiende la mayoría de las veces a eludir las situaciones temporales <definitivas> o bien definidas y a adoptar otras más desdibujadas y ambiguas.”
CAPÍTULO 3. ARTE CONCEPTUAL: PREFERENCIA Y TESAURIZACIÓN [“MAL DO ACUMULADOR”]
“El abismo que separa a 2 Weltanschauungen – o, mejor, a dos Kunstanschauungen – a sólo pocos años de distancia parece insalvable.”
“¿Por qué kitsch? Porque el cielo es demasiado azul, la vegetación demasiado verde, la superficie de la figura demasiado translúcida; y, en consecuencia, el conjunto aparece ya manipulado en gran medida y preparado para que se lo comercialice y se lo ofrezca a los turistas, para uso del <delfín burgués>, que pasará en este lugar vacaciones suficientemente prestigiosas como para que sirvan de status symbol de cara a los amigos y a los conocidos.”
“la presentación más o menos exacta, más o menos magnificada, de la realidad, ya sea la fotográfica, ya sea – con mayor razón aún – la impresionista o la enteramente abstracta, resulta estar superada.”
“Aquí quisiera limitarme a precisar el porqué de la aparición de una clase de preferencia por el aspecto conceptual en el arte visual, tal como se ha ido revelando en el último decenio, porque me parece uno de los temas en que la separación entre la época actual y la que acaba de transcurrir resulta más marcada, en que resulta más sintomática la afirmación de un tipo de preferencia hasta hace poco inimaginable.”
“dadá, el surrealismo, fueron las consecuencias extremas de un persiflage de la presentación naturalista del mundo exterior. El informalismo señaló un regreso inútil a una especie de impresionismo pictórico, sin <contenidos>, pero no sine materia; e incluso la pintura-objeto, que desembocó, por un lado, en el pop-art y, por otro, en el arte programado y cinético (me excuso por la rapidez telegráfica y por la aproximación de estas definiciones), seguía recurriendo, a pesar de todo, a la tangibilidad densa y manipulable de la obra.”
“Por lo demás, no es casualidad que un movimiento tan vasto y, en definitiva, tan <incómodo> como el del conceptualismo se haya revelado precisamente en estos últimos años (de 1965 en adelante): años que han visto el surgimiento de las sublevaciones estudiantiles de 66-8 y su decadencia, la extensión y continuación de la guerra en Vietnam y de las guerrillas en tantas partes del mundo, la difusión de la droga, la decadencia de los movimientos de vanguardia en el cine y en el teatro underground, la crisis de la novela y de la música dodecafónica y, después, de la aleatoria”
“un nihilismo diferente del dadaísta, porque carece de fermentos irónicos y humorísticos, un nihilismo ya no propio de Duchamp, con frecuencia macabro, a veces irritante, otras masoquista o sádico.”
“hace 20 años [1952], la única o más importante tarea del crítico comprometido, del estetólogo, era la de defender la vanguardia, de intentar hacer de mediador entre el universo circunscrito, circunspecto, del artista y el obtuso, cargado de anteojos culturales y morales, del público.”
“la temporada de los happenings fue de corta duración, y en muchos casos se vio <comercializada> mediante la reproducción cinematográfica.”
“nuestra época ha llegado a un punto en que la escisión entre arte <puro> y arte utilitario es cada vez más clara y cruel. El primer sector se va alejando cada día más de la comprensión y del interés del gran público (incluso de un público relativamente culto), más aún de lo que ocurría con el arte abstracto de los años 30, con el op y el pop de los años 60; el segundo sector se acerca cada vez más al producto del diseño industrial y se une a la gran familia del kitsch.”
“El público se alimenta constantemente, de um modo que ya otras veces he definido como absurdo, de <sonidos musicales>, casi siempre carentes de interés artístico alguno, sin propósito renovador alguno, con una función de <relleno sonoro> exclusivamente, ni más ni menos que la del ruido que sube de la calle o del <gorjeo de los pájaros> de los tiempos remotos.” Aqui, muita coisa mudou!
“el llamado público de conciertos, los viejos ambientes de los aficionados a la <música clásica>, incluso gran parte de los profesionales (directores de orquestra, profesores de conservatorio, etc.) desarrollan sólo programas a base de música del pasado, sin interés ni comprensión algunos por la música de nuestros días (me refiero a la de Stockhausen, Schnebel, Berio, Cage, Donatoni, etc.). Las obras de los músicos contemporáneos están destinadas a pocos centenares de personas dispersas por el mundo, todavía menos que las que se interesan por el arte conceptual, por el land art, por el arte pobre.”
“Algunos de esos conceptos (como los de tesaurización y analidad aplicados al coleccionismo) surgieron en una discusión con el neurofisiólogo y psicoanalista Mauro Mancia.”
CONCEITO DE ANALIDADE POBREMENTE APLICADO AO COLECIONADOR: “Para muitos colecionadores, o fato de entrar em posse do quadro, da estátua, é por si mesmo fonte de gozo, de igual modo que o é o entesouramento [retenção] de suas próprias fezes pela criança.”
“Muchas veces, las casas de los coleccionistas tienen pocos muebles y objetos, están mal conservadas, con mobiliario anticuado y desmesuradamente moderno, incluso de gusto dudoso. Las obras están amontonadas en las paredes, una junto a otra, sin ningún respeto por su naturaleza particular, sin ninguna preocupación por ese <espacio vital> que cada una necesitaría ni por su convivencia recíproca.”
“En realidad, poetas concretos tradicionales como Ferdinand Kriwet, Rot, De Campos, etc., siguen ateniéndose, como por lo demás, Gominger (quizás el más riguroso y más imaginativo de los concretistas), al aspecto semántico del lenguaje verbal”
“En definitiva: muchos artistas conceptuales han tenido que someterse al deseo de los aficionados. Han tenido que encontrar el modo de saciar el apetito voraz de los <objetos>, siempre renovado, de aquéllos; han tenido que renunciar a sus sueños de pureza, de transitoriedade, de pobreza.”
CAPÍTULO 4. LA MODA COMO EXALTACIÓN PROAIRÉTICA
“Nenhum outro setor da atividade e da criatividade humana é mais representativo que a moda para uma investigação de caráter proairético [que versa sobre as preferências estéticas do público].” “a moda encarna, quase em estado puro, a preferencialidade, que, ressaltamos, não é a <superioridade> de determinada situação.” Sendo assim, a moda não é uma arte. Ou quem sabe seja o que vem depois do fim da arte.
“Quando dizemos hoje: <a lingüística, o estruturalismo, a psicanálise, o marxismo, a fenomenologia, etc., estão na moda>, no fundo reconhecemos que essas doutrinas poderosas, que essas solenes correntes do pensamentos, podem-se reduzir, no final, a simples momentos efêmeros de preferência, e que, portanto, depois de saboreadas o suficiente, destrinchadas e ostentadas, acabarão rápida e afortunadamente sendo substituídas por outras.”
“A palavra alemã Genuss, que os dicionários costumam traduzir por: gozo, posse, desfrute, uso, etc., significa na realidade: saboreio unido a gozo de uma substância ou situação determinada, e não me parece que exista uma palavra em nossa língua com a qual se a possa substituir. Fala-se de um Genuss pelo café, pelo álcool, pela droga, etc.”
Estilo X Styling (kitsch)
(passado – séc. XIX X séc. XX)
ex: Estilo Império, estilo Luís XVI, rococó, estilo Rainha Ana…
Havia um sincronismo e validades universais (ditados pela aristocracia).
“Bastaria recordar os numerosos trabalhos de Wölfflin, Dvorak, Panofsky, para se dar conta de que muitas de suas análises já não se podem aplicar às formas artísticas de nossos dias. Mas hoje – dado que nossa análise é predominantemente sincrônica – já nem podemos falar de estilo a propósito de certos móveis dinamarqueses, ou eletrodomésticos italianos, senão, sobretudo, de moda e de styling. É um fato – e muitos o afirmaram com razão – que o Art Nouveau, o Jugendstil, constituiu-se como o último estilo autêntico de nossa época.”
A moda do kitsch e o kitsch da moda.
“El propio hecho de haber considerado que se pudieran aplicar esquemas estructuralistas a la moda (como ha hecho Barthes en su Système de la mode), pero limitando en realidad su análisis al aspecto <verbal>, de nomenclatura, relacionado con ella, ha hecho que muchos prediquen la necesidad, o la oportunidad, de incluir la moda dentro de un aspecto lingüístico-estructuralista, como tantos otros sectores de la sociedad y de las ciencias humanas en general. Y la cosa no presentaría dificultad, si no se diera en este caso una eventualidad que no me parece se haya considerado: la de una institucionalización a priori, y no a posteriori, de los elementos lingüísticos relativos a dicho supuesto código.”
“Con frecuencia se afirma que la moda es un fenómeno vinculado a la sociedad capitalista y desconocido, o poco conocido, en los países socialistas y revolucionarios; no resulta muy difícil demostrar la falsedad de esa hipótesis.”
“A redundância: tudo é um invólucro teatral e barroco da propriedade doméstica: a mesa é coberta por uma toalha de mesa, ela mesma protegida por uma outra toalha de plástico. Cortinas e cortinas duplas às janelas. Tapetes, capas, revestimentos, abajures…” Baudrillard
“se o fato de trajar mangas de jaqueta excessivamente largas ou calças excessivamente apertadas (nos períodos em que <é moda>) deve ser considerado de mau gosto – kitsch –, podíamos também ampliar este juízo a outros setores para além da moda. Sempre voltará a época da lâmpada com luz oblíqua, talheres escandinavos, louça de aço inox, etc.”
“Mesmo no cinema, apenas em casos excepcionais – Potemkin, Greta Garbo, Buster Keaton, O vampiro de Düsseldorf (para citar 4 exemplos bem distintos entre si) – as imensas qualidades artísticas conseguem <vencer> o desgaste estilístico devido a uma questão de moda, que predomina nos longas bons mas não <ótimos>. O modo de se mover dos personagens, as frases pronunciadas, a entonação das vozes, certas atitudes românticas ou passionais hoje completamente defasadas e consideradas ingenuamente românticas, ou ridiculamente licenciosas, acabam contaminando mesmo as cenas que eram (e seriam ainda) de qualidade estética e técnica.”
“observar os rostos carrancudos e truculentos ou então inexpressivos, severos e carnavalescos dos diferentes hierarcas nazifascistas é – para todos, hoje – um espetáculo grotesco, ainda mais cômico que propriamente penoso e entristecedor. Como justificar o fato, senão pensando que um grande componente de moda interveio para dar àquela época o trato que ela merece?”
“De praxe, consideramos a toilette (a higiene, os hábitos e estilo) de nossos pais mais ridícula e démodé que a de nossos avós ou bisavós.”
“Na música, teatro, poesia não se adverte esse envelhecimento estético tão veloz decorrente da passagem da moda, uma vez que conseguimos substituir instintivamente com nosso modo de ser e de nos comportarmos aquilo que está descrito na novela ou indicado na peça. No cinema e na fotografia (meios <realistas>) isso é impossível. (…) Uma possível fonte de retroalimentação, que pode ser causa, ainda que também efeito de um espírito de época, desse estado de coisas efêmero é o fato de que no passado não era possível apresentar aos próprios descendentes, documentalmente, e com absoluta fidelidade, uma dada moda, sendo assim imperceptível, senão menos evidente e estridente, o contraste entre o ontem e o hoje.”
“Está ligeiramente out (fora de moda) quem ostenta nas paredes de seu chalé ou casa de verão uma pintura informal (em 1972), como também o está quem usa como música de fundo para receber seus amigos um Respighi¹ ou Pfitzner², embora o mesmo não se possa dizer de quem opta pelo jazz de vanguarda mais recente ou uma marcha de Bach.”
¹ Compositor italiano do XIX-XX, já ele mesmo um nostálgico de períodos ainda mais remotos (sécs. XVI ao XVIII).
² Praticamente o mesmo se pode dizer deste segundo compositor alemão, incluindo o período em que viveu e exerceu sua influência e seu gosto nostálgico, particularmente entusiasta de Palestrina.
“…e as coisas estão mudando enquanto escrevo”
“na Itália, basta seguir um automóvel para observar um exemplo perfeito dessa veemência gesticulatória do povo (não só abundante como até excessiva), com freqüência a causa de acidentes de trânsito, graves até: a maioria das vezes ambas as mãos do motorista abandonam o volante para que ele possa comunicar a seu companheiro a profundidade de seu pensamento de maneira apropriada (que o <co-piloto> decerto não vê, ocupado em vigiar o tráfego!).” “um baixo contínuo que acompanha a palavra”
“o V de vitória com a mão era quase desconhecido, antes de Churchill popularizar o gesto”
“A saudação de punho cerrado de tipo comunista está, talvez, em fase de decadência, como muitos gestos indicativos de <ter fome>, <enganar>, <vou dormir>. A saudação fascista, que esteve em voga, desgraçadamente, por muitos anos, seguiu, depois, existindo com um valor de saudação <normal>, desde que fosse executada com menor elevação do braço e com menos vigor (perdendo assim seu ar <romano>).”
O ciao ou adeus italiano na estação de trem, p.ex., antes de uma larga viagem, era vertical ou frontal (oscilações do braço entre a pessoa que saúda e a direção do viajante); com o tempo, passaram a usar o tchau que hoje conhecemos: oscilações laterais, à moda anglo-saxã ou germânica. Mais curioso ainda: em poucos anos, usos gestuais passaram por transformações importantes: antes mexiam-se os dedos das mãos no adeus, e a palma ficava imóvel; depois, os dedos ficavam juntos e sem se mexerem, e a mão adquiriu dinamismo.
“a passagem do tabaco da aspiração ao fumo se deveu a um aperfeiçoamento do gosto, ou <mudança de moda>. Não se pode dizer que amanhã não se voltará à moda de aspirar o tabaco ou de fumar o café ou mascar o chá.” Congelamento!
“é provável que num futuro próximo (quando, como é verossímil, se tenha liberado a maconha e substâncias semelhantes) o período atual pareça fortemente condicionado: primeiro, pelo proibicionismo; depois, pela liberação; e, finalmente, pela provável decadência do uso de tais substâncias.”
“Isso é o que não me parece admissível: buscar refúgio numa abolição ou atenuação da própria atividade consciente mediante fármacos que a embotam (ou a exaltam, mas desfigurando-a, desegotizando-a) é contrário a todos os princípios a que se dirigiu a civilização ocidental; é ainda adverso buscar refúgio ou auxílio em tentativas mecânicas de vidência ou de visões supressensíveis (práticas iogues, p.ex.).”
“conhecida é a relação entre sexualidade e iniciação no budismo clássico, como na prática do despertar do Chakra” “métodos ocultos que não são apropriados para nossa época”
Um tal Timothy Leary, psicólogo doidão, prescrevia o cogumelo Teonanacatl, tradicional entre aborígenes mexicanos, a seus pacientes nos anos 70. O Dalai-Lama rebateu este “profissional” em 1971: “O que mais falta aos próprios usuários desses narcóticos é o que poderia ser benéfico em seu uso – a Claridade, a Pureza e a Liberdade.”
CAPÍTULO 5. IDEOLOGÍA COMO PROAIRÉTICA PATOLÓGICA
“Joseph Gabel, em seu La conciencia falsa, que segue sendo indubitavelmente o melhor estudo dum aspecto patológico-político ou, se se quer, psicanalítico-marxista da ideologia, analizou bastante bem este <ponto fraco> do fanatismo ideológico.”
“Segundo Dévreux, se podemos considerar o período nazi como o estabelecimento de uma forma esquizofrênica, poderíamos, igualmente, considerar a sociedade européia de finais do séc. XIX como tendencialmente <histérica>.”
“Talvez não se possa dizer o mesmo da Itália em sua relação com o fascismo o mesmo da Alemanha em sua relação com o nazismo; a <cura> italiana não se produziu com o mesmo vigor.”
“Um caso de paranóia política poderia ser o de Israel: o enlace com pontos de partida ético-religiosos, que remontam a milhares de anos; a incrível firmeza na perseguição de um ideal construído sobre um conceito de <nação>, totalmente teórico; o fato de ter ressuscitado uma língua morta há vários séculos…”
“É sabido que a ignorância das funções mais elementares relacionados com o sexo era (até há pouco, se bem que segue sendo em parte) enorme, como também é conhecida a razão para isso: religião ou confissão (catolicismo), falso moralismo (vitoriano) ou alegações puritanas de virtude hipócritas (quakers, calvinistas e protestantes no geral).”
O VOCÁBULO “TEMPO” NOS IDIOMAS ESLAVOS (TEMPO METEOROLÓGICO, TEMPO CRONOLÓGICO):
Croata – vrijeme (clima); goda, rok (devir)
Eslovaco – cas (devir)
Esloveno – vreme (clima); ura (devir)
Polaco – cas (devir)
Russo – vremja (raiz ambivalente); pogoda(clima); cas (devir)
Tcheco – cas (devir)
SEGUNDA PARTE – LAS OPCIONES ECOLÓGICO-URBANÍSTICAS
INTRODUCCIÓN
“A arte (pintura e escultura, mas inclusive a poesia) deixou-se implicar nessa <glorificação do objeto> (a partir do surrealismo, percorrendo a pop art e a op art) de tal modo que não consegue mais livrar-se dessa objetualização dominante.”
“O sutil mal-estar, o sentimento de frustração que experimenta hoje um homem que tenha vivido sua infância no tempo pré-guerras, especialmente nas zonas densamente industrializadas, talvez passem batidos ao jovem nascido no pós-guerras, quando o estrondo das motos, a concentração de fumaça, o estrépito do tráfego, a poluição dos mares eram já uma realidade. E é igualmente possível imaginar que o homem de um futuro próximo esteja já imunizado, ainda mais que o jovem contemporâneo [1972!], contra o barulho e o ar poluído e cinzento onipresentes.”
“Numa praia contaminada nos arredores de Roma tive a ocasião de presenciar um filho perguntar ao pai se podia encher seu baldinho de água do mar: estava o menino tão impregnado da noção de contaminação que não podia deixar de considerar a água do mar como uma espécie de veneno, que se deveria evitar ao máximo.”
Expressões como “o céu azul” e “os eternos cumes nevados da montanha” já se tornaram tão kitsch quanto “amor à pátria” ou “lar doce lar” ou “a moral cristã”, “o seio materno”, “o espírito do corpo” e por aí vai…
“Seria hoje absurdo seguir falando de construção e urbanismo nos termos caros a um Le Corbusier ou um Lúcio Costa há não mais de 20 anos, ou a um Gropius, por exemplo.”
1. DESFASE [DEFASAGEM] ECOLÓGICO Y RESEMANTIZACIÓN URBANÍSTICA
“a indiferença quase total quanto à contribuição e à missão das <artes visuais> em integração com o meio ambiente tem feito com que o que se chama de arquitetura perca quase toda conexão com sua matriz expressiva primária.”
RECADO A LÚCIO COSTA: “A utopia do Bauhaus, que creu poder predicar e pôr em prática a identificação absoluta entre <utilidade> e <beleza> chegou ao fim.”
“Em lugar de almejar colonizar montes de pedra sem atmosfera como os da Lua (meta de aventuras recentes, já nada empolgantes, uma vez que nem as crianças assistem mais os programas dedicados aos vôos lunares na TV [1972!]), seria melhor que o homem tentasse não arruinar em definitivo o belíssimo planeta no qual teve a ventura de nascer.”
“Em primeiro lugar, é necessário livrar-se de formulações estéticas antiquadas que se obstinam em considerar a arquitetura como uma arte plástica, irmã da pintura e da escultura, como se fôra uma espécie de superdecoração em escala de cidade.”
“Se bem que em algumas artes (música e poesia) se possa apontar os equivalentes das partículas elementares da fala (morfemas, lexemas, sintagmas), no caso da arquitetura e urbanismo isso é muito mais problemático.”
“De um ponto de vista semiótico-territorial serão mais aceitáveis as tristíssimas favelas brasileiras, ou tugúrios colombianos, que as villas miseria argentinas. Talvez esta afirmação necessite um esclarecimento: significará, então, o que eu disse que não se pode identificar o aspecto semiológico com o sociológico? Se nos dispusermos a aceitar as abomináveis favelas, por se integrarem de modo mais <orgânico> à cidade do Rio, somos por isso insensíveis às conotações sociais que esta preferência supõe? Aí está o núcleo do problema: também na antiguidade romana, babilônica, grega, pré-colombiana, existiram as injustiças sociais mais inacreditáveis, mas não monstruosidades urbanístico-arquitetônicas como nas atuais Milan, Roma e Buenos Aires.”
“Os centros das cidades-satélites suecas não são nada senão shopping centers de tipo americano, enquanto que, na contra-mão, o <não-centro> das grandes cidades ianques (Cleveland, Atlanta, Houston) – excluindo-se talvez Manhattan, Boston e São Francisco da conta – já deixaram de existir, degradaram-se até se converter em setor de negócios ou mera sede administrativo-bancário-política, onde ninguém vive, onde a vida cessa quando cessa o expediente. E esse fenômeno começa a prevalecer em algumas cidades alemãs de design <americanizado>.”
2. LOS FACTORES PROAIRÉTICOS EN EL DESIGN AMBIENTAL
“Alvin Toffler contaba cómo en 70 de las mayores ciudades americanas el tiempo de residencia media en el mismo lugar era menos de 4 años. El desarraigo con respecto al hábitat propio no sería grave por sí mismo, si condujese a la reconstrucción en otro lugar de otro Heimat; pero eso es precisamente lo que ya no sucede a causa del carácter provisional del empleo, de la familia, que provocan el desinterés afectivo por el suelo urbano o por el natural.”
3. PREFERENCIAS Y PREVENCIONES EN LA ARQUITECTURA INDUSTRIALIZADA Y EN EL DESIGN
“a arquitetura industralizada (ou pré-fabricada, como com freqüência se diz, erroneamente) constitui um dos pontos delicados da exposição, que reaparece sempre que se fala de originalidade dos edifícios, de fantasia construtiva, da tão necessária luta contra o descenso do nível inventivo, contra a uniformização e a homogeneização das construções arquitetônicas de nossos dias.”
4. LOS PRECEDENTES DE UNA SEMIÓTICA ARQUITECTÓNICA
“Por mi parte, estoy convencido de que antes que nada hay que considerar la lingüística como una de las ramas de la semiótica, y no al revés (…) (como sostienen con frecuencia algunos autores franceses).” “En el caso de la arquitectura es evidente que no se puede hablar de una división en fonemas, sino, si acaso, sólo en <morfemas> (o sea, en partículas morfológicamente significativas, ¡ya que el elemento fonético está ausente!)” Um capítulo que não faz o menor sentido (como quase toda a segunda parte do livro)!
“Desgraçado do edifício que se disfarça sob o aspecto de outro, como – desgraçadamente – ocorre com freqüência: igreja com aparência de night club; estádio com a de templo; escola com a de açougue [!!!] (a menos que não seja incomum alguns prédios constituírem uma espécie de curiosidade <agradável>, conquanto isso parece ter sido moda passageira dos 1800)!”
“si una partitura de Bussotti puede considerarse con el mismo criterio que una pintura o un diseño moderno, también algunas notaciones arquitectónicas (croquis, proyectos, etc.), modernas y antiguas, tienen ya de por sí un gran valor artístico: basta con pensar en los célebres esbozos de Mendelssohn, en los de Haering o, sobre todo, en los de Scharoun, y, en el pasado, en algunos proyectos, realizados o no, de Ammannati, de Leonardo, de Miguel Angel, de Leon Battista Alberti. El valor artístico de dichos proyectos – prescindiendo de su <colocación semiótica> – es notable, y sería muy difícil decidir hasta qué punto se trata de obras de diseño, de maqueta, o equiparables a las realizaciones arquitectónicas auténticas. Como es sabido, según algunos, el croquis y el proyecto, si se desarrollaran y profundizaran lo suficiente, equivaldrían perfectamente a la obra ya realizada. (Y en cierto sentido lo vimos, cuando, durante la última guerra, se pudieron reconstruir algunas arquitecturas de la antigüedad sobre la base y con la ayuda de diseños de la época conservados y, por tanto, realizables.)”
“La lectura de la partitura, aunque informa, incluso de forma muy precisa, sobre determinado fragmento musical, no por ello deja de ser una lectura-no-musical (o, por lo menos, no sonora); según la opinión de algunos músicos (Stockhausen, Castaldi) no es otra cosa que el registro mediante un código muy perfeccionado de un objeto sonoro cuyo auténtico disfrute sólo puede producirse a través del órgano del oído. Stockhausen, p.ej., afirma que el tipo de <goce> que le produce el recorrer rápidamente una partitura (incluso saltando de un ponto a otro de la composición) es totalmente diferente al de la audición del mismo fragmento.” Cf. STOCKHAUSEN, Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentale Musik, 1963.
5. LA OPCIÓN POR LO ASIMÉTRICO Y LA ASIMETRÍA DE LAS OPCIONES
“en la Weltanschauung zen y taoísta predomina la tendencia a lo asimétrico, y algunos conceptos como los de wabí y de sabi podrían aproximarse al de asimetría.”
“Parece impossível, mas minha criada de quarto não admite que eu coloque minhas coisas na cômoda de forma assimétrica; quando limpa minha casa se apressa em <colocar simetricamente>, de acordo com um esquema fixo seu, todos os objetos que eu havia colocado de propósito fora do lugar.” Léger
“Podemos antecipar o começo do fenômeno, se pensamos na marcada tendência nessa direção que se pode advertir a partir dos últimos anos do séc. XIX com o florescimento do simbolismo na França e ainda antes, com o do pré-rafaelismo na Inglaterra: pintores e decoradores como Gustave Moreau, D.G. Rossetti, Burnes Jones, Odilon Redon, Khnopff, Puvis de Chavanne e, à geração seguinte, os austríacos da Secessão: Klimt, Schiele, etc., são todos tendencialmente assimétricos, pois começam a olhar com simpatia para o Extremo Oriente” “a adoração pelo número áureo, derivada dos círculos renascentistas, teria de ceder e ver-se invertida por novos módulos estéticos.”
“por que o coração está à esquerda e o fígado à direita? por que é mais comum ser destro? por que a mãe costuma segurar o recém-nascido pelo lado esquerdo?”
“O rosto esquerdo revela o lado oculto ou noturno (sinistro) da vida.”Werner Wolff
“…ao passo que a metade direita – precisamente por <depender> do hemisfério cerebral esquerdo, sede dos processos de criação de idéias mais racionalizados – parece ser o <espelho> da personalidade humana mais socializada e consciente.”
“normalmente o homem entrelaça as mãos de com o polegar direito superposto ao esquerdo, e a mulher ao contrário”
“e como pode ser que o laevus latino não se conservou no italiano (enquanto que se conservou no left inglês, no link alemão, no lijevo esloveno e croata e no lievyi russo?)”
derecho droit destro direito
izquierdo gauche sinistro esquerdo
“Se consideramos alguns esquemas urbanísticos clássicos – dos hipodâmicos aos estelares (tipo Palmanova), aos de L’Enfant (tipo Washington) ou Haussmann (tipo Paris) ou inclusive à aparente heterodoxia de Lúcio Costa no caso de Brasília –, vemos facilmente que em quase todos predomina um princípio de euritmia e equilíbrio, i.e., de obtenção do máximo de equilíbrio baseando-se numa simetria <dinâmica>, numa pseudo-assimetria, à la Hambidge. Hoje (1972!), até esse tipo de equilíbrio me parece pouco aceitável rumo a uma evolução da ordenação territorial e do <caráter distributivo> de nossos edifícios.”
“Na linguagem e no pensamento a assimetria está em todo lugar ou, para ser assimétrico, em quase todo lugar: podemos considerar simétricas as manobras analogizantes ensaiadas – de forma muitas vezes ingênua, mecânica – por um Lévi-Strauss? Sim, sem dúvida; mas isso seria pertencente à exceção: uma tentativa ou mania de assimilar códigos diferentes (sociológicos, alimentares, musicais, etnológicos!) sobretudo dum ponto de vista meramente sintático e sem levar em conta, salvo superficialmente, os autênticos aspectos semânticos e axiológicos que se interrelacionam. Mas, continuando, o fato de considerar como analógicas as metáforas propriamente ditas conduzirá à descoberta dum aspecto assimétrico também nelas, i.e., porque unem dois signifiés diferentes por meio dum signifiant único.”
#SugestõesdeTítulosdeLivros
OXÍMORO OU CARÍBDIS
LEITURAS PROSPECTIVAS
YASUICHI ARAKAWA, Die malerei des Zen-Buddhismus. Pinselstriche des Unendlichen, 1970
JEAN BAUDRILLARD, Le système des objets, 1968
MARIO BUNGE, The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science, 1963
GERMANO CELANT, Arte povera
Revista “Noigandres” (São Paulo), sobre a vertente mais séria da dita poesia concreta de origem germano-suíço-brasileira
GILLO DORFLES, Il Kitsch, antologia del cattuvi gusto, 1969 (1972) / El kitsch, antología del mal gusto, 1973
LUDWIG GIESZ, Phänomenologie des Kitsches, 1960 / Fenomenología del kitsh, 1973
HECAEN, La Symétrie en Neuropsychologie, 1970
EUGÈNE MINKOWSKI, Les conséquences psychopatologiques de la guerre et du nazisme, 1948
ALEXANDER MITSCHERLICH, La inhospitalidad de nuestras ciudades, 1969
EDWIN SCHUR, The Family and the Sexual Revolution, 1964
DAISETZ SUZUKI, Zen and Japanese Culture, 1959
VÁRIOS AUTORES, Psicología del vestir, 1975
HERMANN WEYL, Symmetry, 1952
IVOR DE WOLFE, Civilia, Architectural Press, Londres, 1972
“the <uncanny> is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”
“The Italian and the Portuguese seem to content themselves with words which we should describe as circumlocutions.”
BICAR-O-OLHO: “This fantastic tale begins with the childhoodrecollections of the student Nathaniel: in spite of his presente happiness, he cannot banish the memories associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of the father he loved. On certain evenings his mother used to send the children to bed early, warning them that <the Sand-Man was coming>; and sure enough Nathaniel would not fail to hear the heavy tread of a visitor with whom his father would then be occupied that evening. When questioned about the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true, denied that such a person existed except as a form of speech; but his nurse could give him more definite information: <He is a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the moon to feed his children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.>”
“The grains of sand that are to be thrown into the child’s eyes turn into red-hot grains of coal out of the flames; and in both cases they are meant to make his eyes jump out. In the course of another visit of the Sand-Man’s, a year later, his father was killed in his study by an explosion. The lawyer Coppelius vanished from the place without leaving a trace behind.”
“Uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate, which we must admit in regard to the doll Olympia, is quite irrelevant in connection with this other, more striking instance of uncanniness. It is true that the writer creates a kind of uncertainty in us in the beginning by not letting us know, no doubt purposely, whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation. He has admitted the right to do either; and if he chooses to stage his action in a world peopled with spirits, demons and ghosts, as Shakespeare does in Hamlet, in Macbeth and, in a different sense, in The Tempest and A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, we must bow to his decision and treat his setting as though it were real for as long as we put ourselves into his hands.”
“The theory of <intellectual uncertainty> is thus incapable of explaining that impression.”
“We know from psychoanalytic experience, however, that this fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is a terrible fear of childhood.” Um dia alguém me disse que tocar na pupila gerava cegueira. Outro dia ouvi dizer que não podia me aproximar de sapos nem de borboletas. E em 1994 presenciei um eclipse solar que se repete de 50 em 50 anos – se eu olhasse para o Sol meus olhos se queimariam instantaneamente, a luz estaria para sempre banida de meus sentidos. Eu tinha 6 anos quando isso aconteceu, e me perguntei como eu faria para ir ao trabalho, aos 56 anos, dirigindo – seria o pára-sol prevenção suficiente?!
Imagina se… “Many adults still retain their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no bodily injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye.”
“A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a substitute for the dread of castration.” A única existência inútil – realmente pior que a morte.
“In blinding himself, Oedipus, that mythical law-breaker, was simply carrying out a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that according to the lex talionis was fitted for him.”
EGO SUM: eye think, ay! therefore, eye M.!
“For why does Hoffmann bring the anxiety about eyes into such intimate connection with the father’s death? And why does the Sand-Man appear each time in order to interfere with love?”
“the Professor is even called the father of Olympia.” Zeus, o Pai
“She, the automatic doll, can be nothing else than a personification of Nathaniel’s feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy. (…) Now Spalaazani’s otherwise incomprehensible statement that the optician has stolen Nathaniel’s eyes so as to set them in the doll becomes significant and supplies fresh evidence for the identity of Olympia and Nathaniel. (…) We may with justice call such love narcissistic, and can understand why he who has fallen victim to it should relinquish his real, external object of love. The psychological truth of the situation in which the young man, fixated upon his father by his castration-complex, is incapable of loving a woman, is amply proved by numerous analyses of patients whose story, though less fantastic, is hardly less tragic than that of the student Nathaniel.”
A TOY OE-TYPICAL STORY: “Now, dolls happen to be rather closely connected with infantile life. We remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and lifeless objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people. In fact I have occasionally heard a woman patient declare that even at the age of 8 she had still been convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life if she were to look at them in a particular way, with as concentrated a gaze as possible.” Os bichos de pelúcia de grua que dormiam comigo quando minha casa estava em reforma – como que me lembravam do meu próprio quarto.
“Hoffmann is in literature the unrivalled master of conjuring up the uncanny. His Elixire des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixir) contains a mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative; but it is too obscure and intricate a story to venture to summarize.”
“The theme of the <double> has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank (Del Doppelgänger). He has gone into the connections the <double> has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the astonishing evolution of this idea. For the <double> was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego, an <energetic denial of the power of death>, as Rank says; and probably the
<imortal> soul was the first <double> of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of the genital symbol; the same desire spurred on the ancient Egyptians to the art of making images of the dead in some lasting material. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which holds sway in the mind of the child as in that of primitive man; and when this stage has been left behind the double takes on a different aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death.”
A faculdade da auto-crítica talvez seja uma secreta vingança contra um Outro que conhecemos desde a primeira infância muito bem: nosso Duplo.
“an involuntary return to the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other respects, also result in the same feeling of helplessness and of something uncanny.”
Perder-se numa superquadra da asa norte, dentro de uma grande mansão que já havíamos visitado, em corredores do minhocão ou em estações do metrô quando esquecemos que a nossa já passou. Que horas são?
“if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel-rooms, compartments in railway-trains—always has the same one, or one which at least contains the same figures.”
Aquela música. Essa música. Eu já ouvi tocar. Mas quando, onde?!?
O rosto dum estranho estranhamente familiar. O desconfortado suscitado pelo Efeito Mandela. O livro que eu estava relendo e não sabia – até chegar à metade do livro e finalmente me lembrar. O fato de eu ter perdido a folha de número 33 das minhas anotações sobre a Bíblia justamente quando tinha começado a abordar o Novo Testamento. Uma folha que eu perdi dentro de casa, e parecia inexplicável que o papel tivesse simplesmente se dissolvido no ar…
“They are never surprised when they invariably run up against the person they have just been thinking of, perhaps for the first time for many months. If they say one day <I haven’t had news of so-and-so for a long time>, they will be sure to get a letter from him the next morning. And an accident or a death will rarely take place without having cast its shadow before on their minds. They are in the habit of mentioning this state of affairs in the most modest manner, saying that they have <presentiments> which <usually> come true.”
“if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why the usage of speech has extended das Heimliche into its opposite das Unheimliche; 18 for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old (…) This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light.”
“Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. As we have seen, many languages in use today can only render the German expression. <an unheimliches house> by <a haunted house>.”
“Most likely our fear still contains the old belief that the deceased becomes the enemy of his survivor and wants to carry him off to share his new life with him.”
“All so-called educated people have ceased to believe, officially at any rate, that the dead can become visible as spirits, and have hedged round any such appearances with improbable and remote circumstances; their emotional attitude towards their dead, moreover, once a highly dubious and ambivalent one, has been toned down in the higher strata of the mind into a simple feeling of reverence.”
“Sie ahnt, dass ich ganz sicher em Genie,
Vielleicht sogar der Teufel bin.”
“To many people the idea of being buried alive while appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing of all. (…) phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.”
“I read a story about a young married couple, who move into a furnished flat in which there is a curiously shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening they begin to smell an intolerable and very typical odour that pervades the whole flat; things begin to get in their way and trip them up in the darkness; they seem to see a vague form gliding up the stairs—in short, we are given to understand that the presence of the table causes ghostly crocodiles to haunt the place, or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something of that sort.”
“whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, still in the dream, <this place is familiar to me, I have been there before>, we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body. In this case, too, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, homelike, familiar; the prefix un is the token of repression.”
“Who would be so bold as to call it an uncanny moment, for instance, when Snow-White opens her eyes once more?”
“In fairy-tales, for instance, the world of reality is left behind from the very start, and the animistic system of beliefs is frankly adopted. Wish-fulfillments, secret powers, omnipotence of thoughts, animation of lifeless objects, all the elements so common in fairy-stories, can exert no uncanny influence here; for, as we have learnt, that feeling cannot arise unless there is a conflict of judgement whether things which have been <surmounted> and are regarded as incredible are not, after all, possible; and this problem is excluded from the beginning by the setting of the story. And thus we see that such stories as have furnished us with most of the contradictions to our hypothesis of the uncanny confirm the first part of our proposition—that in the realm of fiction many things are not uncanny which would be so if they happened in real life.”
“The story-teller can also choose a setting which, though less imaginary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admitting superior spiritual entities such as daemonic influences or departed spirits. So long as they remain within their setting of poetic reality their usual attribute of uncanniness fails to attach to such beings. The souls in Dante’s Inferno, or the ghostly apparitions in Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar, may be gloomy and terrible enough, but they are no more really uncanny than is Homer’s jovial world of gods.” “The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case, too, he can increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact. He takes advantage, as it were, of our supposedly surmounted superstitiousness; he deceives us into thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all oversteps the bounds of possibility. We react to his inventions as we should have reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late and the author has achieved his object; but it must be added that his success is not unalloyed. We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge against the attempted deceit; I have noticed this particularly after reading Schnitzler’s Die Weissagung and similar stories which flirt with the supernatural. The writer has then one more means he can use to escape our rising vexation and at the same time to improve his chances of success. It is this, that he should keep us in the dark for a long time about the precise nature of the conditions he has selected for the world he writes about, or that he should cunningly and ingeniously avoid any definite information on the point at all throughout the book. Strictly speaking, all these complications relate only to that class of the uncanny which proceeds from forms of thought that have been surmounted. The class which proceeds from repressed complexes is more irrefragable and remains as powerful in fiction as in real experience, except in one point. The uncanny belonging to the first class—that proceeding from forms of thought that have been surmounted—retains this quality in fiction as in experience so long as the setting is one of physical reality; but as soon as it is given an arbitrary and unrealistic setting in fiction, it is apt to lose its quality of the uncanny.”
“Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of that infantile morbid anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.”
“Biographies of gay men and lesbian women discuss their orientation only when unavoidable, as with Oscar Wilde. There have been several encyclopedias and dictionaries of sexuality (beginning with a German one of 1922, the Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaft), but this work is the first to treat homosexuality in all its complexity and variety.”
“all the efforts of church and state over the centuries to obliterate homosexual behavior and its expression in literature, tradition, and subculture have come to naught, if only because the capacity for homoerotic response and homosexual activity is embedded in human nature, and cannot be eradicated by any amount of suffering inflicted upon hapless individuals.”
“The editors are persuaded that the phenomenology of lesbianism and that of male homosexuality have much in common, especially when viewed in the cultural and social context, where massive homophobia has provided a shared setting, if not necessarily an equal duress.”
“Perhaps the most difficult obstacle to a simple focus on <homosexuality> is the growing realization that what has been lumped together under that term since its coinage in 1869 is not a simple, unitary phenomenon. The more one works with data from times and cultures other than contemporary middle-class American and northern European ones, the more one tends to see a multiplicity of homosexualities.”
“The Greeks who institutionalized pederasty and used it for educational ends take a prominent role, as does the Judeo-Christian tradition of sexual restriction and homophobia that prevailed under the church Fathers, Scholasticism, and the Reformers, and – in altered form – during the 20th century under Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin and Castro.”
ACHILLES
“He is a tragic hero, being aware of the shortness of his life, and his devoted friendship for Patroclus is one of the major themes of the epic. Later Greek speculation made the two lovers, and also gave Achilles a passion for Troilus. The homoerotic elements in the figure of Achilles are characteristically Hellenic. He is supremely beautiful, kalos as the later vase inscriptions have it; he is ever youthful as well as short-lived, yet he foresees and mourns his own death as he anticipates the grief that it will bring to others. His attachment to Patroclus is an archetypal male bond that occurs elsewhere in Greek culture: Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, Harmodius and Aristogiton are pairs of comrades who gladly face danger and death for and beside each other. From the Semitic world stem Gilgamesh and Enkidu, as well as David and Jonathan. The friendship of Achilles and Patroclus is mentioned explicitly only once in the Iliad, and then in a context of military excellence; it is the comradeship of warriors who fight always in each other’s ken: <From then on the son of Thetis urged that never in the moil of Ares [nas confusões da guerra] should Patroclus be stationed apart from his own man-slaughtering spear.>”
“The friendship with Patroclus blossomed into overt homosexual love in the fifth and fourth centuries, in the works of Aeschylus, Plato, and Aeschines, and as such seems to have inspired the enigmatic verses in Lycophron’s third-century Alexandra that make unrequited love Achilles’ motive for killing Troilus. By the IV century of our era this story had been elaborated into a sadomasochistic version in which Achilles causes the death of his beloved by crushing him in a lover’s embrace. As a rule, the post-classical tradition shows Achilles as heterosexual and having an exemplary asexual friendship with Patroclus. The figure of Achilles remained polyvalent. The classical Greek pederastic tradition only sporadically assimilated him, new variations appeared in pagan writings after the Golden Age of Hellenic civilization, and medieval Christian writers deliberately suppressed the homoerotic nuances of the figure.”
W. M. Clarke, Achilles and Patroclus in Love (1978)
AESCHINES
“Athenian orator. His exchanges with Demosthenes in the courts in 343 and 330 reflect the relations between Athens and Macedon in the era of Alexander the Great. Aeschines and Demosthenes were both members of the Athenian boule (assembly) in the year 347-46, and their disagreements led to 16 years of bitter enmity. Demosthenes opposed Aeschines and the efforts to reach an accord with Philip of Macedon, while Aeschines supported the negotiations and wanted to extend them into a peace that would provide for joint action against aggressors and make it possible to do without Macedonian help. In 346-45 Demosthenes began a prosecution of Aeschines for his part in the peace negotiations – Aeschines replied with a charge that Timarchus, Demosthenes’ ally, had prostituted himself with other males and thereby incurred atimia,<civic dishonor>, which disqualified him from addressing the assembly. Aeschines’ stratagem was successful, and Timarchus was defeated and disenfranchised. The oration is often discussed because of the texts of the Athenian laws that it cites, as well as such accusations that Timarchus had gone down to Piraeus, ostensibly to learn the barber’s trade.”
AESCHYLUS
QUEM DISSE, JAEGER, QUE NÃO SE PODE SER SOLDADO E POETA AO MESMO TEMPO? “First of the great Attic tragedians. Aeschylus fought against the Persians at Marathon and probably Salamis. Profoundly religious and patriotic, he produced, according to one catalogue, 72 titles, but 10 others are mentioned elsewhere. He was the one who first added a second actor to speak against the chorus. Of his 7 surviving tragedies, none is pederastic. His lost Myrmidons, however, described in lascivious terms the physical love of Achilles for Patroclus’ thighs, altering the age relationship given in Homer’s Iliad – where Patroclus is a few years the older, but as they grew up together, they were essentially agemates – to suggest that Achilles was the lover (erastes)of Patroclus.
Plato had Phaedrus point out the confusion, and argue that Patroclus must have been the older and therefore the lover, while the beautiful Achilles was his beloved (Symposium, 180a). Among Attic tragedians Aeschylus was followed by Sophocles, Euripides, and Agathon.
Sophocles (496-406 B.C.), who first bested Aeschylus in 468 and added a third actor, wrote 123 tragedies of which 7 survive, all from later than 440.At least 4 of his tragedies were pederastic. Euripides (480-406 B.C.) wrote 75 tragedies of which 19 survive, and the lost Chrysippus,and probably some others as well, were pederastic. Euripides loved the beautiful but effeminate tragedian Agathon until Agathon was 40. The latter, who won his first victory in 416, was the first to reduce the chorus to a mere interlude, but none of his works survive.
All four of the greatest tragedians wrote pederastic plays but none survive, possibly because of Christian homophobia. The tragedians seem to have shared the pederastic enthusiasm of the lyric poets and of Pindar, though many of their mythical and historical source-themes antedated the formal institutionalization of paiderasteiain Greece toward the beginning of the sixth century before our era.”
(o artigo de William Percyfoi transcrito na íntegra)
AFRICA, NORTH
“Pederasty was virtually pandemic in North Africa during the periods of Arab and Turkish rule. Islam as a whole was tolerant of pederasty, and in North Africa particularly so. (The Islamic high-water points in this respect may tentatively be marked out as Baghdad of The Thousand and One Nights, Cairo of the Mamluks, Moorish Granada, and Algiers of the 16th and 17th centuries.) The era of Arabic rule in North Africa did, however, witness occasional puritan movements and rulers, such as the Almohads and a Shiite puritanism centered in Fez (Morocco). This puritanism continues with the current King Hassan II of Morocco, who is, however, hampered by an openly homosexual brother.”
“400 Franciscan friars left the Spain of Isabel the Catholic and embraced Islam rather than <mend their ways>, as she had commanded them to do.”
“Universal throughout pre-colonial North Africa was the singing and dancing boy, widely preferred over the female in café entertainments and suburban pleasure gardens. A prime cultural rationale was to protect the chastity of the females, who would instantly assume the status of a prostitute in presenting such a performance. The result was several centuries of erotic performances by boys, who were the preferred entertainers even when female prostitutes were available, and who did not limit their acts to arousing the lust of the patrons. A North African merchant could stop at the café for a cup of tea and a hookah[narguilé], provided by a young lad, listen to the singing, and then proceed to have sex with the boy right on the premises, before returning to his shop.”
“The present writer has spoken with a Tunisian supervisor of schools who firmly believes in the death penalty for all homosexuals. Thus, in their rush to modernism, Third World leaders often adopt the sexual standards of medieval Christendom, even as Europe and America are moving toward legalization and tolerance of same-sex activity. Such, at least in part, is also the plight of modern North Africa.”
“Tunisia. A small and impoverished country of some 4 million, Tunisia’s high birthrate keeps the country very young – about half the people are under 18. Although it is common to see men walking hand-in-hand (as in all Islamic countries), it would not be wise for a foreigner to adopt the practice with a male lover. Tunisians can easily tell the difference between two friends of approximately equal status (where hand-holding is expected) and a sexual relation (which is <officially> disapproved of and therefore not to be made public).” “In the days of Carthage, the city was known for its perfumed male prostitutes and courtesans. After Carthage was destroyed in the Punic wars, Tunisia became a Roman colony. The country did not regain its independence until modern times. The Romans were supplanted by the Vandals, who in turn surrendered the country to the Byzantine Empire. The rise of the followers of Muhammad swept Tunisia out of Christendom forever, and the country eventually passed into the Turkish Empire, where it remained until the French protectorate.”
“Marxist societies abominate homosexuality, and this influence has had a chilling effect on Algeria. The passing tourist will see nothing of such activity, although residents may have a different experience. Another fact is that Algerians do not like the French (because of the war) and this dislike is frequently extended to all people who look like Frenchmen, though they may be Canadian or Polish. It is a strange country, where you can spot signs saying <Parking Reserved for the National Liberation Front> (the stalls are filled with Mercedes Benzes), and also the only place in all of North Africa where the present writer has even seen a large graffito proclaiming <Nous voulons vivre français!> (We want to live as Frenchmen!).
The adventures of Oscar Wilde and André Gide in Tunisia and Algeria before the war are good evidence that this modern difference between the two countries was in fact caused by the trauma of the war. There is better evidence in the history of Algiers long before. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Algiers was possibly the leading homosexual city in the world. It was the leading Ottoman naval and administrative center in the western Mediterranean, and was key to Turkey’s foreign trade with every country but Italy. Of the major North African cities, it was the furthest from the enemy – Europe. It was the most Turkish city in North Africa, in fact the most Turkish city outside Turkey.”
“The bath-houses (hammams) of Fez were the object of scandalous comments around 1500. Two factors assume a bolder relief in Morocco, although they are typical of North Africa as a whole. One is a horror of masturbation. This dislike, combined with the seclusion of good women and the diseases of prostitutes, leads many a Maghrebi [africano setentrional] to regard anal copulation with a friend as the only alternative open to him, and clearly superior to masturbation. It also leads
to such behavior being regarded as a mere peccadillo. The other, more peculiarly Moroccan tradition is that of baraka, a sort of <religious good luck>. It is believed that a saintly man can transmit some of this baraka to other men by the mechanism of anal intercourse. (Fellatio has traditionally been regarded with disgust in the region, although the 20th century has been changing attitudes.)”
Malek Chebel, L’Esprit de sérail: Perversions et marginalités sexuelles au
Magreb, Paris: Lieu Commun, 1988.
ALCIBIADES
“Reared in the household of his guardian and uncle Pericles, he became the eromenos and later intimate friend of Socrates, who saved his life in battle. His, brilliance enabled him in 420 to become leader of the extreme democratic faction, and his imperialistic designs led Athens into an alliance with Argos and other foes of Sparta, a policy largely discredited by the Spartan victory at Mantinea. He sponsored the plan for a Sicilian expedition to outflank Sparta, which ended after his recall in the capture of thousands of Athenians, most of whom died in the salt mines where they were confined, but soon after the fleet reached Sicily his enemies recalled him on the pretext of his complicity in the mutilation of the Hermae, the phallic pillars marking boundaries between lots of land. He escaped, however, to Sparta and became the adviser of the Spartan high command. Losing the confidence of the Spartans and accused of impregnating the wife of one of Sparta’s two kings, he fled to Persia, then tried to win reinstatement at Athens by winning Persian support for the city and promoting an oligarchic revolution, but without success. Then being appointed commander by the Athenian fleet at Samos, he displayed his military skills for several years and won a brilliant victory at Cyzicus in 410, but reverses in battle and political intrigue at home led to his downfall, and he was finally murdered in Phrygia in 404 [Sócrates, mais velho, foi condenado apenas em 399]. Though an outstanding politician and military leader, Alcibiades compromised himself by the excesses of his sexual life, which was not confined to his own sex, but was uninhibitedly bisexual, as was typical of a member of the Athenian aristocracy. The Attic comedians scolded him for his adventures; Aristophanes wrote a play (now lost) entitled Triphales (The man with three phalli), in which Alcibiades’ erotic exploits were satirized. In his youth, admired by the whole of Athens for his beauty, he bore on his coat of arms an Eros hurling a lightning bolt. Diogenes Laertius said of him that <when a young man, he separated men from their wives, and later, wives from their husbands,> while the comedian Pherecrates declared that <Alcibiades, who once was no man, is now the man of all women>. He gained a bad reputation for introducing luxurious practices into Athenian life, and even his dress was reproached for extravagance. He combined the ambitious political careerist and the bisexual dandy, a synthesis possible only in a society that tolerated homosexual expression and even a certain amount of heterosexual licence in its public figures. His physical beauty alone impressed his contemporaries enough to remain an inseparable part of his historical image.”
Walter Ellis, Alcibiades, New York: Routledge, 1989;
Jean Hatzfeld, Alcibiade: Étude sur l’histoire d’Athènes à la fin du Ve siècle, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951.
ANARCHISM
“Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) and William Godwin (1756-1836) wrote two proto-anarchist classics. Boétie’s Discours de la servitude voluntaire (1552-53) (translated as The Politics of Obedience and as The Will to Bondage) is still read by anarchists.” Ver excertos em Português em http://xtudotudo6.zip.net/arch2012-11-01_2012-11-30.html.
“Pederasty comes not so much from lack of marriage bed as from a hazy yearning for masculine beauty.”Proudhon
“The boy-lover John Henry Mackay (1864-1933), who wrote widely on both pederastic (under the pseudonym Sagitta) and anarchist topics, prepared the first (and only) biography of Stirner in 1898.”
“Karl Marx & Frederick Engels had a personal disgust for homosexuality (Engels told Marx to be grateful that they were too old to attract homosexuals). Marx published full-length diatribes against Proudhon, Stirner, and Bakunin. He used Bakunin’s relationship to Nechaev as an excuse for expelling the anarchists from the International in 1872. Lenin later denounced anarchists as politically <infantile>, just as Freudians argued that homosexuality was an arrested infantile (or adolescent) development.”
“Thomas Bell, a gay secretary of Frank Harris and a trick[?] of Wilde’s, has written a book on Wilde’s anarchism, available only in Portuguese.[!]”
“In Spain during the Civil War (1936-39), anarchists fought against both the fascists and the communists, and for a time dominated large areas of the country. Many gay men and lesbians volunteered to fight in the war, while others worked as ambulance drivers and medics.”
“Emma Goldman (1869-1940) is unquestionably the first person to lecture publicly in the United States on homosexual emancipation”
“Whether from choice or necessity, anarchists have written extensively against prisons and in favor of prisoners, many of whom either from choice or necessity have experienced prison homosexuality. William Godwin opposed punishment of any kind and all anarchists have opposed any enforced sexuality.”
“Both anarchists and gays can be found in the Punk Rock movement. Since many anarchists do not really believe in organizations, they can often be as hard to identify as homosexuals once were. During the early 80s at the New York Gay Pride marches, gay anarchists, S/M groups, gay atheists, NAMBLA, Pag Rag and others all marched together with banners as individual members drifted back and forth between all the groups.”
“A major question is whether homosexuals are inherently attracted to anarchism or whether homosexuals have been equally attracted to democracy, communism, fascism, monarchy, nationalism or capitalism. Because of the secrecy, no one can ever figure what percentage of homosexuals are anarchists and what percentage of anarchists are homosexual. But only among anarchists has there been a consistent commitment, rooted in basic principles of the philosophy, to build a society in which every person is free to express him- or herself sexually in every way.”
ANDERSEN, HANS CHRISTIAN
“His fame rests upon the 168 fairy tales and stories which he wrote between 1835 and 1872. Some of the very first became children’s classics from the moment of their appearance; the tales have since been translated into more than 100 languages. Some are almost child-like in their simplicity; others are so subtle and sophisticated that they can be properly appreciated only by adults.”
“It has been speculated that the fairy tale The Little Mermaid, completed in January 1837, is based on Andersen’s self-identification with a sexless creature with a fish’s tail who tragically loves a handsome prince, but instead of saving her own future as a mermaid by killing the prince and his bride sacrifices herself and commits suicide – another theme of early homosexual apologetic literature.”
ANDROGYNY
“There is a tendency to consider androgyny primarily psychic and constitutional, while hermaphroditism is anatomical.”
“with reference to male human beings <androgynous> implies effeminacy. Logically, it should then mean <viraginous, masculinized> when applied to women, but this parallel is rarely drawn.Thus there is an unanalyzed tendency to regard androgynization as essentially a process of softening or mitigating maleness. Stereotypically, the androgyne is a half-man or incomplete male. In addition to these relatively specific usages there is a kind of semantic halo effect, whereby androgyny is taken to refer to a more all-encompassing realm. Significantly, in this broader, almost mystical sense the negative connotations fall away, and androgyny may even be a prized quality. For example the figures in the Renaissance paintings of Botticelli and Leonardo are sometimes admired for their androgynous beauty. It comes as no surprise that these aspects of the artists were first emphasized by homosexual art critics of the 19th century.”
“In Hinduism and some African religions there are male gods who have female manifestations or avatars. A strand of Jewish medieval interpretation of Genesis holds that Adam and Eve were androgynous before the Fall. If this be the case, God himself must be androgynous since he made man <in his own image>. Working from different premises, medieval Christian mystics found that the compassion of Christ required that he be conceived of as a mother. Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), the German seer, held that all perfect beings, Christ as well as the angels, were androgynous. He foresaw that ultimately Christ’s sacrifice would make possible a restoration of the primal androgyny.”
“androgyny points the way to a return to the Golden Age, an era of harmony unmarred by the conflict and dissension of today which are rooted in an unnatural polarization.”
Mircea Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne, New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
ANIMAL HOMOSEXUALITY
“In the 1970s the well-publicized reports of the German ethologist Konrad Lorenz drew attention to male-male pair bonds in greylag geese. Controlled reports of <lesbian> behavior among birds, in which two females share the responsibilities of a single nest, have existed since 1885. Mounting behavior has been observed among male lizards, monkeys, and mountain goats. In some cases one male bests the other in combat, and then mounts his fellow, engaging in penile thrusts – though rarely with intromission. In other instances, a submissive male will <present> to a dominant one, by exhibiting his buttocks in a receptive manner. Mutual masturbation and fellatio have been observed among male stump-tailed macaques. During oestrus female rhesus monkeys engage in mutual full-body rubbing. Those who have observed these same-sex patterns in various species have noted, explicitly or implicitly, similarities with human behavior. It is vital, however, not to elide differences. Mounting behavior may not be sexual, but an expression of social hierarchy: the dominant partner reaffirms his superiority over the presenting one. In most cases where a sexual pairing does occur, one partner adopts the characteristic behavior of the other sex. While this behavioral inversion sometimes occurs in human homosexual conduct, it is by no means universal. Thus while (say) Roman homosexuality, which often involved slaves submitting to their masters, may find its analogue among animals, modern American androphilia largely does not. This difference suggests that the cultural matrix is important.” “In the light of this complexity, a simple identification of human homosexual behavior with same-sex interactions among animals is reductive, and may block or misdirect the search for an understanding of the remaining mysteries of human sexuality. Still, for those aspects to which they have relevance, animal patterns of homosexual behavior help to place human ones in a phylogenetic perspective – in somewhat the same way as animal cries and calls have a relation to human language, and the structures built by birds and beavers anticipate the feats of human architecture.”
ARISTOCRATIC VICE
“In the 17th century Sir Edward Coke attributed the origin of sodomy to <pride, excess of diet, idleness and contempt of the poor>. The noted English jurist was in fact offering a variation on the prophet Ezekiel (16:49). This accusation reflects the perennial truism that wealth, idleness, and lust tend to go together – a cluster summed up in the Latin term luxuria.”
“The stereotype of aristocratic vice has a sequel in the early 20th-century Marxist notion that the purported increase of homosexuality in modem industrial states stems from the decadence of capitalism; in this view the workers fortunately remain psychologically healthy and thus untainted by the debilitating proclivity. In the Krupp and von Moltke-Eulenburg scandals in Germany in 1903-08, journalists of the socialist press did their best to inflame their readership against the unnatural vices of the aristocracy, which were bringing the nation to the brink of ruin.”
ARISTOTLE
“As a thinker Aristotle is outstanding for the breadth of his interests, which encompassed the entire panorama of the ancient sciences, and for his efforts to make sense of the world through applying an organic and developmental approach. In this way he departed from the essentialist, deductive emphasis of Plato. Unfortunately, Aristotle’s polished essays, which were noted for their style, are lost, and the massive corpus of surviving works derives largely from lecture notes. In these the wording of the Greek presents many uncertainties”
“Although Aristotle is known to have had several male lovers, in his writings he tended to follow Plato’s lead in favoring restraints on overt expression of homoerotic feelings. He differs, however, from Plato’s ethical and idealizing approach to male same-sex love by his stress on biological factors. In a brief but important treatment in the Nicomachean Ethics (7:5) he was the first to distinguish clearly between innate and acquired homosexuality. This dichotomy corresponds to a standard Greek distinction between processes which are determined by nature (physis) and those which are conditioned by culture or custom (nomos).The approach set forth in this text was to be echoed a millennium and a half later in the Christian Scholastic treatments of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, 31:7). In The History of Animals (9:8), Aristotle anticipates modem ethology by showing that homosexual behavior among birds is linked to patterns of domination and submission. In various passages he speaks of homosexual relations among noted Athenian men and boys as a matter of course. His treatment of friendship (Nicomachean Ethics, books 8 and 9) emphasizes its mutual character, based on the equality of the parties, which requires time for full consolidation. He takes it as given that true friendship can occur only between two free males of equal status, excluding slaves and women. Aristotle’s ideas on friendship were to be echoed by Cicero, Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, and Francis Bacon.
The Problems (4:26), a work attributed to Aristotle but probably compiled by a follower, attributes desire for anal intercourse in men to the accumulation of semen in the fundament. This notion derives from the common Greek medical view that semen is produced in the region of the brain and then transferred by a series of conduits to the lower body.
In England and America a spurious compilation of sexual and generative knowledge, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, enjoyed a long run of popularity. Compiled from a variety of sources, including the Hippocratic and Galenic medical traditions, the medieval writings of Albertus Magnus, and folklore of all kinds, this farrago was apparently first published in English in 1684. A predecessor of later sex manuals, the book contains such lore as the determination of the size of the penis from that of the nose.”
ART, VISUAL
“Before the 16th century, we find only representations of friendship between women; then in the Venetian school there begins an imagery of lesbian dalliance – but only for male entertainment. Only in recent decades has there been a substantial production of lesbian art by lesbians and for lesbians.”
pe(re)nial tradition
“In antiquity the Greeks were noted for their national peculiarity of exercising in the nude. Out of this custom grew the monumental nude statue, a genre that Greece bequeathed to the world. The tradition began a little before 600 B.C. with the sequence of nude youths known as kowoi. (Monumental female nudes did not appear until ca. 350 B.C.) Although archeologists have maintained a deafening silence on the matter, it seems clear that the radiance of these figures can only be explained in the light of the Greek homoerotic appreciation of the male form. Whatever else they may have been, the kowoi were the finest pin-ups ever created.”
“The Romans did not share the Greek fondness for nude exercise and their attitude toward homosexual behavior was more ambiguous. Perhaps it is not surprising that they favored the old religious subject of the hermaphrodite, the double-sexed being, but now reduced largely to a subject of titillation [erotização – vulgarização]. They also were capable of depicting scenes of peeping toms [machos, provavelmente felinos] that recall the atmosphere of Petronius’s Satyricon.”
“After the reign of Hadrian, who died in 138, the great age of ancient homoerotic art was over. Consequently, the adoption of Christianity cannot be said to have killed off a vibrant tradition, but it certainly did not encourage its revival.”
“Since Freud’s essay of 1910 the enigmatic figure of Leonardo has offered a special appeal.”
“By the turn of the century magazines began to appear in Germany presenting, by means of photographic reproduction, works appealing exclusively to male homosexual taste; lesbian magazines were only to emerge after World War I. Exceptionally, the American George Piatt Lynes (1907-1955) pursued a career in both mainstream and gay media (the latter in his extensive work for the Swiss magazine, Dei Kreis).”
“Although the Surrealists sought to explore sexuality, the homophobia of their leader André Breton placed a ban on gay subjects – or at least male ones. Two related figures did explore in this realm however, the writer Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), with his drawings of sailors, and the Argentine-born painter Leonor Fini (b. 1908), with enigmatic scenes of women. The ambitious Russian-born Pavel Tchelitchev (1898-1957), connected with several avant-garde circles in Europe and America, also belongs in this company.”
“It may be doubted that the long-standing premises of the modernist aesthetic – its sense of discontinuity, irony, and high seriousness – have been definitively overcome, but there is no doubt that the boundaries of the acceptable have been broadened. This enlargement creates opportunities for gay and lesbian artists. At the same time, however, the tyranny of the market and of critical stereotypes is as great as ever, so that artists are under great pressure to settle into niches that have been prepared for them. It should be remembered that many painters, sculptors, and photographers whose personal orientation is homosexual are as reluctant to be styled <gay artists> as they are to be called neo-expressionist, neo-mannerist, or some other label.”
BALZAC
“Vautrin’s secret is that he does not love women, but when and how does he love men? He does so only in the rents of the fabric of the narrative, because the technique of the novelist lies exactly in not speaking openly, but letting the reader know indirectly the erotic background of the events of his story. The physical union of Vautrin with Lucien he presents with stylistic subtlety as a predestined coupling of two halves of one being, as submission to a law of nature. The homosexual aspect of the discourse must always be masked, must hide behind a euphemism, a taunting ambiguity that nevertheless tells all to the knowing reader. The pact struck between Vautrin and Lucien is a Faustian one. Vautrin dreams of owning a plantation in the American South (sic) where on a 100,000 acres he can have absolute power over his slaves – including their bodies. Balzac refers explicitly to examples of the pederasty of antiquity as a creative, civilization-building force by analogy with the Promethean influence of Vautrin upon his beloved Lucien. Vautrin is almost diabolical as a figure of exuberant masculinity, while Lucien embodies the gentleness and meekness of the feminine. The unconscious dimension of their relationship Balzac underlines with magnificent symbolism. He characterizes Vautrin as a monster, <but attached by love to humanity>.Homosexual love is not relegated to the margin of society, as in the dark underworld of the prison, but expresses the fullness of affection with all its physical demands and its spiritual powers.”
“Having revealed to the hero and heroine an ideal love, Séraphitus-Séraphita departs for a heaven free of the earthly misery that human beings must endure.”
BARTHES, ROLAND
“Barthes introduced into the discussion of literature an original interpretation of semiotics based on the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. His work was associated with the structuralist trend as represented by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, and others. Attacked by the academic establishment for subjectivism, he formulated a concept of criticism as a creative process on an equal plane with fiction and poetry. Even those favorable to his work conceded that this could amount to a <sensuous manhandling> of the text. The turning point in his criticism is probably the tour de forceS/Z (Paris, 1970), analyzing Balzac’s novella about an aging castrato, Sarrasine. Here Barthes turns away from the linear, goal-oriented procedures of traditional criticism in favor of a new mode that is dispersed, deliberately marginal, and <masturbatory>. In literature, he emphasized the factor of jouissance, a word which means both <bliss> and <sexual ejaculation>. Whether these procedures constitute models for a new feminist/gay critical practice that will erode the power of patriarchy, as some of his admirers have asserted, remains unclear.”
“Barthes, who never married, was actively homosexual during most of his life. Although his books are often personal, in his writing he excluded this major aspect of his experience, even when writing about love. Because of the attacks launched against him for his critical innovations, he was apparently reluctant to give his enemies an additional stick with which to beat him. Barthes’ posthumously published Incidents (Paris, 1987) does contain some revealing diary entries. The first group stems from visits he made, evidently in part for sexual purposes, to North Africa in 1968-69. The second group of entries records restless evenings in Paris in the autumn of 1979 just before his death. These jottings reveal that, despite his great fame, he frequently experienced rejection and loneliness. Whatever his personal sorrows, Barthes’ books remain to attest a remarkable human being whose activity coincided with an ebullient phase of Western culture.”
Sanford Freedman, Roland Barthes: A Bibliographical Reader’s Guide, New York: Garland, 1983.
BEAT GENERATION
“The origins of this trend in American culture can be traced to the friendship of three key figures in New York City at the beginning of the 1940s. Allen Ginsberg (1926-[1997]) and Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) met as students at Columbia University, where both were working at becoming writers. In 1944 Ginsberg encountered the somewhat older William Burroughs (1914-[1997]), who was not connected with the University, but whose acquaintance with avant-garde literature supplied an essential intellectual complement to college study. Both Ginsberg and Burroughs were homosexual; Kerouac bisexual. At first the ideas and accomplishments of the three were known only to a small circle. But toward the end of the 1950s, as their works began to be published and widely read, large numbers of young people, <beatniks> and <hippies>, took up elements of their life-style.”
“The word beat was sometimes traced to <beatific>, and sometimes to <beat out> and similar expressions, suggesting a pleasant exhaustion that derives from intensity of experience. Its appeal also reflects the beat and improvisation of jazz music, one of the principal influences on the trend. Some beat poets tried to match their writings with jazz in ballroom recitals, prefiguring the more effective melding of words and music in folk and rock. The ideal of spontaneity was one of the essential elements of the beat aesthetic. These writers sought to capture the immediacy of speech and lived experience, which were, if possible, to be transcribed directly as they occurred. This and related ideals reflect a new version of American folk pragmatism, preferring life to theory, immediacy to reflection, and feeling to reason. Contrary to what one might expect, however, the beat generation was not anti-intellectual, but chose to seek new sources of inspiration in neglected aspects of the European avant-garde and in Eastern thought and religion.”
“First published in Paris in 1959, his novel Naked Lunchbecame available in the United States only after a series of landmark obscenity decisions. With its phantasmagoric and sometimes sexually explicit subject matter, together with its quasi-surrealist techniques of narrative and syntactic disjunction, this novel presented a striking new vision. This novel was followed by The Soft Machineand The Ticket That Explodedto form a trilogy. Nova Express (1964) makes extensive use of the <cut-up> techniques, which Burroughs had developed with his friend Brion Gysin. A keen observer of contemporary reality in several countries, Burroughs has sought to present a kind of <world upside down> in order to sharpen the reader’s consciousness. One of his major themes has been his anarchist-based protest against what he sees as increasingly repressive social control through such institutions as medicine and the police. Involved with
drugs for some years, he managed to kick the habit, but there is no doubt that such experiences shaped his viewpoint. His works have been compared to pop art in painting and science fiction in literature. Sometimes taxed for misogyny, his world tends to be a masculine one, sometimes exploiting fantasies of regression to a hedonistic world of juvenile freedom. Burroughs’s hedonism is acerbic and ironic, and his mixture of qualities yields a distorting mirror of reality which some have found, because perhaps of the many contradictions of later 20th-century civilization itself, to be a compelling representation.”
Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William Burroughs, New York: Henry Holt, 1988.
BEATS AND HIPPIES
“The journalistic word <beatnik> is a pseudo-Slavic coinage of a type popular in the 1960s, the core element deriving from <beat> (generation), the suffix -nik being the formative of the noun of agent in Slavic languages. The term <hippie> was originally a slightly pejorative diminutive of the beat <hipster>, which in turn seems to derive from 1940s jivetalk adjective <hep>, meaning <with it, in step with current fashions>. The original hippies were a younger group with more spending money and more flamboyant dress. Their music was rock instead of the jazz of the beats. Despite differences that seemed important at the time, beats and hippies are probably best regarded as successive phases of a single phenomenon.”
“Attracted by the prestige of the beat writers, many beats/hippies cultivated claims to be poets and philosophers. In reality, once the tendency became modish only a few of the beat recruits were certifiably creative in literature and the arts; these individuals were surrounded by masses of people attracted by the atmosphere of revolt and experiment, or just seeking temporary separation – a moratorium as it was then called – from the banalities of ordinary American life. At its height the phenomenon supported scores of underground newspapers, which were read avidly by curious outsiders as well.”
“Significantly, the street term for the Other, <straight>, could refer either to non-drug users or heterosexuals.”
“Mysticism exerted a potent influence among beats and hippies, and some steeped themselves in Asian religions, especially Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism. This fascination was not new, inasmuch as ever since the foundation of Theosophy as an official movement in 1875, American and other western societies had been permeated by Eastern religious elements. Impelled by a search for wisdom and cheap living conditions, many hippies and beatniks set out for prolonged sojourns in India, Nepal, and North Africa. Stay-at-homes professed their deep respect for American Indian culture.”
“Most hippies were heterosexual, but their long hair exposed them to jibes of effeminacy. In this way they could experience something of the rejection that had always been the lot of homosexuals.”
“With its adoption of a variant of jive talk, largely derived from black urban speech, the movement has left a lasting impression on the English vernacular, as seen in such expressions as <cool>, <spaced out>, and <rip off>.”
Marco Vassi, The Stoned Apocalypse, New York: Trident, 1972.
BENTHAM, JEREMY (1748-1832)
“English philosopher and law reformer. Bentham was the founder of the Utilitarian school of social philosophy, which held that legislation should promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. (…) His Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) was eventually extremely influential in England, France, Spain, and Latin America where several new republics adopted constitutions and penal codes drawn up by him or inspired by his writings.
Bentham’s utilitarian ethics led him to favor abolition of laws prohibiting homosexual behavior. English law in his day (and until 1861) prescribed hanging for sodomy and during the early 19th century was enforced with, on the average, 2 or 3 hangings a year. Bentham held that relations between men were a source of sexual pleasure that did not lead to unwanted pregnancies and hence a social good rather than a social evil. He wrote extensive notes favoring law reform about 1774 and a 50-page manuscript essay in 1785. In 1791, the French National Assembly repealed France’s sodomy law but in England the period of reaction that followed the outbreak of the French Revolution made reforms impossible. In 1814 and 1816 Bentham returned to the subject and wrote lengthy critiques of traditional homophobia which he regarded as an irrational prejudice leading to <cruelty and intolerance>. In 1817-18 he wrote over 300 pages of notes on homosexuality and the Bible. Homophobic sentiment was, however, so intense in England, both in the popular press and in learned circles, that Bentham did not dare to publish any of his writings on this subject. They remained in manuscript until 1931 when C.K. Ogden included brief excerpts in an appendix to his edition of Bentham’s Theory of Legislation. Bentham’s manuscript writings on this subject are excerpted and described in detail in Louis Crompton’s 1985 monograph on Byron. Bentham’s views on homosexuality are sufficiently positive that he might be described as a precursor of the modern gay liberation movement. Bentham not only treats legal, literary, and religious aspects of the subject in his notes, but also finds support for his opinions in ancient history and comparative anthropology.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“The emergence of systematic bibliographical control had to await the birth of the first homosexual emancipation movement in Berlin in 1897. This movement firmly held that progress toward homosexual rights must go hand in hand with intellectual enlightenment. Accordingly, each year’s production was noted in the annual volumes of the Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1899-1923); by the end of the first ten years of monitoring over 1,000 new titles had been recorded. Although surveys were made of earlier literature, up to the time of the extinction of the movement by National-Socialism in 1933, no attempt had been made to organize this material into a single comprehensive bibliography of homosexual studies. Nonetheless, much valuable material was noted in the vast work of Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weisses (Berlin, 1914).”
Athenaeus (fl. ca. A.D. 200), Deipnosophists, Book 13;
Félix Buffiére, Eros adolescent: la pederastie dans la Grece antique (Paris, 1980);
Vern Bullough et al., Annotated Bibliography of Homosexuality(2 vols., New York, 1976);
Wayne R. Dynes, Homosexuality: A Research Guide (New York, 1987).
BRAZIL [HOMOPHOBIA NEWLAND] & PORTUGAL
“The Colonial Era.When the Portuguese reached Brazil in 1500, they were horrified to discover so many Indians who practiced the <unspeakable sin of sodomy>. In the Indian language they were called tivira, and André Thevet, chaplain to Catherine de Medici, described them in 1575 with the word bardache, perhaps the first occasion on which this term was used to describe Amerindian homosexuals. The native women also had relations with one another: according to the chroniclers they were completely <inverted> in appearance, work, and leisure, preferring to die rather than accept the name of women. Perhaps these cacoaimbeguire contributed to the rise of the New World Amazon myth.
In their turn the blacks – more than 5 million were imported during almost 4 centuries of slavery – made a major contribution to the spread of homosexuality in the <Land of the Parrots>. The first transvestite in Brazilian history was a black named Francisco, of the Mani-Congo tribe, who was denounced in 1591 by the Inquisition visitors, but refused to discard women’s clothing. Francisco was a member of the brotherhood of the quimbanba, homosexual fetishists who were well known and respected in the old kingdom of Congo-Angola. Less well established than among the Amerindians and Africans, the Portuguese component (despite the menace of the Tribunal of the Holy Office, 1536-62) continued unabated during the whole history of the kingdom, involving 3 rulers and innumerable notables, and earning sodomy the sobriquet of the <vice of the clergy>. If we compare Portugal with the other European countries of the Renaissance – not excluding England and the Netherlands – our documentation (abundant in the archives of the Inquisition) requires the conclusion that Lisbon and the principal cities of the realm, including the overseas metropolises of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, boasted a gay subculture that was stronger, more vital, and more stratified than those of other lands, reflecting the fact that Luso-Brazilian gays were accorded more tolerance and social acceptance. Thirty sodomites were burned by the Inquisition during 3 centuries of repression, but none in Brazil, despite the more than 300 who were denounced for practicing the <evil sin>. They were referred to as sodomitas and fanchonos.
Independence. With Brazilian independence and the promulgation of the first constitution (1823) under the influence of the Napoleonic Code, homosexual behavior ceased to be criminal, and from this date forward there has been no Brazilian law restricting homosexuality[Bolsonaro e seu séquito se encontram quase 200 anos enterrados na História; me admira que não tenham morrido asfixiados em seu ideal de mundo até agora!] – apart from the prohibition with persons less than 18 years of age, the same as for heterosexuals. Lesbianism, outlawed by the Inquisition since 1646, had always been less visible than male homosexuality in Brazil, and there is no record of any mulher-macho (<male woman>) burned by the Portuguese Inquisition. In the course of Brazilian history various persons of note were publicly defamed for practicing homosexuality: in the 17th century 2 Bahia governors, Diogo Botelho and Câmara Coutinho, both contemporaries of the major satirical poet, Gregorio de Matos, author of the oldest known poem about a lesbian in the Americas, Nise. He himself was brought before the Inquisition for blasphemy in saying that <Jesus Christ was a sodomite>. [HAHAHA!] In the 19th century the revolutionary leader Sabino was accused of homosexual practices. A considerable surviving correspondence between Empress Leopoldina, consort of the Brazil’s first sovereign, Dom Pedro, with her English lady in waiting, Maria Graham, attests that they had both a homosexual relationship and an intense homoemotional reciprocity. Such famous poets and writers as Álvares de Azevedo (1831-1852), Olavo Bilac (1865-1918), and Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) rank among the votaries of Ganymede. The list also includes the pioneer of Brazilian aeronautics, Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873-1932), after whose airship the pommes Santos-Dumont were named. At the end of the 19th century homosexuality appears as a literary theme. In 1890 Aluizio Azevedo included a realistic lesbian scene in O Cortiço, and in 1895 Adolfo Caminha devoted the entire novel O Bom Crioulo(which has been translated into English) to a love affair between a cabin boy and his black protector. In the faculties of medicine of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia various theses addressed the homosexual question, beginning with O Androfilismo of Domingos Firmínio Ribeiro (1898) and O Homosexualismo: A Libertinagem no Rio de Janeiro (1906) by Pires de Almeida – both strongly influenced by the European psychiatrists Moll, Krafft-Ebing, and Tardieu. From 1930 comes the first and most outspoken Brazilian novel on lesbianism, O Terceiro Sexo, by Odilon Azevedo, where lesbian workers founded an association intended to displace men from power, thus setting forth a radical feminist discourse.”
“In 1976 appeared the main gay journal of Brazilian history, O Lampião (The Lantern)[!], which had a great positive effect on the rise of the Brazilian homosexual movement.” “One of the chief battles of gay activists is to denounce the repeated murders of homosexuals – about every 10 days the newspapers report a homophobic crime.”
“Recently the transvestite Roberta Close appeared on the cover of the main national magazines, receiving the accolade of <the model of the beauty of the Brazilian woman>. In the mid-1980s more than 400 Brazilian transvestites could be counted in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris; many also offer themselves in Rome. When they hear the statistics of the Kinsey Report, Brazilian gays smile, suggesting through experience and <participant observation> that in Brazil the proportion of predominantly homosexual men is as high as 30%.”
“Brazil, once the paradise of gays, has entered a difficult path.” Premonitório. Mas falava apenas da AIDS.
BUDDHISM
“Among world religions, Buddhism has been notable for the absence of condemnation of homosexuality as such.”
“For an account of the earliest form of Buddhism, scholars look to the canonical texts of the Tipitaka preserved in the Pali language and transmitted orally until committed to writing in the 2nd century B.C. These scriptures remain authoritative for the Theravada or Hinayana school of Buddhism, now dominant in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. The Pali Canon draws a sharp distinction between the path of the lay-person and that of the bhikkhu (mendicant monk, an ordained member of the Buddhist Sangha or Order). The former is expected primarily to support the Sangha and to improve his karmic standing through the performance of meritorious deeds so that his future lives will be more fortunate than his present one. The bhikkhu, in contrast, is expected to devote all his energies to self-liberation, the struggle to cast off the attachments which prevent him from attaining the goal of nirvana in the present lifetime.”
“all acts involving the intentional emission of his semen are prohibited for the monk; the insertion of the penis into a female or male is grounds for automatic expulsion from the Sangha, while even masturbation is a (lesser) offense.” “there is no law against a monk receiving a penis into his own body.”
“The full rules of the vinaya are not applied to the samanera or novice monk, who may be taken into the Sangha as early as 7 years old and who is generally expected though not obligated to take the Higher Ordination by the age of 21. In this way the more intense sexual drive of the male teenager is tacitly allowed for. A samanera may masturbate without committing an offense. Interestingly, while a novice commits a grave offense if he engages in coitus with a female, requiring him to leave the Sangha, should he instead have sex with a male he is only guilty of a lesser offense requiring that he reaffirms his samanera vows and perform such penance as is directed by his teacher. This may be the only instance of a world religion treating homosexual acts more favorably than heterosexual ones.”
“it has been speculated that homosexual orientation may arise from the residual karma of a previous life spent in the opposite gender from that of the body currently occupied by the life-continuum. This explanation contains no element of negativity but rather posits homosexuality as a <natural> result of the rebirth cycle.”
“The form of Buddhism which spread northward into Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia from its Indian heartland came to be known as the Mahayana. It de-emphasized the dichotomy between monk and lay-person and relaxed the strict vinaya codes, even permitting monks to marry (in Japan). The Mahayana doctrinally sought to obliterate categorical thinking in general and resolutely fought against conceptual dualism. These tendencies favored the development of positive attitudes toward homosexual practices, most notably in Japan.”
“When Father Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in the mid-16th century with the hope of converting the Japanese to Christianity, he was horrified upon encountering many Buddhist monks involved in same-sex relationships; indeed, he soon began referring to homoeroticism as the <Japanese vice>. Although some Buddhist monks condemned such relationships, notably the monk Genshin, many others either accepted or participated in same-sex relationships. Among Japanese Buddhist sects in which such relationships have been documented are the Jishu, Hokkeshu, Shingon, and Zen.”
“Zen, that form of Buddhism perhaps most familiar to Westerners, emerged during the 9th century. In the Zen monasteries of medieval Japan, same-sex relations, both between monks and between monks and novices (known as kasshiki and shami), appear to have been so commonplace that the shogun Hojo Sadatoki (whom we might now refer to as <homophobic>) initiated an unsuccessful campaign in 1303 to rid the monasteries of same-sex love. Homoerotic relationships occurring within a Zen Buddhist context have been documented in such literary works as the Gozan Bungaku, Iwatsutsuji, and Comrade Loves of the Samurai [1972]. The blending of Buddhism and homoeroticism has continued to figure prominently in the works of contemporary Japanese writers, notably Yukio Mishima and Mutsuo Takahashi.”
“the Gelugpas [seita tibetana dos Lamas que se sucedem] condemned heterosexual intercourse for monks, believing that the mere odor resulting from heterosexual copulation could provoke the rage of certain deities. Such misogynistic and anti-heterosexual notions may have encouraged same-sex bonding.”
“Among those who may be credited with introducing the West to Buddhism are Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom are thought to have loved members of the same sex and both of whom blended elements of Buddhism with elements of other spiritual traditions in their work. In the latter half of the 20th century, many American gays are practitioners of Buddhism, and the blending of homoeroticism and Buddhism may be found in the work of a number of gay American writers and musicians including Allen Ginsberg, Harold Norse, Richard Ronan, Franklin Abbott, and Lou Harrison.”
BYRON
“The most influential poet of his day, with a world-wide reputation, Byron became famous with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-
18), an account of his early travels in Portugal, Spain, Albania, and Greece. The proud, gloomy, guilt-ridden, alienated Harold defined the <Byronic hero> who was to reappear in various guises in Byron’s later poems, notably in Manfred, The Corsair, and Lara. The type became a defining image for European and American romanticism. Forced into exile in 1816 because of the scandal caused by his wife’s leaving him, Byron settled in Italy, principally in Venice. There he wrote his sparkling satire on cant and hypocrisy, Don Juan. He spent the last months of his life in Greece, trying to help the Greeks in their struggle to gain independence from the Turks.”
“Because of the intense homophobia of English society these poems were ostensibly addressed to a woman, as the name Thyrza and Byron’s use of feminine pronouns implied.”
“publicity about his love affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, compounded the scandal [of his homosexuality].”
“Byron’s last three poems, On This Day I Complete My 36th Year, Last Words on Greece, and Love and Death, poignantly describe his love for Loukas, which was not reciprocated.”
“A surreptitiously published erotic poem, Don Leon, purporting to be Byron’s lost autobiography, probably written in 1833, had set forth many of the facts about Byron’s homosexuality but was dismissed as an unwarranted libel. An edition appeared in 1866 but it remained unknown to all but a few specialists. When the Fortune Press reprinted it in 1934, the publication was confiscated by the British police.”
CAESAR
“In addition to his three wives and several mistresses, Julius Caesar had a number of homosexual affairs.”
Arthur D. Kahn, The Education of Julius Caesar: A Biography, a Reconstruction, New York: Schocken, 1986;
“American novelist and journalist. Capote became famous at the age of 24 with his elegant, evocative book Other Voices, Other Rooms, which concerns the growing consciousness of a boy seeking to comprehend the ambivalent inhabitants of a remote Mississippi house. Dubbed <swamp baroque>, this short novel was easily assimilated into then-current notions of Southern decadence. (…) In 1966 he published In Cold Blood, a <non-fiction novel> about the seemingly senseless murder of a Kansas farm family by two drifters. In preparing for the book, Capote gained the confidence of the murderers, and was thus able to make vivid their sleazy mental universe.”
“Capote became the confidant of rich and famous people, especially women, and he gathered their stories for incorporation in a major work which was intended to rival Marcel Proust. Yet when excerpts from this work-in-progress were published in magazines, not only were they found to be vulgar and lacking in insight, but Capote began to be dropped by the socialites he had so unsubtly satirized. Dismayed, the writer sank more and more into a miasma of alcohol, cocaine, and valium – his only consolation the devoted love, or so he claimed, of a succession of straight, proletarian young men whom he prized because of their very ordinariness.”
CARAVAGGIO
“Caravaggio came under the protection of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a homosexual prelate. During this period he painted several works showing ambiguous or androgynous young men, including The Musicians (New York, Metropolitan Museum). Efforts have been made to deny the homoerotic implications of these works, but they seem feeble.”
“Only after World War II did his reputation begin to climb, attaining remarkable heights in the 1980s, when even the abstract artist Frank Stella praised him. In 1986 Derek Jarman’s stylish film Caravaggio was released, presenting the artist as bisexual, but emphasizing the homosexual side.”
Baco/Dionísio pelas mãos do pintor bissexual italiano.
CASTRATI
“The castrati were male singers emasculated in boyhood to preserve the soprano or contralto range of their voices, who from the 16th century to the 19th played roles in Italian opera.” “Boys are commonly mischievous, unruly, and troublesome, and by the time they have really been trained their voices are usually on the edge of breaking; falsettists do not share these drawbacks, but their voices have a peculiar, unpleasant quality, and as a rule cannot attain as high a range as the soprano.”
“The elaborate a cappella style, which began to flourish about the middle of the 15th century, required a much wider range of voices and a higher degree of virtuosity than anything that had gone before, and for this task the existing singers were inadequate. The first response took the form of Spanish falsettists of a special kind, but by the end of the 16th century these had yielded to the castrati, who also dominated the new baroque art form – the opera, which was the principal musical activity of the Italian nation in the next two centuries. Opera was unlike legitimate theatre in that it traveled well; it was the first form of musical entertainment that was both popular and to a certain degree international, so that a star system transcending national borders arose. Leading singers were discussed, criticized, and compared in fashionable drawing rooms from Lisbon to St. Petersburg. (…) If other nations had some form of native opera, this ranked lower on the cultural scale and was indifferently sung, while the Italian version enjoyed the highest standard of singing that had ever been known, and will in all likelihood never again be attained. France alone refused admission to Italian singers, and virtually banned the castrati; but Frenchmen, like other Europeans, were full of praise for the opera of Italy.
Since no recording devices existed in the heyday of the castrati, the modern critic has no way of judging the quality of their performance, yet 6 generations of music-lovers preferred the voices of these <half-men> to those of women themselves and of whole men.”
“In this economic stratum, however, it was accepted that any male child who betrayed the slightest aptitude for music should be sold into servitude, just as in modern Thailand children are sold by their parents to labor in factories or serve in brothels. The successful castrato naturally tried to conceal his humble origins and pose as the scion of an honorable family. The singing-masters of that era were responsible for the perfection of the art of the castrati; no one since has rivaled them in perseverance and thoroughness, and in their perfect command of the capabilities and shortcomings of the human vocal organs. They usually worked in a conservatorio, though sometimes they had their own singing schools or tutored pupils on the side.
Since canon law condemned castration and threatened anyone involved in it with excommunication, which could be reinforced by civil penalties, the business had to be carried on more or less clandestinely, and everywhere prying questions brought only misleading and deceitful answers. The town of Lecce in Apulia, and Norcia, a small town in the Papal States about 20 miles east of Spoleto, are mentioned as notorious for the practice, though the castrati themselves came from all parts of the peninsula. The doctors most esteemed for their skill in the operation were those of Bologna, and their services were in demand not just in Italy but abroad as well.”
“The curriculum entailed much hard work, and was thorough and comprehensive; as much attention was given to the theory of singing as to its actual practice. Between the ages of 15 and 20, a castrato who had retained and embellished his voice, and passed the various tests with greater or lesser distinction, was considered ready for his debut. On contract to some opera house, he would often first be seen in a female part, for which his youth and fresh complexion would particularly suit him. His looks and unfamiliarity would perhaps gain him greater success than his art would have merited, to the rage and envy of his senior colleagues. Once his name was made, he would have his clique of admirers who attended en masse his every performance and extolled him as their idol; aristocratic ladies and gentlemen would fancy themselves in love with him and manipulate a piquant interview. Backstage, the rivalry with other singers could rage with intense virulence; and a castrato who was too vain and insolent might be assassinated by the hirelings of a rival’s protector. If, however, the performer did not please his audience, he would be doomed to touring small provincial opera houses, or to performing in a church choir. Dissatisfied with his situation, he could set off for Bologna, the marketplace for the musical profession in Italy, to better his fortunes. The castrati came in for a great amount of scurrilous and unkind abuse, and as their fame increased, so did the hatred of them. They were often castigated as malign creatures who lured men into homosexuality, and there were admittedly homosexual castrati, as Casanova’s accounts of XVIII century Italy bear witness. He mentions meeting an abbé whom he
took for a girl in disguise, but was later told that it was a famous castrate. In Rome in 1762, he attended a performance at which the prima donna was a castrato, the minion of Cardinal Borghese, who supped every evening with his protector. From his behavior on stage, <it was obvious that he hoped to inspire the love of those who liked him as a man, and probably would not have done so as a woman.> He concludes by saying that the holy city of Rome forces every man to become a pederast, even if it does not believe in the effect of the illusion which the castrati provoke.”
“Opponents of castration have claimed that the practice caused its victims an early loss of voice and an untimely death, while others have affirmed that castration prolonged the life of the vocal cords, and even that of their owner. There is no solid evidence for either contention: the castrati had approximately the same life span as their contemporaries, and retired at roughly the same age as other singers. The operation appears to have had surprisingly little effect on the general health and well-being of the subject, any more than on his sexual impulses. The trauma was largely a psychological one, in an age when virility was deemed a sovereign virtue.” A castração tardia não elimina a libido, ao contrário da crença vulgar. Não há solução fácil para o dilema da energia! Eu-nuco El-niño or neverminds…
“Toward the end of the XVIII century castrati went out of fashion, and new styles in musical composition led to the disappearance of these singers. Meyerbeer was the last composer of importance to write for the male soprano voice; his Il Crociato in Egitto, produced at Venice in 1824, was designed especially for a castrato star. Succeeding generations regarded their memory with derision and disgust, and were happy to live in an age when such products of barbarism were no longer possible. A few castrati performed in the Vatican chapel and some other Roman churches until late in the XIX century, but their vogue on the operatic stage had long passed.”
Angus Heriot, The Castrati in Opera
CATAMITE
“The Latin common noun, catamitus, designating a minion or kept boy, is usually derived from the Greek proper name Ganymede(s), the favorite of Zeus. Another possible source is Kadmilos, the companion of the Theban god Kabeiros. The word entered English in 16th century as part of the Renaissance revival of classical literature, and has always retained a learned, quasi-exotic aura. The term could also be used as a verbal adjective, as <a catamited boy>.” “In modern English the termination -ite tends to be perceived as pejorative, as in Trotskyite (vs. Trotskyist) and sodomite.”
CATULLUS
“Born at Verona, he spent most of his life in Rome, but kept a villa near his birthplace at Smirno on Lake Garda. Often considered the best Republican poet, he imitated Sappho as well as other archaic, classical, and Hellenistic models, upon which he often improved, and which he combined with native Latin traditions to create stunning, original pieces. He wrote poems, 250 of which survive, of happiness and bitter disappointment. Some are addressed to his mistress Clodia, 10 years his senior, whom he addressed as Lesbia(though with no insinuation of what we now call lesbianism), and who was unfaithful to him with other men. Homophobic Christians and modern schoolmasters have, however, greatly exaggerated the importance of the poems to Lesbia, which amount to no more than 1/8 of the Catullan corpus.”
“Sophisticated and fastidious, he set the standard for the Augustan poets of love Ovid, Horace, Vergil, and Propertius. In the Silver Age even Martial acknowledged his debt to Catullus’ epigrams. Like those poets, and most specifically Tibullus, he showed little inhibition and equal attraction to boys and women, but also shared the traditional attitude that the active, full-grown male partner degraded the passive one, and that the threat to penetrate another male symbolized one’s superior virility and power. On the other hand, the accusation of having been raped by another male has a largely negative force”
CENSORSHIP AND OBSCENITY
“The practice of tolerating certain hand-produced materials clearly shows that censorship is concerned not simply with the prohibition of materials, but with the size of the audience. It is for this reason that medical and other books dealing with sexual matters formerly had the crucial details in Latin.”
“The urge to censor is probably ultimately rooted in fear of blasphemy, the apprehension that if utterances offensive to the gods are tolerated their wrath will fall on the whole society. It was impiety toward the gods for which Socrates was tried and condemned in 399 B.C. The Roman erotic poet Ovid was banished by the puritanical emperor Augustus in A.D. 8.”
“Since the monasteries had a monopoly on producing manuscripts, it was assumed that such oversight was not necessary. In fact the abbey scriptoria not only copied erotic materials from Greco-Roman times, but created their own new genres of this type. In any event, the medieval authorities were concerned more with doctrinal deviation than with obscenity.” “The centralization of printing in the hands of a relatively few firms made it possible to scrutinize their intended productions before publication; only those that had passed the test and bore the imprimatur [seal] could be printed. It was then only necessary to make sure that heretical materials were not smuggled in from abroad. In Catholic countries this system was put in place by the establishment, under the Inquisition, with the Index of Prohibited Books in 1557. In countries where the Reformation took hold the control of books was generally assumed by the government. In England the requirement that books should be licenced for printing by the privy council or other agents of the crown was introduced in 1538. These origins explain why the activity of censors was for long chiefly concerned with the printed word. Revealingly, this system is still in force in Communist countries today [1990].”
“The French author Nicolas Chorier contrived an even more ambitious ruse for his pansexual dialogues of Aloisia Sigea (1658(?)), which purported to be a translation into Latin by a Dutch author (Jan de Meurs) working from a Spanish original by a learned woman.” Entendeu? Uma tradução para o latim (língua culta) de um escrito erudito (mas vulgar) de uma espanhola, feito por um holandês, para circular na França!
“Many French books, unwelcome to throne and altar, were published in Geneva, in Amsterdam, and in Germany. With the coming of the French revolution, however, all restraints were off. Thus the large works which the Marquis de Sade had composed in prison were published, as well as two fascinating homosexual pamphlets, Les enfans de Sodome and Les petits bougres au manège. Although controls were eventually tightened again, Paris gained the reputation (which lasted until about 1960) among English and American travelers as the place where <dirty books> could be obtained.”
“Through his prudish editions of Shakespeare, Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) gave rise to the term <bowdlerize>. At the ports, an efficient customs service kept all but a trickle of works deemed to be obscene from coming in. In the United States, the morals crusader Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) not only fought successfully for stringent new legislation, but as head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice [haha] he claimed responsibility for the destruction of 160 tons of literature and pictures. The restrictions on malleability proved to be particularly hard on publishers of homosexual material, and this problem was not overcome until the ONE, Inc. case in 1954. A landmark in freedom to read books in the United States was the 1931 Ulysses case. Shortly thereafter, however, Hollywood instituted a system of self-censorship known as the Hays Office. This device effectively prevented any direct representation of homosexual love on the silver screen for decades, the only exceptions being a very few foreign films shown at art houses. During this period book publishers practiced their own form of self-censorship by insisting that novels featuring homosexual characters must doom them to an unhappy end.
Only after World War II did the walls begin to come tumbling down in English-speaking countries. In Britain the publishers of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence were acquitted after a spectacular trial in 1960. In America Grove Press had obtained a favorable court decision on the availability of Lady Chatterley in 1959; three years later the firm went on to publish Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer without difficulty. The travails of a book containing explicit homosexual passages, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, were more extended. In 1958 authorities at the University of Chicago refused to permit publication of excerpts in a campus literary review. This led to the founding of a new journal, largely to publish the Burroughs text; once this had been done, a lengthy court battle ensued. Only in 1964 was the way clear for the whole novel to be issued by Grove Press. (The book had been published in Paris in 1959.)
Subsequently, a series of United States Supreme Court decisions made censorship impractical, and for all intents and purposes it has ceased nationally, though local option is sometimes exercised. This cessation permitted the appearance and sale of a mass of sexually explicit
books, films, and magazines. The only restriction that is ubiquitously enforced is the ban on <kiddy porn>, photographs and films of children engaging in sexual acts. In an unlikely de facto alliance, two groups emerged at the end of the 1970s in America to reestablish some form of censorship: one consisting of fundamentalists and other religious conservatives; the other of feminist groups [haha].”
Michael Barry Goodman, Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1981;
Rocco, Alcibiades The Schoolboy (1652) (diálogo êmulo de Platão apólogo da pederastia)
CERVANTES
“For 5 years he was a captive in Algiers, where he was on surprisingly good terms with a homosexual convert to Islam; he refers several times in his writings to the pederasty that flourished in the Ottoman empire – on his return from Algiers he was accused of unspecified filthy acts. His marriage was unhappy, and women in his works are treated distantly. Like Manuel Azaña, he put a very high value on freedom.
While Cervantes presented the male-female relationship as the theoretical ideal and goal for most people, the use of pairs of male friends is characteristic of his fiction, and questions of gender are often close to the surface. In his masterpiece Don Quixote (1605-15), which includes cross-dressing by both sexes, the middle-aged protagonist has never had, and has no interest in, sexual intercourse with a woman. A boy servant who appears fleetingly at the outset is replaced by the unhappily-married companion Sancho Panza. The two men come to love each other, although the love is not sexual.”
Verbete por Daniel Eisenberg
Louis Combet, Cervantes ou les incertitudes du désir, Lyon: Presses Universitaires, 1982 (review in MLN, 97 [1982], 422-27);
Rosa Rossi, Ascoltare Cervantes, Milan: Riuniti, 1987 (Spanish translation: Escuchar a Cervantes, Valladolid: Ámbito, 1988);
Luis Rosales, Cervantes y la libertad, 2ed., Madrid: Cultura Hispánica, 1985;
Ruth El Saffar, Cervantes and the Androgyne, Cervantes, III (1983);
______. Beyond Fiction: The Recovery of the Feminine in the Novels of Cervantes, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
CHINA
“The civilization of China emerged from pre-history during the first half of the 2nd millennium B.C. in the valley of the Huang-He (Yellow River), spreading gradually southwards. Over the centuries China has exercised extensive influence on Korea, Japan, and southeast Asia. Inasmuch as Chinese society has traditionally viewed male homosexuality and lesbianism as altogether different, their histories are separate and are consequently treated in sequence in this article.”
“During the latter part of the Zhou, homosexuality appears as a part of the sex lives of the rulers of many states of that era. Ancient records include homosexual relationships as unexceptional in nature and not needing justification or explanation. This tone of prosaic acceptance indicates that these authors considered homosexuality among the social elite to be fairly common and unremarkable. However, the political, ritual and social importance of the family unit made procreation a necessity. Bisexuality therefore became more accepted than exclusive homosexuality, a predominance continuing throughout Chinese history.
The Eastern Zhou produced several figures who became so associated with homosexuality that later generations invoked their names as symbols of homosexual love, much in the same way that Europeans looked to Ganymede, Socrates, and Hadrian. These famous men included Mizi Xia, who offered his royal lover a half-eaten peach, and Long Yang, who compared the fickle [volúvel] lover to a fisherman who tosses back a small fish when he catches a larger one. Rather than adopt scientific terminology, with associations of sexual pathology, Chinese litterateurs preferred the aesthetic appeal of these literary tropes [figures of speech].”
“One incident in the life of Dong Xian became a timeless metaphor for homosexuality. A tersely worded account [relato oral sucinto] relates how Emperor Ai [last Han] was sleeping with Dong Xian one afternoon when he was called to court. Rather than wake up his beloved, who was reclining across the emperor’s sleeve [manga, sobra de tecido], Ai took out a dagger and cut off the end of his garment. When courtiers inquired after the missing fabric, Emperor Ai told them what had happened. This example of love moved his courtiers to cut off the ends of their own sleeves in imitation, beginning a new fashion trend.”
“The Jin dynasty (265-420) poet Zhang Hanbian wrote a glowing tribute to the 15-year-old boy prostitute Zhou Xiaoshi. In it he presents the boy’s life as happy and care-free, <inclined toward extravagance and festiveness, gazing around at the leisurely and beautiful>. A later poet, the Liang dynasty (502-557) figure Liu Zun, tried to present a more balanced view in a poem entitled Many Blossoms. In this piece he shows the dangers and uncertainty associated with a boy prostitute’s life. His Zhou Xiaoshi
<knows both wounds and frivolity
Withholding words, ashamed of communicating.>
Although these poems take opposite perspectives on homosexual prostitution, the appearance of this theme as an inspiration for poetry points to the presence of a significant homosexual world complete with male prostitutes catering [sendo ofertados] to the wealthy.”
“The high profile of male prostitution led the Song rulers to take limited action against it. Many Confucian moralists objected to male prostitution because they saw the sexual passivity of a prostitute as extremely feminizing. In the early 12th century, a law was codified which declared that male prostitutes would receive 100 strokes of a bamboo rod and pay a fine of 50,000 cash. Considering the harsh legal penalties of the period, which included mutilation and death by slicing, this punishment was actually quite lenient. And it appears that the law was rarely if ever enforced, so it soon became a dead letter.”
“Legal intervention peaked in the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) when the Kang Xi Emperor (r. 1662-1723) took steps against the sexual procurement of young boys, homosexual rape, and even consensual homosexual acts.” “it seems that the traditional government laissez-faire attitude toward male sexuality prevented enforcement of the law against consensual homosexual acts.”
“A thirst for knowledge of homosexual history led to the compilation of the anonymous Ming collection Records of the Cut Sleeve (Duan xiu pian) which contains vignettes of homosexual encounters culled from nearly two millennia of sources. This anthology is the first history of Chinese homosexuality, perhaps the first comprehensive homosexual history in any culture, and still serves as our primary guide to China’s male homosexual past.”
“In Fujian province on the South China coast, a form of male marriage developed during the Ming. Two men were united, the older referred to as an <adoptive older brother> (qixiong) and the younger as <adoptive younger brother> (qidi). The younger qidi would move into the qixiong’s household, where he would be treated as a son-in-law by his husband’s parents. Throughout the marriage, which often lasted for 20 years, the qixiong was completely responsible for his younger husband’s upkeep. Wealthy qixiong even adopted young boys who were raised as sons by the couple. At the end of each marriage, which was usually terminated because of the familial responsibilities of procreation, the older husband paid the necessary price to acquire a suitable bride for his beloved qidi.” [!!!]
“The famous 17th century author Li Yu wrote several works featuring male homosexuality and lesbianism. The greatest Chinese work of prose fiction, Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), features a bisexual protagonist and many homosexual interludes. And the mid-19th century saw the creation of A Mirror Ranking Precious Flowers (Pinhua baojian), a literary masterpiece detailing the romances of male actors and their scholar patrons.”
“Within a few generations, China shifted from a relative tolerance of homosexuality to open hostility. The reasons for this change are complex and not yet completely understood. First, the creation of colloquial baihua literary language removed many potential readers from the difficult classical Chinese works which contained the native homosexual tradition. Also, the Chinese reformers early in the century began to see any divergence between their own society and that of the West as a sign of backwardness. This led to a restructuring of Chinese marriage and sexuality along more Western lines. The uncritical acceptance of Western science, which regarded homosexuality as pathological, added to the Chinese rejection of same-sex love. The end result is a contemporary China in which the native homosexual tradition has been virtually forgotten and homosexuality is ironically seen as a recent importation from the decadent West.
Communist China.In the People’s Republic of China, homosexuality is taken as a sign of bourgeois immorality and punished by <reeducation> in labor camps. Officially the incidence of homosexuality is quite low. Western psychologists, however, have noted that the official reporting of impotence is much higher in mainland China than in the West. It seems that many Chinese men, unfamiliar with homosexual role models, interpret their sexuality solely according to their attraction to women. Nevertheless, a small gay subculture has begun to develop in the major cities since the end of the Maoist era [?]. Fear of discovery and lack of privacy tend to limit the quality and duration of homosexual relationships. And for the vast majority of Chinese living in the conservative country-side, homosexual contacts are much more difficult to come by.” “With the 1997 return of Hong Kong to China approaching, British liberals have supported a last minute repeal of the sodomy law.”
“Traditionally, Chinese people have viewed male homosexuality and lesbianism as unrelated. Consequently, much of the information we have on male homosexuality in China does not apply to the female experience. Piecing together the Chinese lesbian past is frustrated by the relative lack of source material. Since literature and scholarship were usually written by men and for men, aspects of female sexuality unrelated to male concerns were almost always ignored.” “Sex manuals of the period Ming include instructions integrating lesbian acts with heterosexual intercourse as a way of varying the sex lives of men with multiple concubines.”
“Li Yu’s first play, Pitying the Fragrant Companion (Lianxiangban), describes a young married woman’s love for a younger unmarried woman. The married woman convinces her husband to take her talented beloved as a concubine. The 3 then live as a happy ménage-à-trois free from jealousy. A more conventional lesbian love affair is detailed in Dream of the Red Chamber, in which a former actress regularly offers incense to the memory of her deceased beloved.”
The most highly developed form of female relationship was the lesbian marriages formed by the exclusively female membership of Golden Orchid Associations. A lesbian couple within this group could choose to undergo a marriage ceremony in which one partner was designated <husband> and the other <wife>. After an exchange of ritual gifts, a wedding feast attended by female friends served to witness the marriage. These married lesbian couples could even adopt young girls, who in turn could inherit family property from the couple’s parents. This ritual was not uncommon in 19th-century Guangzhou province. Prior to this, the only other honorable way for a woman to remain unmarried was to enter a Buddhist nunnery.” “The existence of Golden Orchid Associations became possible only by the rise of a textile industry in south China which enabled women to become economically independent. The traditional social and economic attachment of women to the home has so far prevented the emergence in modem China of a lesbian community on even so limited a scale as that of male homosexuals.”
Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng, Golden Lotus ou The Plum [Ameixa] in The Golden Vase (2013) (título original: Jin ping mei)(novela de costumes, considerada o “Lolita” oriental), s/ data precisa (~séc. XVI; ed. por Zhang Zhupo no século seguinte). trad. francesa: La merveilleuse histoire de Hsi Men avec ses six femmes (1), Fleur en fiole d’or (2);
Pai Hsien-yung, The Outsiders (Niezi) (inspirou um filme homônimo, de 1986)
CHRISTIANITY
“ORÍGENES” DO MAL II: “By about A.D. 200, the church had come to recognize the texts making up the New Testament as a single canon. After some hesitation, the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, was taken from Judaism and also accepted as divinely inspired. From this point onwards, Christian doctrines were elaborated by a group of intellectuals, known as the Fathers of the Church or the Patristic writers, beginning with such figures as Origen, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian.” “Though they based their exegesis upon the Bible, they were inevitably influenced by philosophical and religious currents of their own time, especially Greek Stoicism and Neo-Platonism and by rival mystery cults such as Manichaeanism and Gnosticism.” “Still today there are differences on such sexually related topics as divorce, celibacy, and so forth between Roman Catholics and members of various eastern branches of Christianity which date from the foundations of Christianity, including Coptic, Nestorian, and various Orthodox Churches. In practice, most of these churches have been more tolerant of homosexuality than the Roman Catholic Church and its Protestant off-shoots.”
RESUMO DAS CONFISSÕES DE UM HOMEM POUCO SANTO
“St. Augustine (d. 430), one of the great scholars of the ancient world, had converted to the austere faith of Manichaeanism after receiving a classical education. It seemed to his mind more suited to his Neo-Platonic and Stoic ideals than the Christianity of his mother. In Manichaean belief, which drew heavily from Zoroastrianism, intercourse leading to procreation was particularly evil because it caused other souls to be imprisoned in bodies, thus continuing the cycle of good versus evil.
Augustine was a member of the Manichaean religion for some 11 years but never reached the stage of the Elect in part because of his inability to control his sexual appetites. He kept a mistress, fathered a child, and according to his own statement, struggled to overcome his lustful appetites everyday by praying: <Give me chastity, and continence, but do not give it yet>. Recognizing his own inability to give up sexual intercourse, Augustine finally arrived at the conclusion that the only way to control his venereal desire was through marriage. He expelled his mistress and his son from his house, became engaged to a young girl not yet of age for wedlock (probably under 12 years of age), and planned a marriage. Unable to abstain from sex, he turned to prostitutes, went through a religious crisis, and in the process became converted to Christianity.”
HA-HA: “All other sex was sinful including coitus within marriage not performed in the proper position (the female on her back and facing the male) and using the proper appendages and orifices (penis in vagina). St. Augustine’s views became the views of the western church centered in Rome.” “In general there was no extensive discussion of homosexuality by any of the early Church Fathers, and most of the references are incidental.”
“The Augustinian views were modified in the 13th century [o que houve nestes 7 séculos além de monges devassos e burros?] by St. Thomas Aquinas, who held that homosexual activities, though similar to other sins of lust, were more sinful because they were also sins against nature. The sins against nature in descending order were (I) masturbation, (2) intercourse in an unnatural position, (3) copulation with the same sex (homosexuality and lesbianism), and (4) sex with non-humans (bestiality).”
One of the key sources in the early medieval Church is the penitential literature. Originally penance had been a way of reconciling the sinner with God and had taken place through open confession. The earliest penitentials put sexual purity at a high premium, and failure to observe the sexual regulations was classified as equal to idolatry (reversion to paganism) and homicide. Ultimately public penance was replaced by private penance and confession which was regulated by the manuals or penitentials designed to guide those who were hearing them. Most of the early penitentials classified homosexual and lesbian activities as equivalent to fornication. Later ones classified such activities as equivalent to adultery although some writers distinguished between interfemoral intercourse and anal intercourse and between fellatio or oral-genital contacts. Anal intercourse was regarded as being the most serious sin.” “Sodomy came to be regarded as the most heinous of sexual offenses, even worse than incest, and as civil law began to take over from canon law, it could be punished as a capital crime.”
Antes só dormia, hoje sodomia.
Só dormia, ou será que prazer também? No lato sensucht
Calvin & Child Harolde: “Catholics denounced Calvin for his supposed pederasty, a charge that was completely unfounded.”
NADA COMO COMER O BRIOCO DUMA INDIAZINHA: “In 1730-31 the great Dutch persecution of sodomites occurred, and in the accompanying propaganda the old charges against Roman Catholicism were revived. In Catholic countries themselves, the dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773 was preceded by accusations of sodomy.”
Graciano, A Harmony of Discordant Canons (1140)
St. Peter Damián (1007-1072), Liber Gomorrhianus
CHURCHES, GAY
“The emergence of Christian churches with predominantly gay and lesbian congregations, as well as interest groups within or allied to existing denominations, is a recent phenomenon, centered in the English-speaking world. There are records of homosexual monks, nuns, and priests, especially in the later Middle Ages and in early modern times, but no indication that they even thought of organizing on the basis of their sexual preference. Christian homosexuals drawn to particular parishes, where cliques [panelinhas] occasionally even became a visible segment of the congregation, would not openly avow this shift in the church’s character: they remained closeted gay Christians, so to speak.”
“Some maintain that Jesus – an unmarried man in a Jewish milieu where marriage and procreation were de rigueur even for the religious elite – had a passionate relationship with John, the beloved disciple. Liturgically and sociologically the UFMCC tends to be of a <low church> character, with notable exceptions in some congregations. The evangelical fundamentalist domination of the UFMCC may be regarded as a response to the homophobic vehemence of the mainstream fundamentalist churches, which drives gay Christians out of their fold with a vengeance and forces them into an external redoubt, in contrast to the relatively more tolerant atmosphere, hospitable to internal gay caucuses [panelinhas, partidos], of the more liberal churches.”
CICERO
“Roman politician, orator, and writer, who left behind a corpus of Latin prose (speeches, treatises, letters) that make him one of the great authors of classical antiquity. Unsuccessful in politics, he was overestimated as a philosopher by the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and underestimated in modern times, but was and is ranked as one of the greatest masters of Latin style. His career as an orator began in 81 B.C., and from the very beginning his speeches revealed his rhetorical gifts. His denunciation ofVerres, the proconsul who had plundered the province of Sicily, opened the way to his election as aedile, praetor, and then consul, but subsequently the intrigues of his enemies led to his banishment from Rome (58/57), followed by his triumphal return. In the civil war he took the side of Pompey and so failed again, but was pardoned by the victorious Caesar, after whose death he launched a rhetorical attack on Mark Antony. The formation of the triumvirate meant that Cicero was to be proscribed by his opponent and murdered by his henchmen.”
“In the last turbulent century of the Roman republic in which he lived, a contrast between the austere virtue of earlier times and the luxury and vice of the present had become commonplace. Also, as we know from the slightly later genre of satirical poetry, a taste for salacious gossip had taken root in the metropolis. In his orations Cicero remorselessly flays the homosexual acts of his enemies, contrasting homosexual love with the passion inspired by women which is <far more of natural inspiration>.”
“Something of the Roman antipathy to Greek paiderasteia transpires from Cicero’s condemnation of the nudity which the Greeks flaunted in their public baths and gymnasia, and from his assertion that the Greeks were inconsistent in their notion of friendship. He pointedly noted: <Why is it that no one falls in love with an ugly youth or a handsome old man?> Effeminacy and passive homosexuality are unnatural and blameworthy in a free man, though Cicero remained enough under the influence of Greek mores to express no negative judgment on the practice of keeping handsome young slaves as minions of their master.” “The Judaic condemnation of homosexuality per se had not yet reached Rome, but the
distinction that had existed in Hellenic law and custom between acts worthy and unworthy of a citizen was adopted and even heightened by the com[cu]bination of appeal to Roman civic virtue and his own rhetorical flair.”
SMEAR CAMPAIGN: “Cicero’s rhetoric thus had two sides: the attempt to discredit opponents by inflammatory imputations of homosexual conduct and of sexual immorality in general – a type of smear to be followed in political life down to modern times”
CIRCUMCISION
GENEALOGIA DA PROFILAXIA: “Male circumcision, or the cutting away of the foreskin [prepúcio] of the penis, has been practiced by numerous peoples from remotest antiquity as a religious custom, while to some modern homosexuals it has an aesthetic and erotic significance. It has been speculated that the custom originated somewhere in Africa where water was scarce and the ability to wash was limited. Thus the Western Semites (Israelites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arabs, Edomites, Syrians), who lived in an area where water was never really plentiful, also observed the custom, while the Eastem Semites (Assyrians and Babylonians), in an area where water was more abundant, did not circumcise. This is true also of the Greeks and other Aegean peoples who always lived near the water.”
“Jesus never mentioned circumcision, though the Jewish rite was (Luke 2:21) performed upon him on his 8th day as it was with all other males of his community of faith – hence the designation of the calendar in which the first day of the year is January 1 as <circumcision style>. In the early church the party of Paul of Tarsus which opposed circumcision was victorious, and uncircumcised Greeks and Romans poured into the new faith, so that to this day the majority of European men have retained their foreskins. With the coming of the faith of Islam, however, in the VII century the Middle East and North Africa became a stronghold of the practice of circumcision. Hindus and Buddhists avoid it, hence East Asians – and Amerindians – retain their foreskins.”
“In the late 20th century the trend is being reversed in America as more and more medical articles – and some books – have argued that the operation in most cases is needless.”
“There are even groups of men who have retained their foreskins (and others who admire them); these individuals with generous or pronounced <curtains> are in demand.”
Bud Berkeley & Joe Tiffenbach, Circumcision: Its Past, Its Present, and Its Future, San Francisco: Bud Berkeley, 1983-84;
Rosemary Romberg, Circumcision: The Painful Dilemma, South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1985;
Edward Wallerstein, Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy, New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1980.
CLASS
“When there are no children to raise there is more discretionary income, so that adopting a homosexual lifestyle provides a margin for class enhancement.” “An established gay man or lesbian may put resources which parents would use for raising the status of their children into helping a lover-protegé. The mentor may also provide private lessons in manners and business acumen.” “Curiously, some parents seem to tolerate same-sex alliances by their offspring more easily than those that cross class or racial lines. § Internalizing the folk belief that homosexuals are more <artistic>, some gay men cultivate musical, theatrical, and culinary tastes that are above their <station> – and above their income. Acquisition of these refined preferences, together with <corrected> speech patterns, hinders easy communication with former peers, though there are many factors that work for geographical and psychological distance between homosexuals, on the one hand, and their families and original peer groups, on the other. Given their relative freedom, some individuals may be inclined to experiment with <class bending>, [sinuosidade de classe] sometimes with paradoxical results.”
“There is class, and there is class fantasy.”
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
“Greek church father. Born in Athens, probably of pagan and peasant ancestry, he is not to be confused with Clement, bishop of Rome, author of the New Testament epistle. After his conversion, Clement of Alexandria traveled widely to study under Christians, finally under the learned Pantaenus in Alexandria. Of the early Fathers, he had the most thorough knowledge of Greek literature. He quoted Homer, Hesiod, the dramatists, and (most of all) Platonic and Stoic philosophers. Sometime before 200 he succeeded Pantaenus, whom he praised for his orthodoxy, as head of the catechetical school at Alexandria, but in 202 he had to flee the persecution unleashed by the emperor Septimius Severus and perhaps died in Asia Minor.”
“Although Clement’s christianity has been criticized as being too Hellenized, his serene hope and classical learning helped convert the upper classes. His pseudo-Platonic doctrine that homosexuality was particularly noxious because it was <against nature> served to combine that strand of classical philosophy with Hellenistic Jewish homophobia, most trenchantly exemplified by the Alexandrian philosopher Philo Judaeus (20 B.C.-A.D. 45), to justify persecution of sodomites. He thus preceded and stimulated the homophobia of the Christian emperors, from Constantine’s sons to Justinian, and of the two most influential Fathers, John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo.”
CLERGY, GAY
“that there is a psychological affinity between religious ministry and hemophilia”Edward Carpenter
“The patrician John XII (938-964) went so far as to model himself on the scandalous Roman emperor Heliogabalus, holding homosexual orgies in the papal palace – a practice imitated by Benedict IX (1021-ca. 1052).” “paradoxically the enforcement of celibacy on priests and even attempts to impose it on those in lesser orders increased the danger of homosexuality.”
“Friars, who unlike the monks were free to wander among the laity without much supervision, became notorious as seducers of boys as well as women, whose confessions they often heard to the disgruntlement [desabono] of parish priests. Many homosexual clergy, then as now, confessed to one another and were formally absolved. Indeed, the confessional at times became the locus of seduction.”
“Philip IV of France charged Boniface VIII not only with heresy, usury, and simony, but with sodomy and masturbation as well.”
“The Renaissance in Italy, with its revival of classical antiquity and love of art, saw a number of popes who were interested in their own sex. Among them were the anti-pope John XXIII (d. 1419), who began his career as a pirate. Entering the clergy he quickly acquired the reputation of an unblushing libertine. The humanist pope Pius II (1405-1464) watched boys run naked in a race at Pienza, noting a boy <with fair hair and a beautiful body, though disfigured with mud>. The vain Venetian Paul II (1417-1471) toyed with adopting the name Formosus. Affecting the most lavish costumes, he was attacked by his enemies as <Our Lady of Pity>. His successor, Sixtus IV (1414-1482), made his mark as an art patron, erecting the Sistine chapel. He also elevated to the cardinalate a number of handsome young men. Julius II (1443-1513), another art-loving pope, provoked such scandal that he was arraigned under various charges, including that of sodomy, but he managed to survive the attempt to depose him. His successor, the extravagant Medici Leo X (1475-1521), became embroiled in intrigues to advance favorite nephews, a hobby that strained the treasury to the utmost. Julius III (1487-1555), who had presided over the Council of Trent before his pontificate, was nonetheless sometimes seen at official functions with catamites [<coroinhas>], one of whom he made a cardinal.”
“The anticlerical literature of the last decades of that century delighted in exposing cases in which a clergyman had committed a sexual offense, to the point where in 1911 the Pope had to issue the motu proprio decree Quamvis diligenter forbidding the Catholic laity to bring charges against the clergy before secular courts. This step unilaterally abolished the principle of the equality of all citizens before the law established by the French Revolution, reinstating the <benefit of clergy> of the Middle Ages. The anticlerical literature of that period still needs study for the light that it can shed on the homosexual subculture of the clerical milieux.”
The Bible for Believers and Unbelievers (1922)(clássico anticlerical russo)
The Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 22.
Transcrição completa do capítulo 22 das regras de São Benedito (regulamento dos monges na alta idade média):
“CHAPTER XXII: HOW THE MONKS ARE TO SLEEP
Let them sleep singly in separate beds. Let them receive bedding suitable to their manner of life, at the discretion of the abbot. If it can be done, let all sleep in one room: but if their number does not allow of this, let them repose by tens or by twenties with their seniors who have charge of them. Let a candle burn continually in the dormitory until morning. Let them sleep clothed and girded with girdles or cords, but let them not have knives at their sides while they sleep, lest by chance while dreaming they wound a sleeper; and let them be monks always ready; and upon the signal being given let them rise without delay and hasten one after the other, yet with all gravity and decorum, to be ready in good time for the Work of God. Let not the younger brethren have their beds by themselves, but among those of the seniors: and let them be allowed gently to encourage one another as they rise for the Work of God, because some may feel drowsy and listless.”
COCTEAU, JEAN
The Infernal Machine (peça)
COLETTE
“A happy childhood is a bad preparation for contact with human beings.”
COLOR SYMBOLISM
“A current Russian term for a gay man is golubchik, from goluboy, <blue>, evidently through association with the <blue blood> of the aristocracy of the Old Régime.”
“According to Havelock Ellis, one could not safely walk down the streets of late 19th century New York wearing a red tie without being accosted, since this garment was then the universal mark of the male prostitute.” “Because of the <scarlet woman>, the great Whore of Babylon of the book of Revelation, that color has acquired a strong association with prostitution and adultery”
“In American culture the word lavender – a blend of red and blue (as in <lavender lover>, The Lavender Lexicon, etc.) – almost speaks for itself.”
“The mid-1980s saw public display at rallies and marches of a rainbow Gay Pride Flag, consisting of six parallel stripes ranging from bright red to deep purple. The juxtaposition of colors stands for the diversity of the gay/lesbian community with regard to ethnicity, gender, and class – perhaps also connoting, in the minds of some, the coalition politics of the Rainbow Alliance headed by Jesse Jackson.”
COMICS
“The first true comic strips were introduced in 1897 as a circulation-building device in the Sunday supplements of the Hearst newspapers. The now-familiar pulp comic book was a creation of the Depression: the first commercial example is Famous Funnies of 1934. Although these strips generally affirmed middle-class values, and certainly contained not the slightest overt indication of sex, they were regularly denounced by pundits as a pernicious influence on the young.”
“Batman, appearing in 1939, featured the adventures of a playboy detective and his teenage ward, Robin. Although the relationship is portrayed as a simple mentor-protegé one, some teenage male readers were able to project something stronger into it. This aspect was certainly flirted with in the campy television off-shoot beginning in 1966, though this series reflects a much changed cultural climate. In 1941 there appeared Wonder-woman, featuring an Amazon with special powers living on an all-woman island. This strip – contrary to the expressed wishes of its creators – served as a focus for lesbian aspirations. In the 1970s it was rediscovered by the women’s movement as a proto-feminist statement.
In the late 1940s Blade drew several illustrated stories, including The Barn and Truck Hiker, that can be considered predecessors of the gay comics. Circulated underground, they have been officially published only in recent years. Somewhat later the wordless strips of supermacho types created by Tom of Finland began to circulate in Europe.
It was the American counterculture of the 1960s, however, which first made possible the exploration of taboo subjects in a context of crumbling censorship restrictions. In 1964 a Philadelphia gay monthly, Drum, began serializing Harry Chess by Al Shapiro (A. Jay). Modeled on a popular television series, Harry Chess was both macho and campy, though explicit sex scenes were veiled. In the 1970s no-holds-barred examples appeared drawn by such artists as Bill Ward, Sean, and Stephen (Meatman).”
COMING OUT
“A few gays and lesbians report no memory of a coming out process; they always considered themselves homosexual and were never <in the closet>. Others have reported a sudden revelation of their own homosexuality which does not fit into any theory of stages but has brought them from apparently heterosexual to comfortably homosexual virtually overnight.”
“The self-help literature for gay and lesbian youth is quite explicit in designating parents as the crucial factor in the youth’s coming out process. Those who do not come out to their family, according to G.B. MacDonald, become <half-members of the family unit: afraid and alienated, unable ever to be totally open and spontaneous, to trust or be trusted… This sad stunting of human potential breeds stress for gay people and their families alike – stress characterized by secrecy, ignorance, helplessness, and distance.> The scientific literature, however, has largely ignored the role of parents, having centered on gay and lesbian adults.”
CONTEST LITERATURE
Diálogos.
Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon
Pseudo-Lucian, Affairs of the Heart
CONTRARY SEXUAL FEELING
“the linguistic remnant of the first, uncertain psychiatric attempt to grapple with the problem of homosexuality.”
COUNTERCULTURE
“Apparently the term counterculture is an adaptation of the slightly earlier <adversary culture>, an expression coined by the literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905-1975). In many respects the counterculture constituted a mass diffusion – fostered by diligent media exploitation – of the prefigurative beat/hippie phenomenon. As American involvement in the Vietnam War increased, in the wake of opposition to it the counterculture shifted from the gentle <flower-child> phase to a more aggressive posture, making common cause with the New Left, which was not, like the radicalism of the 30s, forced by economic crisis to focus on issues of unemployment and poverty. Of course radical political leaders were accustomed to decry the self-indulgence of the hippies, but their followers, as often as not, readily succumbed to the lure of psychedelic drugs and the happy times of group togetherness accompanied by ever present rock music.”
MESSIANISMO EPIDÊMICO: “The counterculture shamelessly embraced ageism: <Don’t trust anyone over thirty.> Observing this precept cut young people off from the accumulated experience and wisdom of sympathetic elders. Moreover, it meant that the adherents of the movement themselves quickly became back numbers as they crossed over the 30-year line. In regard to gay adherents, the distrust of older people tended to reinforce the ageism already present in their own subculture. To be sure, the full force of such problematic effects has become evident only in retrospect. Although outsiders, and some insiders as well, exaggerated the fusion of the counterculture and the New Left, still the convergence of massive cultural innovation with hopes for fundamental political change gave the young generation a heady sense of imminent revolution.”
“The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz and others correctly perceived the link between the campaign to decriminalize marijuana and the efforts to reform sex laws.” “many assumed that homosexuals were essentially counterculturist, leftist, and opposed root and branch to the established order. Subsequent observation has shown, not surprisingly perhaps, that a majority of gay men and lesbians were (and are) liberal-reformist and even conservative, rather than revolutionary in then-overall political and social outlook.”
CROWLEY, ALEISTER
“After the turn of the century Crowley’s public career began, and he was regularly attacked in the press as <The Great Beast> and <The Wickedest Man in the World>.”
Raulseixismo: <There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.>
“In a 1910 memoir Aleister Crowley proclaimed, <I shall fight openly for that which no Englishman dare defend, even in secret – sodomy! At school I was taught to admire Plato and Aristotle, who recommend sodomy to youths – I am not so rebellious as to oppose their dictum; and in truth there seems to be no better way to avoid the contamination of woman and the morose pleasures of solitary vice.>”
“he advanced beyond the grade of Magus to the supreme status of Ipsissimus.” E o Quico?
“Scarcely known today outside occult circles, Crowley is an extravagant instance of the concern with heterodox religion that has flourished among some male homosexuals who could find no peace within established Christianity, and more recently among female adherents of <the craft>. Through his voluminous writings Crowley foreshadowed the emergence of the <Age of Aquarius>.”
Israel Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle: An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley, St. Paul: Llewellen Publications, 1970.
CRUISING
Nicole Ariana, How to Pick up Men, New York: Bantam, 1972;
Mark Freedman & Harvey Mayes, Loving Man, New York: Hark, 1976, chapter 2;
John A. Lee, Getting Sex, Toronto: General, 1978 [Tinder on paper for human beings as archaic as those from a century ago];
Publius Ovid, Art of Love [~1A.D., obra seminal do “flerte” e “sondagens de sexo casual”, homo e heteronormativas!]
CUBA
“The largest island of the Antilles chain, home to 10 million Spanish-speaking people” Para 2017, o censo ainda não aponta população superior a 11.5 milhões.
“The British, French, and Dutch seized islands from the Spanish or colonized vacant ones as naval bases or sugar plantations; like the pirates they seldom brought women along. All 3 European powers were involved in the notorious triangular trade, shipping molasses or rum to Europe, guns and trinkets from there to Africa, and slaves back to the West Indies.”
“Cuba began to excel in sugar production after 1762. Havana became a glittering metropolis, rivaling New York and Rio de Janeiro, by 1800. The slave population, including huge numbers of males imported for work in the cane fields or molasses manufacturing, grew from fewer than 40,000 in 1770 to over 430,000 seventy years later. The census of 1841 reported that more than half the population was non-white (black and mixed blood) and that 43% were slaves. Males outnumbered females by 2 to 1 in the center and west and were just equal in the east. Other islands in the Caribbean had even greater sexual imbalances. Documentation for the homosexuality that must have abounded is scarce but the earlier prevalence can be assumed from attitudes and customs that still survive.”
“With Spain’s adoption of the Napoleonic Code in 1889, homosexuality was decriminalized 3 years after the abolition of slavery.”
“During World War I, Europe was closed to North Americans and Cuba, especially Havana, became a resort for the more adventurous. Prosperity increased with a rise in commodity prices. Also, the Prohibition in the United States after 1920 left Cuba as an oasis where liquor still flowed freely. Casino gambling and prostitution were also legal. A favorite port of call of cruise ships [pun intended!], Havana flourished as a mecca for pleasure-seekers.”
“The post-war collapse of commodity prices was to some extent offset by tourism. Everything was for sale in Havana under the dictator Fulgencio Batista, whose 1952 coup ousted an outwardly democratic but venal and nepotistic predecessor.
Old Havana had gay bars. Moral laxity, characteristic of the slave-rooted Caribbean economy, the Napoleonic Code, and the weakness of the Catholic Church (which was mainly Spanish, urban and upper class) produced an environment where gays were only mildly persecuted and could buy protection from corrupt officials. Drugs, especially marijuana, which flourished throughout the Caribbean, were available in Cuba long before they won popularity in the United States.”
“Exploiting popular revulsion against continuing political corruption as well as resentment of the diminishing but still important American domination, Fidel Castro led an ill-assorted group of liberals, patriots, and Marxists, including some gays, to victory over Batista in 1959. Only after he came to power did the United States realize that Castro was an avowed Communist. The American Central Intelligence Agency then tried and failed to assassinate him. His triumph was sealed by the missile crisis of 1962 when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in return for Kennedy’s promise never to try to invade Cuba.”
“Soviet hostility toward homosexuality since 1934, when Stalin restored the penal laws against male homosexuals, combined with traditional Latin American machismo and Catholic homophobia, made the existence of Cuban homosexuals wretched and oppressive. To prevent their <contamination> of youth, thousands of gays in the 1960s were placed in work camps known as Military Units to Increase Production (UMAP). Although the camps were abolished by the end of the decade, other forms of discrimination continued. Article 359 of the Cuban penal code prohibits public homosexuality. Violations are punished with a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 20 years. Parents must discourage their children from homosexuality or report their failure to officials as Articles 355-58 mandate. Articles 76-94 punish with 4 years imprisonment sexual deviation regarded by the government as contrary to the spirit of Socialism.”
“The gifted playwright and fiction writer Virgilio Piñera (1912-1967) returned from Argentina in 1957 and after Castro’s triumph worked for several of the newspapers of the regime. On October 11, 1961, he was arrested and jailed for homosexuality. Che Guevara personally denounced him.”
Allen Young, Gays under the Cuban Revolution
DANDYISM
“The dandy has been since antiquity the man who prides himself on being the incarnation of elegance and of male fashion. The word itself stems from the Romantic period in the 19th century, when the character type reached its apogee; England and France were the principal countries in which it flourished. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was one of the first to perceive that the type was not limited to the age just preceding his own, but had emerged across the centuries in some celebrated historical figures. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808-1889) wrote an Essay on Dandyism and George Brummel (1845), dealing with Beau Brummell (1778-1840), the most famous English representative of the dandy in the London of George IV.
History of the Type. Ancient Greece saw two classical specimens of the dandy: Agathon and Alcibiades. In Plato’s Symposium Agathon is a poet and tragedian, not merely handsome, but obsessed with the most trivial details of his wardrobe. Aristophanes shows him using a razor to keep his cheeks as smooth and glistening as marble, wearing sumptuous clothing in the latest Ionian fashion. Later in the same dialogue Alcibiades also enters the stage, the most dazzling figure of the jeunesse dorée of Athens, richer and more influential than Agathon, and never sparing any expenditure that would enhance his renown.”
“Another aesthete of this era, Oscar Wilde, affected a particularly striking costume when he made a lecture tour of the United States, capitalizing on a character featured in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience (1881).”
“Rationale. The relation of the dandy to male homosexuality is complicated. As a rule the homosexual – more than the male who is attracted to women – feels the need to distinguish his person in some way, is more conscious of the world of male fashion and more likely to be narcissistically preoccupied with his image. Naturally not all the dandies of the past were homosexual or bisexual, and an element of leisure class self-demarcation and snobbery enters into the picture. Since it is usually the male of the species whom nature makes physically more noteworthy, the male-female antithesis in style of dress that has prevailed in Western culture since the French Revolution reverses the immemorial state of affairs. The notion that only a woman may be preoccupied with her wardrobe and that a man should dress simply and even unobtrusively is of recent date.”
DANTE ALIGHIERI
“As a youth he had a profound spiritual experience in an encounter with the young Beatrice Portinari; after her death he submerged himself in the study of philosophy and poetry. In 1302 Dante was banished from Florence, pursuing his literary career in various other cities of Italy.”
“The presence in both the Inferno and the Purgatorio of groups of <sodomites> has given rise to a series of debates over the centuries. These passages must be interpreted in the larger context of the great poem’s situations and personnel.” “The sodomites of the Inferno (cantos 15 and 16) are seen running under a rain of fire, condemned never to stop if they wish to avoid the fate of being nailed to the ground for a hundred years with no chance of shielding themselves against the flames. Having recognized Dante, Brunetto Latini (ca. 1212-1294) called him to speak with him, voicing an important prophecy of Dante’s future. In describing his fellow sufferers, Latini mentioned a number of famous intellectuals, politicians, and soldiers.
In the Purgatorio (canto 26) the sodomites appear in a different context – together with lustful heterosexuals. The two categories travel in opposite directions, yelling out the reason for their punishment.
How can one account for the striking deference and sympathy that Dante shows for the sodomites? This matter began to puzzle commentators only a few years after the poet’s death.”
“Dante’s education took place in the 13th century when Italy was beginning to change its attitudes toward homosexual behavior. Conduct which had been a transgression condemned by religion but viewed with indulgence by everyday morality assumed increasing seriousness in the eyes of the laity. For Dante it was still possible – as it had commonly been through the first half of the 13th century – to separate human and divine judgment with respect to sodomy.”
IDADE DAS LUZES E O BURACO ESCURO: “For Dante’s commentators sodomy was a sin of such gravity that it was inconceivable for them to treat with respect men seared with such <infamy>.”
“That Dante had spoken of Brunetto Latini and the sodomites with too much sympathy because he too shared their feelings was the conclusion of one anonymous commentator of the 14th century. Another wild suggestion is that the shameless Latini had made an attempt on Dante’s own virtue, and that hence Dante’s gentle words are in reality sarcasm that must be understood <in the opposite sense> (Guiniforto dei Bargigi; 1406-ca. 1460). Then, foreshadowing a thesis that would be favored by medical opinion in the 12th century, it was suggested that there were two types of sodomites, those by <choice> and those who are such by <necessity>.”
“The debate on Dante’s motives has continued until our own day. In 1950Andre Pezard devoted a whole book, Dante sous la pluie de feu, to an effort to show that the sin for which Brunetto and his companions were being punished was sodomy not in the usual sense, but in an allegorical one: sodomie spirituelle, which in Brunetto’s case meant having used the French language as a medium for one of his works.”
“The authoritative Encyclopedia Dantesca has sought to bring the conflict to an end, taking adequate account of Dante’s indulgent judgment as the correct key for solving the supposed <enigma> of the band of sodomites. As regards the reason for Brunetto Latini’s presence among the sodomites, Avalle D’Arco’s recent confirmation of the attribution to him of a long love poem directed to a man, S’eo son distretto inamoramente, shows that it was probably on the basis of facts that were publicly known in Dante’s time that he was consigned to Hell.” Aposto o cu que você já deu o cu.
DICKINSON, EMILY (1830-1886)
“American poet. After brief periods at Amherst Academy and Holyoke Female Seminary, she settled into an outwardly uneventful life keeping house for her family. Dickinson never married. The real events in her life are her writings, which have assumed classic status in American literature.”
“These homoerotic poems are never joyous, but that is to be expected in a society where heterosexual marriage was virtually believed inevitable and there was little possibility of two unrelated women establishing a life together if they were not wealthy through independent inheritance.”
DIONYSUS
“Greek god associated with wine and emotional exuberance. Although the name occurs in linear B tablets [?] from the end of the second millennium B.C., his figure absorbed additional elements from Thrace and the East in the following centuries. Dionysus, called Bacchus in Latin, was the son of Zeus and a mortal, Semele. When his mother unwisely besought Zeus to reveal himself in his true form, she was incinerated, but the embryo of her son escaped destruction. Zeus then inserted it into his own thigh and carried the child to term. This quality of being <twice born>, once from a woman and once from a man, points to the ambiguity of the god, who though male had effeminate traits. In literary and artistic representations, he sometimes served as a vehicle for questioning sex roles, otherwise strongly polarized in ancient Greece.
According to the late-antique writer Nonnus, Dionysus fell in love with a Phrygian boy, Ampelos, who became his inseparable companion. When the boy was killed in a bull-riding accident, the grief-stricken Dionysus turned him into a vine. As a result, the practices of vine cultivating and grape harvesting, of wine making and drinking, commemorate this deeply felt pederastic relationship: in honoring the vine (ampelos in Greek), one honors the god through his beloved.
In historic times Dionysus attracted a cult following consisting largely of women, the Bacchae or maenads. During the ritual followers abandoned their houses and work to roam about in the mountains, hair and clothing in disarray, and liberally imbibing wine, normally forbidden to women. At the height of their ecstasy they would seize upon an animal or even a child, tear it to pieces, and devour the uncooked flesh, by ingesting which they sought to incorporate the god and his powers within themselves. From a sociological point of view, the Bacchic cult is a <religion of the oppressed>, affording an ecstatic relief to women, whose status was low. Occurring only once during the year, or once every two years, these Dionysiac rites were bracketed off from the normal life of the Greek polis, suggesting comparison with such later European customs as the feast of fools, the carnival, the charivari, and mardi gras.
The maenads assume a major role in Euripides’ tragedy, The Bacchae (406 BC). Accompanied by his female followers, Dionysus appears in Thebes as a missionary. Unwisely, King Pentheus insults and arrests the divine visitor; after he has been rendered mad and humiliated, the transgressor is dismembered by the maenads. Interpretations of the play differ: a warning of the consequences of emotional excess versus a reaffirmation of the enduring presence of humanity’s irrational side. The subject probably attracted Euripides as a phenomenon of individual and group psychology in its own right, but it is unlikely that he intended it as a forecast of modern gay liberation in the <faery spirituality> mode, as Arthur Evans has argued. Inasmuch as the sexuality of The Bacchae was not pederastic, the Greek audience would not have seen the play as homosexual (a concept foreign to their mentality), but rather as challenging gender-role assumptions about men and women, whatever their sexual orientation. That the parts of the maenads were taken by men was not exceptional: women never appeared on the Greek stage.
Bacchanalian rites were introduced into Rome during the Republic. Men joined women in the frenzied gatherings, and (according to the historian Livy) there was more debauchery among the men with each other than with the women. Apart from their orgiastic aspects, the rites caused concern because they crossed class lines, welcoming citizens, freed men and slaves alike. Condemned as a subversive foreign import, the Senate suppressed the Bacchanalia in 186 BC, but they evidently were soon revived. Roman sarcophagi of the 2nd and 3rd century of our era show Bacchic scenes, projecting hopes for an afterlife spent in Dionysic bliss. In its last phases the cult of Dionysus emerged as an other-worldly mystery religion, showing affinities with Mithraism, the religion of Isis, and Christianity. Meeting now behind closed doors, members of the sect recognized one another by passwords and signs.
Although the early Christians regarded all pagan worship as demonic, they were not averse to purloining the Bacchic wine harvest imagery for their own sarcophagi and mosaics. Some Bacchic reminiscences recur in drinking songs of medieval goliardic poets, notably the Carmina Burana.”
“At the end of the 16th century the flamboyant bisexual painter Caravaggio created a notably provocative image of Bacchus-Dionysus (Florence, Uffizi Gallery).” Veja pintura no verbete do pintor mais acima.
“The most influential latter-day evocation of the god occurs in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) of Friedrich Nietzsche, who exalted the category of the Dionysiac as an antidote for excessive rationality in the interpretation of ancient Greece and, by implication, in modern life as well.
Nietzsche’s ideas were modernized and correlated with anthropology and psychoanalysis by the classical scholar E.R. Dodds, who in turn influenced the poet W.H. Auden. Together with his lover, Chester Kallman, Auden turned Euripides’ play into an opera libretto entitled The Bassarids.”
Karl Kerenyi, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, London: Routledge, 1976.
DREAMS
“When a dream has homosexual content, the hermeneutic process is complicated by the ethical assumptions of the dreamer and the interpreter, which reflect the attitudes of society toward same-sex experience.
To understand their dream experiences human beings have formulated a lore to which the ancients gave the name oneirocritical. Because the ancient world accepted homosexual interest and activity as part of human sexuality, the dream interpreters of the eastern Mediterranean cultures could calmly explain the homoerotic episodes in dreams in terms of their overall system of signs and meanings and without anxiety. Such was the work of Artemidorus of Daldis (middle of the 2nd century), which alludes to pédérastie and homosexual dream sequences and assigns them a specific, often prophetic meaning. Not so the Christian Middle Ages; the literature of dreams became exclusively heterosexual because the taboo with which theology had tainted sexual attraction to one’s own sex imposed a censorship that is only now being lifted.”
DRUGS
“It should be noted that there has never been a country or society in which unrestricted use of all psychoactive drugs has been permitted over any period of time.”
“In some users hallucinogens cause terrifying experiences; psychological problems can be exacerbated, and brain damage caused. The action of stimulants is often followed by a compensatory negative experience through which the body restores its equilibrium.”
“Society can tolerate drug use if it is encapsulated within an artistic, recreational, religious, or therapeutic context; while some are able to so control their usagé, for many that is a daunting or impossible condition, at least in our present culture”
“education is more effective than prohibition. Exaggeration of drugs’ harmful effects reduces respect for law, overwhelms the courts and prisons, inhibits research on any therapeutic use of drugs, makes drugs of controlled strength and purity unavailable, gives drugs the glamour of the forbidden, and encourages progression to ever more dangerous yet legally equal substances. As with alcohol during America’s Prohibition (1920-33), the supply of illegal drugs has become a very profitable industry, and not a passive or benign one. Foreigners who supply drugs sometimes justify their actions to themselves and their countrymen as a means of striking back at the political and economic power of the United States.”
“during the 1960s, there were a considerable number of reports of people becoming aware of homoeroticism for the first time while under the influence of LSD especially. Drugs have also been used by musicians, artists, and writers who claim that the substances help them create, although this claim is controversial, perhaps because if substantiated it would be a powerful argument for drug use.”
“The use of hashish (cannabis), eaten in sweets rather than smoked, is found in the Bible (Song of Songs 5:1; I Samuel 14:25-45), and there is evidence of psychic use of hemp (marijuana), from which hashish is made, from pre-historic times. Herodotus, for example, reports its popularity among the Scythians. However, widespread use of hashish begins in Islam in the 12th and 13th centuries. While the Koran prohibited wine, which because of distribution costs was somewhat more expensive than today, it was silent on hashish, which was also much less expensive. There was debate about whether the Koran’s silence was to be taken as approval, or whether prohibition was to be inferred from the treatment of wine; still, as long as it remained a minority indulgence it was tolerated, as wine usually was. Hashish users became a subculture; in particular it is linked to the mystical Sufis, who made a cult and ritual of its use. However, almost every Islamic poet from the 13th to the 16th centuries produced at least some playful poems on hashish, although wine poetry is much more abundant.”
“Hashish was thought to cause effeminacy, a preference for the passive sexual role, and a loss of interest in sex. However, it was also prized as the drug of scholars and lovers of young men, and an aid in seduction of the latter. Turkish soldiers frequently ate hashish together before going into battle.
Coffee was introduced to Europe in the 17th century from the Turkish empire. Both within Islam and in Europe coffee was at first a similarly controversial drug, subject to occasional legal restriction or suppression. Its use in coffee-houses, later cafés, was typical of intellectuals and dissidents.”
“The first half of the 20th century was characterized by a wave of reaction against drugs and the establishment of legal controls throughout Westem Europe and North America. However, the tensions of the 1960s, against a backdrop of the Holocaust and the invention and use of the atomic bomb, brought on a new wave of drug use. The hedonistic use of cannabis increased greatly; its enthusiasts promoted it as an aid to sensual and sexual enjoyment. The Beat generation, especially William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, had already turned to potent psychedelics as a means of self-improvement; they became part of the short-lived counterculture of the late 1960s. The discovery of psychedelics was in part due to progress in anthropology and archeology. The use by native peoples of mescaline (peyote), psilocybin (mushrooms), and other psychedelics became known, and the possible role of such substances in visions and oracles of the ancient Mediterranean world was proposed by scholars. The hallucinogenic properties of the most potent psychedelic yet known, lysergic acid diethylamine-25 (LSD), were discovered in 1943” “until it became too controversial, it was manufactured by a pharmaceutical company for research in psychotherapeutic treatment.”
“The gay bar remains the only gay institution in many American communities, as it was almost everywhere until the 1970s.”
“Poppers are a vasodilator of transitory effect, and cause a <high> from a drop in blood pressure; users say that the intensity and/or duration of orgasm is increased, that muscles (such as throat and anal sphincters) and gag reflexes are relaxed, and that feelings of increased union or <melting> with the sex partner result. Many users report that continued use (a single inhalation produces effects only for a few minutes) inhibits erections, while other users seem unaffected. Likewise, some users say the poppers encourage passivity and complete relaxation, while others report no such effect. Headaches and dizziness are sometimes reported as side effects.” “In the early 1980s poppers were accused of being a co-factor in the development of AIDS, and they were made illegal in some areas, although the accusation remains unproven.”
EFFEMINACY, HISTORICAL SEMANTICS OF
“In reading older texts it is important to bear these differences in mind, for the term effeminate can be used slightingly of a womanizer [mulherengo] as well as of a <womanish> man.
The ancient Greeks and Romans sharply differentiated the active male homosexual, the paiderastes (in the New Testament arsenokoites, literally <man-layer>), from the passive partner, the cinaedus or pathicus (New Testament Greek malakos; Hebrew, rakha). The Greeks also sometimes used the term androgynos, <man-woman>, to stigmatize the passive homosexual. Beginning with the Old Attic comedies of Aristophanes, the passive is a stock figure of derision and contempt, the active partner far less so. Because of the military ideals on which ancient societies were founded, passivity and softness in the male were equated with cowardice and want of virility. A seeming exception is the god Dionysus – whose effeminate characteristics are, however, probably an import from the non-Greek East.
In ancient Rome the terms mollis (soft) and effeminatus acquired special connotations of decadence and enervating luxury. By contrast the word virtus meant manliness. The Roman satirists took sardonic delight in flagellating the vices of luxury that were rampant among the upper classes of a nation that, once rude and war-like, had succumbed to the temptations that followed its successful conquest and plunder of the entire ancient world. The classical notion of effeminacy as the result of luxury, idleness, and pampered self-indulgence is thus far removed from the claim of some gay liberationists today to kinship with the exploited and down-trodden.”
“The old Icelandic literature stemming from medieval Scandinavia documents the condemnation of the argr, the cowardly, unwar-like effeminate (compare Modern German arg, <bad>). The Latin term mollities (softness) entered early Christian and medieval writings, but often with reference to masturbation. It may be that the 18th-century English term molly for an effeminate homosexual is a reminiscence of Latin mollis.”
“In the 16th century the French monarch Henri III assembled an entourage of favorites whose name mignon connotes effeminacy and delicacy. In French also the original meaning of bardache was the passive partner of the active bougre. English writings of the 17th and 18th century frequently denounced foppery [dandismo], sometimes homosexual but more often heterosexual.”
“Restoration times also witnessed the popularity of the self-referencing habit of male homosexuals adopting women’s names: Mary, Mary-Anne, Molly, Nance or Nancy, and Nelly. The habit occurs in other languages as well – Janet in Flemish; Checca (from Francesca) in Italian; Maricón (from Maria) in Spanish; and Adelaida in Portuguese.”
“19th-century English witnessed a semantic shift of a number of terms originally applied to women to provide opprobrious designations of male homosexuals. Thus gay had the meaning of a loose woman, prostitute; faggot, a slatternly woman –, and queen (or quean), a trollop. Even today the popular mind tends to the view that gay men seek to imitate women, or even become women –, the considerable number of unstereotypical, masculine homosexuals are not taken into account.”
“Termagant and virago, though pejorative, do not suggest variance of sexual orientation. The girl who is a tomboy has always been treated more indulgently than the boy who is a sissy.”
“Men who cross-dress as women are of two kinds. Some go to great lengths to make the simulation credible, an effort that may be a prelude to transsexualism. In other instances the simulation is imperfect, a kind of send-up. Although some feminists have interpreted such cross-dressing exercises as mockery of women, it is more likely that they signify a questioning of gender categories. In any event, transvestism is not normally held to lie within the province of effeminacy, which is thought to be the adjunction of feminine traits in a person otherwise fully recognizable as masculine.”
Hans Herter, Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum, 4 (1959).
EGYPT
“Traditionally the pharaohs married their half-sisters, a custom that other peoples considered curious. Self-confident in their cherished habits and customs, the Egyptians nonetheless cherished a distinct sense of privacy, which restricted discussion of erotic themes in the documents that have come down to modern times. Most of our evidence stems from temples and tombs, where a full record of everyday life could scarcely be expected. Unfortunately, Egypt had no law codes comparable to those known from ancient Mesopotamia.”
“The realm of mythology provides several instances of homosexual behavior. In order to subordinate him, the god Seth attempted to sodomize his brother Horus, but the latter foiled him, and tricked Seth into ingesting some of his (Horus’s) own semen. Seth then became pregnant. In another myth the ithyphallic god Min anally assaulted an enemy, who later gave birth to the god Thoth. Both these stories present involuntary receptive homosexuality as a humiliation, but the act itself is not condemned; in the latter incident the god of wisdom is born as a result. (In another myth the high god engenders offspring parthenogenetically by masturbation.) While it is sometimes claimed that the ancient Egyptians were accustomed to sodomize enemies after their defeat on the battlefield, the evidence is equivocal.”
“In what is surely history’s first homosexual short story, King Pepy II Neferkare (2355-2261) makes nocturnal visits to have sex with his general Sisinne. This episode is significant as an instance of androphilia – sex between two adult men – rather than the pederasty that was dominant in the ancient world. From a slightly earlier period comes the Tomb of the Two Brothers at Thebes, which the excavators have explained as the joint sepulcher of two men, Niankhnum and Khnumhotep, who were lovers. Bas reliefs on the tomb walls show the owners embracing affectionately.”
“Queen Hatshepsut (reigned 1503-1482 BC) adopted male dress and even wore a false beard; these male attributes probably stem from her decision to reign alone, rather than from lesbianism.
A figure of particular interest is the pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV; reigned ca. 1372-1354 BC), who was a religious and artistic reformer. Although this king begat several daughters with his wife, the famous Nefertiti, in art he is often shown as eunuch-like, with swollen hips and feminine breasts. According to some interpreters these somatic features reflect a glandular disorder. Other scholars believe that they are a deliberate artistic stylization, so that the appearance of androgyny may convey a universal concept of the office of kingship, uniting the male and the female so as to constitute an appropriate counterpart of the universal god Aten he introduced. Scenes of Akhenaten caressing his son-in-law Smenkhkare have been interpreted, doubtfully, as indicating a homosexual relation between the two.”
ELLIS, HAVELOCK
“Pioneering British writer on sexual psychology. Descended from a family with many generations of seafarers, Henry Havelock Ellis was named after a distinguished soldier who was the hero of the Indian Mutiny. Early in life he sailed twice around the world and spent some years in Australia. In boarding school he had some unpleasant experiences suggesting a passive element in his character, and his attachments to women were often more friendships than erotic liaisons. At the age of 32 he married Edith Lees, a lesbian; after the first year of their marriage all sexual relations ceased, and both went on to a series of affairs with women. By nature an autodidact, Ellis obtained in 1889 only a licentiate in Medicine, Surgery, and Midwifery from the Society of Apothecaries – a somewhat inferior degree that always embarrassed him. More interested in his literary studies than in the practice of medicine, he nevertheless collected case histories mainly by correspondence, as his autobiography makes no mention of clinical practice.”
ERA DE AQUARIUS: “In the atmosphere that prevailed after the disgrace of Oscar Wilde (May 1895), publication in England was problematic, but under doubtful auspices the English edition was released in November 1897.”
“Sexual Inversion was the first book in English to treat homosexuality as neither disease nor crime, and if he dismissed the current notion that it was a species of <degeneracy> (in the biological sense), he also maintained that it was inborn and unmodifiable – a view that he never renounced. His book, couched in simple language, urged public toleration for what was then regarded as unnatural and criminal to the highest degree. To a readership conditioned from childhood to regard homosexual behavior with disgust and abhorrence, the book was beyond the limits of comprehension, and a radical publisher and bookseller named George Bedborough was duly prosecuted for issuing <a certain lewd wicked bawdy scandalous and obscene libel>” “The book was to appear in two later editions as the second volume of Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which in its final format extended to 7 volumes covering the whole of sexual science as it existed in the first three decades of the 20th century.” “Ellis never endorsed the explanations offered by Freud and the psychoanalytic school, so that the third edition of Sexual Inversion (1915), which was supplemented by material drawn from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, published a year earlier, presented essentially the standpoint of 1904. The next in radical character was the measured discussion of masturbation, which Victorian society had been taught to regard with virtual paranoia as the cause of numberless ills.”
EPHEBOPHILIA
“The term ephebophilia seems to have been coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in his Wesen der Liebe (1906)”
ANTI-AQUILINO (BANQUETE): “those with bearded faces who had outgrown the stage at which they were appropriate as the younger partners in pederasty, but not yet old enough to marry: the prime age for military service. The ancient Greek age of puberty was likely in the mid-teens rather than the younger ages typical of contemporary Western society.”
“In other societies, ephebes are legally on a par with younger children, but in practice sexual activities with them are not as harshly repressed as with the younger group.”
“The combination of heightened sexual energy with a lack of heterosexual outlets (owing to marriage ages in the twenties and restrictions on pre-marital opportunities) and low incomes (characteristic of males still in school, military service, or just beginning to acquire work experience) has in many societies made heterosexual ephebes more available for trade (one-sided) relationships with homosexuals than any other group of heterosexual males.
For many ephebophiles, the naïveté of ephebes is a source of attraction, their enthusiasm for new experiences (including sexual and romantic involvements) contrasted with what is perceived to be the more jaded and skeptical attitudes of other adults.”
“The ancient Greeks acknowledged this trait with the term philephebos (fond of young men) and philoboupais (one who is fond of over-matured boys, <bull-boys> or <husky young men>), but generally slighted it in favor of the pederastic preference. Nevertheless, the athletic games of which the Greeks were so fond featured nude ephebes, the size of whose members received public acclaim, and the victors basked in adulation; Pindar wrote odes to them.”
“In the 20th century, the dominance of the androphile model of male homosexuality has tended to subsume, appropriate, and obscure the ephebophile current, and to consider it as a mode of adult-adult relationships rather than as a distinctive type of preference.”
EPICUREANISM
“Knowledge of Epicureanism, the classical rival of Stoicism, is fragmentary because Christians, disliking its atheistic materialism, belief in the accidental existence of the cosmos, and ethical libertarianism, either failed to copy or actually destroyed the detested works. Of all the numerous works composed in antiquity, only Lucretius’ philosophical poem De rerum natura survives intact. Diogenes Laertius reported that Epicurus wrote more than anyone else, including 37 books On Nature. A typical maxim: <We see that pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily>.
Epicurus (341-270 BC), the founder of the school, served as an ephebe in Athens at 18 and then studied at the Academy, a fellow classmate of Menander, when Aristotle was absent in Chalcis. Having taught abroad, where he combatted the atomist philosophy of Democritus, he returned to Athens and bought his house with a garden in 307-6. There he taught until his death, allowing women and slaves to participate in his lessons – to the shock of traditionalists. Only a few lines of his works survive. Apparently he likened sexual object choice, whether of women or boys, to food preferences – a parallel that often recurred in later times. His beloved Metrodorus predeceased him.
[O LEITMOTIF INCONSCIENTE DO BLOG] The Epicurean school, consisting of scholars who secluded themselves from society in Epicurus’ garden, lived modestly or even austerely. Stoics, however, libeled the secretive Epicureans because of their professed hedonism, accusing them of profligacy of every kind despite the fact that Epicurus felt that pleasure could be attained only in restraint of some pursuits that in the long run bring more pain than the temporary pleasure they seem to offer. Natural pleasures are easily satisfied, others being unnecessary. The ideal was freedom from destiny by satisfying desire and avoiding the pain of desires too difficult or impossible to satisfy. By freeing man from fear of gods and an afterlife and by teaching him to avoid competition in politics and business it liberates him from emotional turmoil. Friendship was extremely important to Epicureans.”
“Lucretius (ca. 94-55 BC) seems not to have added any ideas to those taught by Epicurus himself. But others, like the fabulously rich general Lucullus, whose banquets became proverbial, excused their gross sensuality by references to Epicurus’ maxims. Julius Caesar proclaimed himself an Epicurean. Under the Empire Stoicism vanquished its rival and vied with Christianity, which when triumphant anathematized Epicureanism.”
“the Soviet Communists, who naturally ranked Epicurus above Plato as the greatest philosopher of antiquity.” ???
“Gassendi (1592-1655) [neo-epicurean] exerted enormous influence on both Newton and Leibniz.”
FAGGOT
“One of the most persistent myths that have gained a foot-hold in the gay movement is the belief that faggot derives from the basic meaning of <bundle of sticks used to light a fire>, with the historical commentary that when witches were burned at the stake, <only presumed male homosexuals were considered low enough to help kindle the fires>.
The English word has in fact three forms: faggot, attested by the Oxford English Dictionary from circa 1300; fadge, attested from 1588; and faggald, which the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue first records from 1375. The first and second forms have the additional meaning <fat, slovenly woman> which according to the English Dialect Dictionary survived into the 19th century in the folk speech of England.
The homosexual sense of the term, unknown in England itself, appears for the first time in America in a vocabulary of criminal slang printed in Portland, Oregon in 1914, with the example <All the fagots (sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight>. The apocopated (clipped) form fag then arose by virtue of the tendency of American colloquial speech to create words of one syllable; the first quotation is from the book by Neis Anderson, The Hobo (1923): <Fairies or Fags are men or boys who exploit sex for profit.> The short form thus also has no connection with British fag as attested from the 19th century (for example, in the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays) in the sense of <public school boy who performs menial tasks for an upper-classman>.
In American slang faggot/fag usurped the semantic role of bugger in British usage, with its connotations of extreme hostility and contempt bordering on death wishes. In more recent decades it has become the term of abuse par excellence in the mouths of heterosexuals, often just as an insult aimed at another male’s alleged want of masculinity or courage, rather than implying a sexual role or orientation.
The ultimate origin of the word is a Germanic term represented by the Norwegian dialect words fagg, <bundle, heap>, alongside bagge, <obese, clumsy creature> (chiefly of animals). From the latter are derived such Romance words as French bagasse and ltalian bagascia, <prostitute>, whence the parallel derivative bagascione whose meaning matches that of American English faggot/fag, while Catalan bagassejar signifies to faggot, <to frequent the company of loose women>.
The final proof that faggot cannot have originated in the burning of witches at the stake is that in English law both witchcraft and buggery were punishable by hanging, and that in the reign of the homosexual monarch James I the execution of heretics came to an end, so that by the time American English gave the word its new meaning there cannot have been in the popular mind even the faintest remnant of the complex of ideas credited to the term in the contemporary myth. It is purely and simply an Americanism of the 20th century.
Given the fact that the term faggot cannot refer to burning at the stake, why does the myth continue to enjoy popularity in the gay movement? On the conscious level it serves as a device with which to attack the medieval church, by extension Christianity in toto, and finally all authority. On another level, it may linger as a <myth of origins>, a kind of collective masochistic ritual that willingly identifies the homosexual as victim.”
FASCISM
“The term fascism derives from fasces, the bundles of rods carried by the lictors of ancient Rome to symbolize the unity of classes in the Republic. Fascism is the authoritarian movement that arose in Italy in the wake of World War I. Although Hitler admired its founder Mussolini and imitated him at first – the term Führer is modeled on Duce – one cannot simply equate his more radical National Socialist movement with the Italian phenomenon, as writers of the left are prone to do.”
“Not essentially racist like Nazism or anti-bourgeois like Marxism, Italian fascism, with its corporative binding of workers and employers, has been less consistently hostile to homosexuals.”
“Mussolini also argued in a discussion of a draft penal code in 1930 that because Italians, being virile, were not homosexuals, Italy needed no law banning homosexual acts, which he believed only degenerate foreigners to practice. A ban would only frighten such tourists away, and Italy needed the money they spent to improve its balance of payments and shore up its sagging economy. Napoléon had promulgated his code, which did not penalize homosexual acts between consenting adults, in northern Italy in 1810, and thus decriminalized sodomy. It had already been decriminalized in Tuscany by Grand Duke Leopold, the enlightened brother of Joseph II. The Albertine Code of 1837 for Piedmont-Sardinia was extended to all its dominions after the House of Savoy created a united Kingdom of Italy, a task completed in 1870. Pervasive was the influence of the jurist MarquisCesare Beccaria, who argued against cruel and unusual punishments and against all offenses motivated by religious superstition and fanaticism.
Thus Italy with its age-old <Mediterranean homosexuality> in which women were protected, almost secluded – upper-class girls at least in the South being accompanied in public by dueñas –, had like other Latin countries allowed female prostitution and closed its eyes to homosexuality. As such it had became the playground par excellence during the grand tour of the English milords, and also the refuge of exiles and émigrés from the criminal sanctions of the Anglo-American common law and the Prussian code. The Prussian Code was extended in 1871-72 to the North and then South German territories incorporated in the Reich, including ones where the Code Napoleon had prevailed in the early part of the century. Byron and John Addington Symonds took refuge in Italy, as William Beckford did in Portugal and Oscar Wilde in Paris. Friedrich Alfred Krupp’s playground was in Capri, Thomas Mann’s in Venice, and Count Adelswárd Fersen’s also in Capri.”
“Personally, Mussolini was somewhat of a sexual acrobat, in that he had a succession of mistresses and often took time out in the office to have sex with one or another of his secretaries.”
“Believing in military strength through numbers, Mussolini did more than Hitler to subsidize parents of numerous progeny, thus hoping to increase Italy’s population from 40 to 60 million.”
“However, after he formed the Rome-Berlin Axis with Hitler in 1936, Mussolini began, under Nazi influence, to persecute homosexuals and to promulgate anti-Semitic decrees in 1938 and 1939, though these were laxly enforced, and permitted exceptions, such as veterans of World War I.”
“Oppressing homosexuals more than Jews, Mussolini’s regime rounded up and imprisoned a substantial number, a procedure poignantly depicted in Ettore Scola’s excellent film A Special Day (1977).” “Even exclusive homosexuals, if they were not unlucky, survived fascism unscathed.”
“Admiral Horthy seized control of Hungary from the communist Bela Kun in 1920 and as Regent unleashed a <White Terror> largely directed against Jews, two years before Mussolini marched on Rome with his black-shirts.”
“Fascists were less consistent and more divided among themselves than even communists or Nazis. After all, they had no sacred text like Das Kapital or Mein Kampf, and further were not ruling only a single powerful country.” “Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in Central Europe to survive this period, simply continued the Austrian penal code of 1852 that penalized both male and female homosexuality.”
“The great homosexual poet Federico García Lorca was shot by a death squad near Granada in 1936; it is said that they fired the bullets through his backside to <make the punishment fit the crime>.” “More than Mussolini, Franco resisted the theories and pressures of Hitler, whom he regarded as a despicable (and perhaps deranged) upstart. It has been argued that Franco was not a fascist at all and that he actually maintained a pro-Jewish policy, granting asylum to refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe and attempting to protect Sephardic Jews in the Balkan countries. In his last years he in fact liberalized Spain to a certain extent, allowing among other things a resurgence of gay bars, baths, and culture even before the accession of King Juan Carlos upon his death in 1975. Today Spain is one of the freest countries in Europe.”
“Naturally Latins, like Slavs, being considered inferior peoples by Hitler, did not in general espouse racism (Hitler had to make the Japanese honorary Aryans to ally with them in the Tripartite Pact of 1937), so they had no reason to think of homosexuals in his terms.”
FASCIST PERVERSION, BELIEF IN
“Fascism and National Socialism (Nazism) were originally distinct political systems, but their eventual international ties (the <Rome-Berlin axis>) led to the use of <fascist> as an umbrella term¹ by Communist writers anxious to avoid the implication that <National Socialism> was a type of socialism. Neither in Italy nor in Spain did the right-authoritarian political movements have a homosexual component. Rather it was in Weimar Germany that the right-wing paramilitary groups which constituted the nucleus of the later National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) attracted a considerable number of homosexuals whose erotic leanings overlapped with the male bonding of the party. This strong male bonding, in the later judgment of their own leaders, gave the Nazis a crucial advantage in their victory over the rival Social Democratic and communist formations in the early 1930s.
The most celebrated of the homosexuals in the Nazi Party of the 1920s was Ernst Rohm, whose sexual proclivities were openly denounced by left-wing propagandists, but this did not deprive him of Hitler’s confidence until the putsch of June 30, 1934, in which he and many of his homosexual comrades in arms were massacred.”
¹ Discordo, mas segue o jogo.
“theorists such as Wilhelm Reich who were opposed to homosexuality [?] could claim that the right-wing youth were <becoming more homosexual>. The victory of National Socialism at the beginning of 1933 then reinforced Communist and émigré propagandists in their resort to <fascist perversion> as a rhetorical device with which they could abuse and vilify the regime that had defeated and exiled them – and which they hoped would be transient and unstable.
In particular, the statute by which Stalin restored the criminal sanctions against homosexuality that had been omitted from the penal codes of 1922 and 1926 was officially titled the <Law of March 7, 1934> – a pointed allusion to the anniversary of the National Socialist consolidation of power one year earlier.”
“In the United States Maoists charged that the gay liberation movement of 1969 and the years following was an example of <bourgeois décadance> that would vanish once the triumph of socialism was achieved. “
Samuel Igra, Germany’s National Vice, London: Quality Press, 1945.
FILM
“Adolescent alienation was the theme of Rebel without a Cause (1955), in which, however, the delicate Sal Mineo character dies so that James Dean can be united with Natalie Wood.”
“In the book Midnight Express the hero admitted to a gay love affair in prison, but in the movie version (1978) he rejects a handsome fellow inmate’s advances.”
“Screen biographies of gay people have had similar fates. Michelangelo and Cole Porter appear as joyful heterosexuals; Oscar Wilde could not be sanitized, to be sure, but he was presented in a <tasteful> manner (3 British versions, 2 in 1960, one in 1984). Recent screen biographies have been better; the documentary on the painter Paul Cadmus (1980) is open without being sensational; Prick Up Your Ears, on the life of Joe Orton, is as frank as one can wish, though it somehow misses the core of his personality.”
“In The Third Sex (West Germany, 1959) a sophisticated older man has an entourage of teenage boys. Although this film purveys dated ideas of homosexuality, it went farther in explicitness than anything that Hollywood was able to do for over a decade. Federico Fellini’s celebrated La Dolce Vita (1960) is a multifaceted portrait of eternal decadence in chic circles in Rome.”
“One breakthrough came in 1967 when the legendary Marlon Brando portrayed a closeted homosexual army officer in John Huston’sReflections in a Golden Eye, a film which drew a <Condemned> rating from the Catholic Church.” Who gives a fuck (literally)!
“Sunday Bloody Sunday: this film was notable for the shock experienced by straight audiences at a kissing scene between Peter Finch and Murray Head. Perhaps the most notorious of the gay directors was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose Fox and His Friends (1975) deals with homosexuality and class struggle. Fassbinder’s last film was his controversial version of a Genet novel, Querelle (1982). The death of Franco created the possibility of a new openness in Spanish culture, including a number of gay films. Influenced by Luis Buñuel, Law of Desire (1986) by Pedro Almodóvar is surely a masterpiece of comic surrealism.”
“Already in the 1920s some major directors were known to be gay, including the German Friedrich W. Murnau and the Russian Sergei Eisenstein.”
“During their lifetimes Charles Laughton and Montgomery Clift had to suffer fag-baiting taunts from colleagues, while Rock Hudson remained largely untouched by public scandal until his death from AIDS in 1985. Tyrone Power and Cary Grant were decloseted after their deaths. The sexuality of others, such as Errol Flynn and James Dean, remains the subject of argument. In Germany the stage actor and film director Gustav Grundgens managed to work through the Nazi period, even though his homosexuality was known to the regime.”
“In 1969, however, hardcore porno arrived, apparently to stay. Some 50 theatres across the United States specialized in the genre, and where the authorities were willing to turn a blind eye, sexual acts took place there, stimulated by the films.”
“Much of the early production was forgettable, but in 1971, in Boys in the Sand starring Casey Donovan (Cal Culver), the director-producer Wakefield Poole achieved a rare blend of sexual explicitness and cinematographic values.”
“In the later 80s AIDS began to devastate porno-industry workers, gay and straight, and safe sex procedures became more rigorous on the set (it should be noted, however, that long before AIDS, by strict convention, pornographic film ejaculations were always conducted outside the body, so as to be graphically visible; hence film sex was always basically <safe sex>).”
PROVAVELMENTE ULTRAPASSADO: “Lesbian porno exists only as scenes within films addressed to heterosexual males, their being, thus far, no market for full-length lesbian films of this nature. A number of independent lesbian film-makers have made candid motion pictures about lesbian life, but they are not pornographic.”
Carel Rowe, The Baudelairean Cinema: A Trend Within the American Avant-Garde, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982.
FLAUBERT
“From his early years at the lycée onward, he preferred the pen to his father’s scalpel, and single-handedly edited a minor journal, the Colibri, that clumsily but clearly foretold his future talent. In Paris he read Law but never took the degree for reasons of health, and there met Maxime Du Camp, with whom he formed a close friendship. Together they traveled through Brittany and Normandy in 1847, bringing back a volume of reminiscences that was to be published only after Flaubert’s death (Par les champs et par les grèves, 1885). Between October of 1849 and May of 1851 the two traveled in Egypt and Turkey, and there Flaubert had a number of pédérastie experiences which he related in his letters to Louis Bouilhet.”
BORING FASHION: “On his return to France Flaubert shut himself up in his country house at Croisset, near Rouen. Instead of aspiring to self-discovery in the manner of the Romanticists, Flaubert sought to bury his own personality by striving for the goal of art in itself, and he devoted his entire life to the quest for its secrets. His ferocious will to be in his works <like God>, everywhere and nowhere, explains the nerve-wracking effort that went into each of his novels, in which nothing is left to the free flow of inspiration, nothing is asserted without being verified, nothing is described that has not been seen.” “This explains the multiple versions that are periodically uncovered of almost every one of his works, with the sole exception of Madame Bovary (1857), which led to his being tried for offending public decency.”
“In 1857 he traveled to Tunisia to collect material for a historical novel set in Carthage after the First Punic War. Salammbô (1862), abundantly documented, is so rich in sadistic scenes, including one of a mass child-sacrifice, that it horrified some contemporary readers.”
“In 1874 he published La tentation de saint Antoine, a prose poem of great power and imagination. His last work, Bouvard et Pécuchet (issued posthumously in 1881), is an unfinished study in male bonding.”
“Sodomy is a subject of conversation at table. You can deny it at times, but everyone starts ribbing you and you end up spilling the beans. Traveling for our own information and entrusted with a mission by the government, we regarded it as our duty to abandon ourselves to this manner of ejaculation. The occasion has not yet presented itself, but we are looking for one. The Turkish baths are where it is practiced. One rents the bath for 5 fr., including the masseurs, pipe, coffee, and linen, and takes one’s urchin into one of the rooms. – You should know that all the bath attendants are bardaches [homossexuais passivos].”
FOUCAULT
“at the end of his life he surprised the world with 2 successor volumes with a different subject matter: the management of sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome. While completing these books he was already gravely ill, a fact that may account for their turgid, sometimes repetitive presentation. In June 1984 Michel Foucault died in Paris of complications resulting from AIDS.”
O CONTINENTE SE ESMIGALHA: “Discontent with the systems of Marx and Freud and their contentious followers had nonetheless left an appetite for new <mega-theories>, which the Anglo-Saxon pragmatic tradition was unable to satisfy.”
“This concept of discontinuity was all the more welcome as the ground had been prepared by an influential American philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, whose concept of radical shifts in paradigm had been widely adopted. In vain did Foucault protest toward the end of his life that he was not the philosopher of discontinuity; he is now generally taken to be such.”
“Not since Jean-Paul Sartre had France given the world a thinker of such resonance. Yet Foucault’s work shows a number of key weaknesses. Not gifted with the patience for accumulating detail that since Aristotle has been taken to be a hallmark of the historian’s craft, he often spun elaborate theories from scanty empirical evidence. He also showed a predilection for scatter-gun concepts such as episteme, discourse, difference, and power; in seeking to explain much, these talismans make for fuzziness. Foucauldian language has had a seductive appeal for his followers, but repetition dulls the magic and banalization looms.”
FOURIER
“French Utopian philosopher and sexual radical. Fourier spent much of his life in Lyon, trapped in a business world which he hated with a passion. Disillusioned in childhood by the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the people around him, he gradually formulated an elaborate theory of how totally to transform society in a Utopian world of the future known as Harmony, in which mankind would live in large communes called Phalansteries.
Fourier hid his sexual beliefs from his contemporaries, and it was more than a century after his death before his main erotic work, Le nouveau monde amoureux, was first published. (…) Fourier did not believe that anyone under 16 had any sexual feelings, nor did he understand the psychology of sadism, pedophilia, or rape, so that his sexual theories are not entirely suitable for modem experimentation. (…) He recognized male homosexuals and lesbians as biological categories long before Krafft-Ebing created the modern concept of immutable sexual <perversions>.” “He wrote some fictional episodes in the vein of William Beckford, one of which describes the seduction of a beautiful youth by an older man.”
FRANCE
“French politics and literature have exercised an incalculable influence on other countries, from England to Quebec, from Senegal to Vietnam. Whether justified or not, a reputation for libertine hedonism clings to the country, and especially to its capital, Paris – by far the largest city of northern Europe from the 12th to the 18th centuries (when London surpassed it), making France a barometer of changing sexual mores.”
“The heavy-drinking later Merovingians, descendants of the Frankish king Merovech and his grandson Clovis, who conquered all Gaul, were barbarians who indulged their sensual appetites freely. Lack of control allowed considerable sexual license to continue into the more Christianized Carolingian period (late 8th-9th centuries), and probably to increase during the feudal anarchy that followed the Viking invasions of the 9th and 10th, but in the 11th century the church moved to regulate private conduct according to its own strict canons.”
“The term sodomia, which appears in the last decades of the 12th century [?], covered bestiality, homosexual practices, and <unnatural> heterosexual relations of all kinds.” “Popes organized the Inquisition against them and invoked the bloody Albigensian Crusade which devastated much of Languedoc, homeland of a sensual culture tinged by Moslem influences from the south. The word bougre itself survives to this day as English bugger, which in Great Britain, apart from legal usage, remains a coarse and virtually obscene expression.”
“The guilt of the Templars remains moot to this day; while some may have been involved in homosexual liaisons, the political atmosphere surrounding the investigation and the later controversy made impartial judgment impossible. A persistent fear of sexuality and a pathetic inability to stamp out its proscribed manifestations, even with periodic burning of offenders at the stake and strict regulations within the cloister, plagued medieval society to the end.”
“Henri III was celebrated for his mignons, the favorites drawn from the ranks of the petty nobility – handsome, gorgeously attired and adorned adolescents and magnificent swordsmen ready to sacrifice their lives for their sovereign. Although the king had exhibited homosexual tendencies earlier in life, these became more marked after a stay in Venice in 1574. Yet neither he nor the mignons scorned the opposite sex in their pursuit of pleasure, and there is no absolute proof that any of this circle expressed their desires genitally. Yet a whole literature of pamphlets and lampoons by Protestants and by Catholic extremists, both of whom disapproved of the king’s moderate policy, was inspired by the life of the court of Henri III until his assassination in 1589.”
“Even the entourage of Cardinal Richelieu included the Abbé Boisrobert, patron of the theatre and the arts, and founder of the French Academy, the summit of French intellectual life. His proclivities were so well known that he was nicknamed <the mayor of Sodom>, while the king who occupied the throne, Louis XIII, was surnamed <the chaste> because of his absolute indifference to the fair sex and to his wife Marie de Medici.”
“In his posthumously published novel La religieuse, Denis Diderot indicted convents as hot-houses of lesbianism.”
“The Revolution secured the release (though only for a time) of the imprisoned pansexual writer and thinker, the Marquis D.A.F. de Sade, who carried the transgressive strain in the Enlightenment to the ultimate limits of the imagination.”
“The novels of Jean Genet, a former professional thief, treated male homosexuality with a pornographic frankness and style rich in imagery unparalleled in world literature. Genet enjoyed the patronage of the dominant intellectual of the time, the heterosexual Jean-Paul Sartre, who also wrote about homosexuality in other contexts.”
“Innovations such as a computerized gay bulletin board – the Minitel – reached France, but also the tragic incursion of AIDS (in French, SIDA), spread in no small part from Haiti and the United States.”
FREE-MASONRY
“The fraternal order of Free and Accepted Masons is a male secret society having adherents throughout the world. The order is claimed to have arisen from the English and Scottish fraternities of stone-masons and cathedral builders in the late Middle Ages. The formation of a grand lodge in London in 1717 marked the beginning of the spread of free-masonry on the continent as far east as Poland and Russia. From its obscure origins free-masonry gradually evolved into a political and benevolent society that vigorously promoted the ideology of the Enlightenment, and thus came into sharp and lasting antagonism with the defenders of the Old Régime.”
“The slogan Liberty, Equality, Fraternity immortalized by the French Revolution is said to have begun in the lodges of the Martinist affiliate.”
FREUDIAN CONCEPTS
“Five aspects of Freud’s psychoanalytic work are relevant to homosexuality, though by no means have all of them been fully appreciated in the discussion of the legal and social aspects of the subject. These include: (1) the psychology of sex; (2) the etiology of paranoia; (3) psychoanalytic anthropology; (4) the psychology of religion; and (5) the origins of Judaism and Christianity. In regard to the last two the psychoanalytic profession in the United States has notably shied away from the implications of the founder’s ideas, in no small part because of its accommodation to the norms of American culture, including popular Protestant religiosity.”
“Freud pointed out that the pederast is attracted only to the male youth who has not yet lost his androgynous quality, so that it is the blend of masculine and feminine traits in the boy that arouses and attracts the adult male” “with a narcissistic starting point they seek youthful sexual partners resembling themselves, whom they then love as the mother loved them. He also determined that alleged inverts were not indifferent to female stimuli, but transferred their arousal to male objects.”
“Recent investigations have sought to confirm this insight for paranoia in male subjects only, and in all likelihood it is related not just to the phenomenon of homosexual panic but to the generally higher level of societal anxiety and legal intolerance in regard to male as opposed to female homosexuality. This would also explain why lesbianism is invisible to the unconscious: the collective male psyche experiences no threat from female homosexuality.”
“The outcome of Freud’s explorations in this direction [anthropology] was Totem and Taboo (1913), which despite the break with his Swiss colleague in that year is the most Jungian of all his works.” “While Hellenic civilization could distinguish between father-son and erastes-eromenos relationships, Biblical Judaism could not, and expanded its earlier prohibition of homosexual acts with a father or uncle to a generalized taboo. It is perhaps pertinent that pedophilia (sex with pre-pubertal children), as distinct from pederasty, usually involves members of the same family, not total strangers. Also, extending this mode of thinking, the fascination which some homosexual men have for partners of other races may be owing to the unconscious guilt that still adheres to a sexual relationship with anyone who could be even remotely related to them, which is to say a member of the same ethnic or racial group.” “Totemism and exogamy are the two halves of the familiar Oedipus complex, the attraction to the mother and the death wishes against the rival father.” “Freud then appealed to Robertson Smith’s writings on sacrifice and sacrificial feasts in which the totem is ceremonially slain and eaten, thus reenacting the original deed. The rite is followed by mourning and then by triumphant rejoicing and wild excesses –, the events serve to perpetuate the community and its identity with the ancestor. After thousands of years of religious evolution the totem became a god, and the complicated story of the various religions begins. This work of Freud’s has been condemned by anthropologists and other specialists, yet it may throw considerable light on aspects of Judeo-Christian myth and legend that cluster around the rivalry of the father and his adolescent son – in which the homosexual aggressor is, ostensibly, seeking to destroy the masculinity of his rival by <using him as a woman>.”
“Obsessional neurosis is a pathological counterpart of religion, while religion may be styled a collective obsessional neurosis.”
“From the secondary sources that he had read, Freud surmised that the lawgiver Moses was an Egyptian who had opted for exile after religious counter-revolution had undone the reforms of the first monotheist, Akhenaten. His Egyptian retinue became the Levites, the elite of the new religious community which received its law code, not from him, but from the Midianite priest of a volcanic deity, Jahweh, at the shrine of Kadesh Barnea. This last site, amusingly enough, presumably took its name from the bevy of male and female cult prostitutes who ministered at its shrine. The Biblical Moses is a fusion of the two historic figures.
Freud also, on the basis of a book published by the German Semiticist Ernst Sellin, posited the death of Moses in an uprising caused by his autocratic rule and apodictic pronouncements. The whole notion was based upon a reinterpretation of some passages in the book of Hosea, which because of its early and poetic character, not to speak of the problems of textual transmission, poses enormous difficulties even for the expert.” “Judaism is a religion of the father, Christianity a religion of the son, whose death on the cross and the institution of the eucharist are the last stage in the evolution that began with the slaying and eating of the totem animal by the primal horde.”
“The particular emphasis with which Freud contradicted Magnus Hirschfeld’s notion that homosexuals were a biological third sex led – together with a tendency (not confined to psychoanalysis) to deny the constitutional bases of behavior – to the assertion that homosexuality was purely the result of <fixation> in an infantile stage of sexual development provoked by the action or inaction of the parents. (…) Thus in the popular mind the belief that homosexuality is somehow a failure of psychological development has its underpinning in the Freudian concepts.”
“his legacy has quietly worked in favor of toleration”
FRIENDSHIP, FEMALE ROMANTIC
“When Sarah’s family discovered that she had run off with a woman instead of a man, they were relieved – her reputation would not suffer any irreparable harm (as it would have had her accomplice been male). Her relative Mrs. Tighe observed, <Sarah’s conduct, though it has an appearance of imprudence, is I am sure void of serious impropriety. There were no gentlemen concerned, nor does it appear to be anything more than a scheme of Romantic Friendship.> The English, during the second half of the 18th century, prized sensibility, faithfulness, and devotion in a woman, but forbade her significant contact with the opposite sex before she was betrothed. It was reasoned, apparently, that young women could practice these sentiments on each other so that when they were ready for marriage they would have perfected themselves in those areas. It is doubtful that women viewed their own romantic friendships in such a way, but – if we can place any credence in 18th century English fiction as a true reflection of that society – men did. Because romantic friendship between women served men’s self-interest in their view, it was permitted and even socially encouraged. The attitude of Charlotte Lennox’s hero in Euphemia (1790) is typical. Maria Harley’s uncle chides her for her great love for Euphemia and her obstinate grief when Euphemia leaves for America, and he points out that her fiancé <has reason to be jealous of a friendship that leaves him but second place in Maria’s affection>; but the fiancé responds, <Miss Harley’s sensibility on this occasion is the foundation of all my hopes. From a heart so capable of a sincere attachment, the man who is so happy as to be her choice may expect all the refinements of a delicate passion, with all the permanence of a generous friendship.>”
“The most complete fictional blueprint for conducting a romantic friendship is Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1762), a novel which went through four editions by 1778.”
“Mrs. Delany’s description of her own first love (in The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany, ed. Sara L. Woolsey) is typical of what numerous autobiographies, diaries, letters, and novels of the period contained. As a young woman, she formed a passionate attachment to a clergyman’s daughter, whom she admired for her <uncommon genius … intrepid spirit … extraordinary understanding, lively imagination, and humane disposition.> They shared <secret talk> and <whispers> together –, they wrote to one another every day, and met in the fields between their fathers’ houses at every opportunity. <We thought that day tedious,> Mrs. Delany wrote years later, <that we did not meet, and had many stolen interviews>. Typical of many youthful romantic friendships, it did not last long (at the age of 17, Mrs. Delany was given in marriage to an old man), but it provided fuel for the imagination which idealized the possibilities of what such a relationship might be like without the impingement of cold marital reality. Because of such girlhood intimacies (which were often cut off in an untimely manner), most women would have understood when those attachments were compared with heterosexual love by the female characters in 18th century novels, and were considered, as Lucy says in William Hayley’s The Young Widow, <infinitely more valuable>. They would have had their own frame of reference when in those novels, women adopted the David and Jonathan story for themselves and swore that they felt for each other (again as Lucy says) <a love passing the Love of Men>, or proclaimed as does Anne Hughes, the author of Henry and Isabella (1788), that such friendships are <more sweet, interesting, and to complete all, lasting, than any other which we can ever hope to possess; and were a just account of anxiety and satisfaction to be made out, would, it is possible, in the eye of rational estimation, far exceed the so-much boasted pleasure of love.>”
“Saint Mery, who recorded his observations of his 1793-1798 journey, was shocked by the <unlimited liberty> which American young ladies seemed to enjoy, and by their ostensible lack of passion toward men. The combination of their independence, heterosexual passionlessness, and intimacy with each other could have meant only one thing to a Frenchman
in the 1790s: that <they are not at all strangers to being willing to seek unnatural pleasures with persons of their own sex>. It is as doubtful that great masses of middle and upper-class young ladies gave themselves up to homosexuality as it is that they gave themselves up to heterosexual intercourse before marriage. But the fiction of the period corroborates that St. Mery saw American women behaving openly as though they were in love with each other. Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormand, for example, suggests that American romantic friends were very much like their English counterparts.”
“But love between women, at least as it was lived in women’s fantasies, was far more consuming than the likes of Casanova could believe. Women dreamed not of erotic escapades but of a blissful life together. In such a life a woman would have choices; she would be in command of her own destiny; she would be an adult relating to another adult in a way that a heterosexual relationship with a virtual stranger (often an old or at least a much older man), arranged by a parent for consideration totally divorced from affection, would not allow her to be. Samuel Richardson permitted Miss Howe to express the yearnings of many a frustrated romantic friend when she remarked to Clarissa, <How charmingly might you and I live together and despise them all>.”
FRIENDSHIP, MALE
“For Plato, friendship is rather part of the philosopher’s quest: a link between the world of the senses in which we live and the eternal world.”
“How could the masculinity of a youth be preserved in a homosexual relationship with an older man? That was the kernel of the problem for the Greeks. For the Romans it was the perennial anxiety that a free citizen might take a passive role in a sexual relationship with a slave. Homosexuality in itself was not the problem for either: it was in the forms that homosexuality might take that the difficulty lay.”
“Homosexuality and friendship: they may well appear at first as two discrete histories, one of society and the other of sexuality. But if one tries to follow their subterranean currents in the Europe of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, one will end by finding oneself drawn into writing about something larger. One will find oneself writing about power and the power not only of judges but of words.”
“Marriage itself was redefined, with implicit consequences for friendship. A society that had observed the tradition of arranged marriages between unequal partners was confronted with a need for change. Under the influence of the middle-class ideology of the 18th century, society now accepted the principle of a marriage founded upon the affinity of equals, upon love rather than family interest. In this sense husband and wife could now be friends, and friendship was no longer invested with an exclusively homo-social character. The decisive shift in this direction occurred in England, where the Industrial Revolution and the ideology of classical liberalism went hand in hand.”
“So Romanticism revived the classical model of friendship for which Hellenic antecedents could always be held up as an ideal by such homosexual admirers of antiquity as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a thinker who in Goethe’s words <felt himself born for a friendship of this kind> and <became conscious of his true self only under this form of friendship>.”
“While Ernst Röhm could boast, late in 1933, that the homoerotic component in the SA and SS had given the Nazis the crucial edge in their struggle against the Weimar system, homophobic writers could call for the suppression of all forms of overt male homosexuality and the enactment of even more punitive laws – which were in fact adopted in 1935.”
“Certain women feel more comfortable in their dealings with gay men, just because they know that they do not have to be constantly on guard against sexual aggression, but can have close relationships, both social and professional, that attain high levels of creativity and imagination.”
“The use of friend or friendship as an euphemism for the homosexual partner (lover) and the liaison itself persists. Recently the compilers of newspaper obituary columns have taken to describing the lifelong companion of a deceased homosexual as <his friend>, in contexts where a heterosexual would be survived by the spouse and children.” Haha
Edward Carpenter, Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship (1902)
GAMES, GAY
“Anyone was allowed to compete regardless of race, sex, age, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, or athletic ability. In keeping with the Masters Movement in sports, athletes competed with others in their own age group. The track and field and swimming events were officially sanctioned by their respective national masters programs. Athletes participated, not as representatives of their respective countries, but as individuals on behalf of cities and towns. There were no minimum qualifying standards in any events.”
“The organizers of the Gay Games have experienced considerable legal difficulties. Before the 1982 Gay Games, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) filed a court action against the organizers of the Gay Games, which were going to be called the Gay Olympic Games. In 1978, the United States Congress passed the Amateur Sports Act which, among other things, granted the USOC exclusive use of the word Olympic. Although the USOC had allowed the Rat Olympics, Police Olympics, and Dog Olympics, it took exception to the term Gay Olympic Games. Two years later, the USOC continued its harassment of the Gay Games and filed suit to recover legal fees in the amount of $96,600.”
GAY
“The word gay (though not its 3 later slang meanings) stems from the Old Provençal gai, <high spirited, mirthful>. A derivation of this term in turn from the Old High German gahi, <impetuous> (cf. modem German jah, <sudden>), though attractive at first sight, seems unlikely. Gai was a favorite expression among the troubadours, who came to speak of their intricate art of poetry as gai saber, <gay knowledge>. Despite assertions to the contrary, none of these uses reveals any particular sexual content. In so far as the word gay or gai has acquired a sexual meaning in Romance languages, as it has very recently, this connotation is entirely owing to the influence of the American homosexual liberation movement as a component of the American popular culture that has swamped the non-Communist world.
Beginning in the 17th century, the English word gay began to connote the conduct of a playboy or dashing man about town, whose behavior was not always strictly moral but not totally depraved either; hence the popularity of such expressions as <gay lothario>, <gay deceiver>, and <gay blade>. Applied to women in the 19th century (or perhaps somewhat before), it came to mean <of loose morals; a prostitute>: <As soon as a woman has ostensibly lost her reputation we, with grim inappositeness, call her gay> (Sunday Times, London, 1868).”
“The expansion of the term to mean homosexual man constitutes a tertiary stage of modification, the sequence being lothario, then female prostitute, then homosexual man.”
“The word (and its equivalents in other European languages) is attested in the sense of <belonging to the demimonde> or <given to illicit sexual pleasures>, even specifically to prostitution, but nowhere with the special homosexual sense that is reinforced by the antonym straight, which in the sense of heterosexual was known exclusively in the gay subculture until quite recently.”
“Although it has not been found in print before 1933 (when it appears in Noel Ersine’s Dictionary of Underworld Slang as gay cat, <a homosexual boy>), it is safe to assume that the usage must have been circulating orally in the United States for a decade or more. (As Jack London explains in The Road of 1907, gay cat originally meant – or so he thought – an apprentice hobo, without reference to sexual orientation.) In 1955 the English journalist Peter Wildblood defined gay as <an American euphemism for homosexual>, at the same time conceding that it had made inroads in Britain. Grammatically, the word is an adjective, and there has been some resistance to the use of gay, gays as nouns, but this opposition seems to be fading.”
“Many lesbian organizations now reject the term gay, restricting it to men, hence the spread of such binary phrases as <gay and lesbian> and <lesbian and gay people>.”
GAY STUDIES
“Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895), whose Forschungen zur mannmännhchen Liebe (Researches on Love between Males), published from 1864 to 1870, ranged in an encyclopedic manner over the history, literature, and ethnography of past and present.”
“In England John Addington Symonds may be considered the first gay scholar, since he composed two privately printed works, A Problem in Greek Ethics and A Problem in Modern Ethics, the latter of which introduced to the English-speaking world the recent findings of continental psychiatrists and the new vision of Ulrichs and Walt Whitman. Symonds was also a major contributor to the first edition of Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion (German 1896, English 1897). At the same time the American university president Andrew Dickson White quietly inserted into his 2-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) a comprehensive analysis and demolition of the Sodom legend. In the same year Marc-André Raffalovich published his Uranisme et unisexualité (Uranism and unisexuality), with copious bibliographical and literary material, some from German authors of the 19th century, which he supplemented at intervals in a series of articles in the Archives d’anthropologie criminelle down to World War I.”
“psychoanalytic biographies of famous homosexuals, a genre initiated by Freud’s philologically rather weak Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci (A Childhood Reminiscence of Leonardo da Vinci; 1910).”
“The interest of geneticists in twin studies led to some papers on the sexual orientation of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, a field pioneered by Franz Kallmann. While certain issues continue to be disputed, the study of monozygotic twin pairs has revealed concordances as marked as those for intelligence and other character traits, albeit with a complexity in the developmental aspect of the personality that earlier thinkers had not fully appreciated.”
“black studies and women’s studies are by their very nature interdisciplinary. In 1976, for example, ONE Institute, the independent Los Angeles homophile education foundation, articulated the subject in the following fields: anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, education, medicine and biology, psychiatry, law and its enforcement, military, religion and ethics, biography and autobiography, literature and the arts, the homophile movement, and transvestism and transsexualism (An Annotated Bibliography of Homosexuality, New York, 1976).”
“In anthropology there is a continuing temptation to ethno-romanticism, that is over-idealizing the exotic culture one is studying, viewing it as natural, non-repressive, organic, and so forth.”
GENET, JEAN
“The homosexuality of Genet’s characters is explicit, and the scenes of love-making attain the limit of physical and psychological detail, recounted in the argot of the French criminal underworld (which largely defies English translation) and in a style once possible only in pornographic novels sold <under the counter>. If the homosexuality of the heroes of Genet’s novels has a strong sado-masochistic component, their love is depicted with honesty and tenderness. The plot construction borders on free association, while the sordid and brutal aspects of male love are not suppressed or denied.” “Since French writing shapes literary trends throughout the world, the influence of Genet on future depictions of homosexual experience is likely to mount.”
GERMANY
“In the Passion of Saint Pelagius composed in Latin by Roswitha (Hrotswith) of Gandersheim, there is the story of the son of the king of Galicia in Spain who, captured by the Moslem invaders, was approached by Abderrahman with offers of the highest honors if he would submit to his pederastic advances but violently refused – at the cost of his life. The Latin poem on Lantfrid and Cobbo relates the love of two men, one homosexual, the other bisexual. A High German version of Solomon and Mololf composed about 1190 makes an allusion to sodomy, while the Eneid of Heinrich von Veldeke has the mother of Lavinia, the daughter of King Latinus of Italy accuse Aeneas of being a notorious sodomite to dissuade her from marrying him. Moriz von Craun, a verse narrative of ca. 1200, makes the emperor Nero the archetype of the mad sodomite, who even wishes to give birth to a child. In his rhymed Flauenbuch (1257), Ulrich von Lichtenstein presents a debate between a knight and a lady, in which the latter accuses men of preferring hunting, drinking, and boy-love to the service of women. About the same time the Austrian poet Der Strieker used references to Sodom and Gomorrah in his negative condemnation.”
“Prussia was the first German state that in 1794 abolished the death penalty for sodomy and replaced it with imprisonment and flogging. After 1810 many states (including Bavaria, Württemberg, and Hannover) followed the model of the Code Napoleon in France and introduced complete impunity for homosexual acts, a policy reversed in 1871 in favor of the anti-homosexual Paragraph 175 of the uniform Imperial Penal Code.”
“In German poetry, however, the homosexual theme was rare before the 19th century. Friendship between men is, to be sure, a frequent subject of poetry (especially in Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Wilhelm Heinse, even in Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and others), but the amicable feelings depicted in them are clearly demarcated from the longing of pederasts and sodomites, and the boundary between friendship and sexuality is seldom if ever crossed (though possibly in F.W.B. von Ramdohr, Venus Urania, 1798, Part 2, pp. 103ff.)”
“The flowering of a gay movement in the first third of the 20th century was the outstanding feature that set the homosexuals in Germany apart from those in other countries.”
“The campaign for the abolition of Paragraph 175 provoked an enormous literature of books, pamphlets, and articles pro and con, so extensive that by 1914 the criminologist Hans Gross could write that everything that anyone could ever have to say on the subject had by then appeared in print. There was also a profusion of gay and lesbian poetry, short stories, and novels. Such mainstream authors as Hans Henny Jahnn, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann, Anna Elisabet Weihrauch, and Christa Winsloe also discussed the theme. This cultural efflorescence lent substance to the claim of Weimar Germany to be a land of cultural innovation, though to be sure the Republic had its dark side as well.”
“If until then Germany was probably unique and unparalleled in the world in terms of governmental liberalism and of opportunities for homosexual life, then the same was true in reverse for the Nazi era from 1933 to 1945: at least 10,000 homosexual men, stigmatized with the pink triangle, were confined in German concentration camps under the Holocaust during those 12 years, and many of them were killed.”
“In West Germany after about 1948 conditions returned to what they had been before 1933. Although the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 remained on the books, homosexual organizations, bars, and gay magazines were tolerated in many West German cities and in West Berlin. In East Germany, to be sure, only the milder pre-1933 version of paragraph 175 was in force, but homosexual life was subject to restrictions on the part of the state and the police, so that gay men and lesbians had scarcely any opportunity to organize and express their views freely.”
Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle, New York: Henry Holt, 1986.
GIDE, ANDRÉ
“In 1891 Gide met Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant aesthete, who set about ridding him of his inhibitions – with seductive grace. Gide’s first really striking work of moral <subversion> was Les Nourritures terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth, 1897), a set of lyrical exhortations to a fictional youth, Nathanaël, who is urged to free himself of the Christian sense of sin and cultivate the life of the senses with sincerity and independence. During the political turmoil of the 1930s Gide returned to the same themes and stylistic manners in Les nouvelles nourritures (1935).”
“In 1895 he married his cousin, Madeleine Rondeaux, and suffered an acute conflict between her strict Christian values and his own yearning for self-liberation, together with his awakening homosexual drives. The never-ending battle within himself between the puritan and the pagan, the Biblical and the Nietzschean, caused his intellect to oscillate between two poles that are reflected in his succeeding books. In Les Caves du Vatican (The Vatican Cellars, 1914), the hero, Lafcadio, <lives dangerously> according to the Gidean formula and commits a seemingly senseless murder as a psychologically liberating <gratuitous act>. A further series of short novels have an ironic structure dominated by the viewpoint of a single character, while his major novel, Les Fauxmonnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1926) has a Chinese-box like structure meant to reflect the disorder and complexity of real life.”
“Limited in scope as they were, Gide’s four dialogues constituted a remarkable achievement for their time by blending personal experience, the French literary mode of detached presentation of abnormal behavior, the traditional appeal to ancient Greece, and the then quite young science of ethology – the comparative study of the behavior of species lower on the evolutionary scale.”
Gide, Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (Back from the USSR, 1936)
GILGAMESH
“This Mesopotamian figure ranks as the first tragic hero in world literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh has survived in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite versions that go back to the 3rd millennium before our era. Lost from sight until the decipherment of the cuneiform script retrieved the literatures of early Mesopotamia, the epic is a blend of pure adventure, morality, and tragedy. Only the final version, that of Assurbanipal’s library in Nineveh, has survived in virtually complete form, but all the episodes in the cycle existed as separate poems in Sumerian. The setting of the story is the 3rd millennium, and the original language was Sumerian, the Paleoeurasian speech of the first literate civilization of Mesopotamia, which continued like Latin to be copied as a dead language of past culture even after it was displaced by the Eastern Semitic Akkadian.”
“Gilgamesh is announced at the outset as a hero: two-thirds god and one-third man, endowed by the gods with strength, with beauty, with wisdom. His sexual demands upon the people of Uruk are insatiable: <No son is left with his father, for Gilgamesh takes them all . . . His lust leaves no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior’s daughter nor the wife of the noble.> In reply to their complaints Aruru, the goddess of creation, forms Enkidu out of clay. <His body was rough, he had long hair like a woman’s. He was innocent of mankind; he knew not the cultivated land.> To tame the wild man a harlot offers her services, <she made herself naked and welcomed his eagerness, she incited the savage to love and taught him the woman’s art.> At the conclusion, the transforming power of eros has humanized him; the wild animals flee from him, sensing that as a civilized man he is no longer one of them. The metamorphosis from the subhuman and savage to his new self proves strikingly how love is the force behind civilization.”
“Gilgamesh has two dreams with symbolism which presages the homoerotic relationship which the gods have planned for him and the challenger Enkidu. In the Akkadian text there are puns on the words lusru, <ball (of fire), meteorite>, andiezru, <male with curled hair>, the counterpart of the harlot, and on hassinu, <axe>, and assinu, <male prostitute>. Gilgamesh’s superior energy and wisdom set him apart from others and make him lonely; he needs a male companion who can be his intimate and his equal at the same time, while their male bond stimulates and inspires them to action. After a wrestling match between Enkidu and Gilgamesh in which the latter triumphs, the two become comrades. Their erotic drive is not lost, but rather transformed and directed to higher objects; it leads to a homoerotic relationship that entails the rejection of Ishtar, the goddess of love. A liaison of this kind is not contingent on the physical beauty of the lover, it endures until death. Gilgamesh himself abandons his earlier oppressive conduct toward Uruk and comes to behave like a virtuous ruler who pursues the noble goals of fame and immortality through great deeds. But a dream warns Gilgamesh: <The father of the gods has given you kingship (but) everlasting life is not your destiny … Do not abuse this power, deal justly with your servants in the palace.>”
“To obtain the secret of everlasting life he journeys far across the sea to Utnapishtim, who tells him the Babylonian version of the story of the Deluge. On his return he carries with him a flower that has the power of conferring eternal youth, but loses it to a serpent lying beside a pool and so reaches Uruk empty-handed, yet still able to engrave the tale of his journey in stone. Gilgamesh has been transformed by a love that makes him seek not the pleasures of the moment, but virtue, wisdom, and immortality, hence the motif of the epic is that male bonding is a positive ingredient of civilization itself.”
George F. Held, “Parallels between The Gilgamesh Epic and Plato’s Symposium”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 42 (1983) (artigo)
GOETHE
BIOGRAFIAS PARTE II & III: “Settling at Weimar under the patronage of the ducal heir and elected to the Privy Council, he became leader in that intellectual center, associating with Wieland, Herder, and later Schiller. His visit to Italy recorded in Italienische Reise and probably involving pederastic adventures inspired him anew as did his intimate friendship with Schiller. Even after he married in 1806 he continued his frequent love affairs with women. His autobiographical Wilhelm Meister, a Bildungsroman or novel of character formation [probably boring…], and the second part of Faust (in 1832), exalted his reputation further, although he was already first in German literature. The non-exhaustive Weimar edition of his works extends to over 130 volumes.”
Knaben hebt ich wohl auch, doch
lieber sind mir die Mädchen,
Hab ich als Mädchen sie sätt, dient
sie als Knabe mir noch.
“If I have had enough of one as a girl, she still serves me as a boy.”
“In the play Egmont (1788) the hero’s enemy Alba is embarrassed by his son’s intense emotional bonding with Egmont. The figure of Mignon, the waif girl in Wilhelm Meister, could be androgynous. In his Travels in Switzerland [DV] he waxed rapturous over the sight of a nude comrade bathing in the lake, and in the West Eastern Divan (1819, enlarged edition, 1827), he used the pretext of being inspired by Persian poetry to allude to the <pure> love which a handsome cupbearer evokes from his master (sec. 9).”
GREECE, ANCIENT
“Paiderasteia, or the love of an adult male for an adolescent boy, was invested with a particular aura of idealism and integrated firmly into the social fabric. The erastes or lover was a free male citizen, often a member of the upper social strata, and the eromenos or beloved was a youth between 12 and 17, occasionally somewhat older. Pedophilia, in the sense of erotic interest in young children, was unknown to the Greeks and the practice never approved by them. An interesting question, however, is what was the average age of puberty for ancient Greek boys? For some men (the philobupais type), the boy remained attractive after the growth of the first beard, for most he was not – exactly as with the modern pederast.”
“It formed part of the process of initiation of the adolescent into the society of adult males, of his apprenticeship in the arts of the hunter and warrior. The attachment of the lover to his boy eroticized the process of learning, making it less arduous and more pleasurable, while reinforcing the bond between the mentor and his pupil.”
“a biological universal – the physical beauty and grace of the adolescent that invest him with an androgynous quality soon lost when he reaches adulthood.”
“The achievements of their own history necessarily rested upon the legacy of 3,000 years of cultural evolution in the Semitic and Hamitic nations. In technology and material culture they – and their successor peoples – never went far beyond the accomplishments of the non-Indo-European civilizations of the East. It was in the realm of theory and philosophy that the Greeks innovated – and created a new model of the state and society, a new conception of truth and justice that were the foundations of Western civilization.”
“Sir Francis Galton calculated in the late 19th century that in the space of 200 years the population of Athens – a mere 45,000 adult male citizens [número controverso] – had produced 14 of the 100 greatest men of all time. This legacy – the <Greek miracle> – owed no small part of its splendor to the pederastic ethos that underlay its educational system and its civic ideal.”
“Marriage and fatherhood were part of the life cycle of duties for which the initiation and training prepared the eromenos. Needless to say, family life did not hinder a male from pursuing boys or frequenting the geisha-like hetairai. Down to the 4th century BC, however, the really intense and reciprocal passion that the modern world calls romantic love was reserved for relationships between males. Only in the Hellenistic period (after 323 BC) was the additional possibility of love between man and wife recognized.”
A INSÂNIA E O RANCOR DO MESTRE: “The misinterpretations have been reinforced by the strictures of the elderly Plato in the Laws, where an element of resentment toward the young and of embitterment at his own failures and disappointments as a teacher seems to have been at work. This text, however it may anticipate later judeo-Christian attitudes and practices, was never typical of Greek thought on the subject. The evidence of the classical authors shows that as late as the early 3rd century of our era the Greeks accepted pederasty non-chalantly as part of the sexual order, without condemnation or apprehension.”
“The Greeks knew nothing of the Book of Leviticus, cared nothing for the injunctions it contained, and scarcely even heard of the religious community for which it was meant down to the beginning of the Hellenistic era, when Judea was incorporated into the empire of Alexander the Great. On the other hand,there is evidence that in the Zoroastrian religion pederasty was ascribed to a demonic inventor and regarded as an inexpiable sin, as a vice of the Georgians, the Caucasian neighbors of the Persians – just as the Israelites identified homosexual practices with the religion of the heathen Canaanites whose land they coveted and invaded. However, the antagonism between the Greeks and the Persians precluded any adoption of the beliefs and customs of the <evil empire> – against which they won their legendary victories. The Greek spirit – of which pederasty was a vital component – stood guard over the cradle of Western civilization against the encroachments of Persian despotism. Only on the eastern periphery of the Hellenic world – where Greeks lived as subject peoples under Persian rule – could the Zoroastrian beliefs gain a foothold.”
“Oral-genital sexuality seems not to have been popular, but this was probably for hygienic reasons specific to the ancient world.”
“The career of Sappho suggests that lesbian relations in ancient Greece took the same pattern, that is to say, they were corophile – between adult women and adolescent girls who were receiving their own initiation into the arts of womanhood. But the paucity of evidence makes it difficult to assay the incidence of the phenomenon, especially as Greek sexual mores were entirely androcentric – everything was seen from the standpoint of the adult male and free citizen. The subordinate status of women and children was taken for granted, and the effeminate man was the object of ridicule if not contempt, as can be seen in the plays of Aristophanes and his older contemporary Cratinus.”
“It is true that the more abstract thinking of the Greeks ultimately recognized the parallel between male and female homosexuality, beginning with a passage in Plato’s Laws (636bc) in which both are stigmatized as <against nature> – a concept which the Semitic mind, incidentally, lacked until it was adopted from the Greek authors translated in the Middle Ages.”
“Toward the end of the 2nd millennium the Mycenean era closed with a series of disasters, both natural catastrophes and wars – of which the Trojan war sung by Homer was an episode. During this period the Dorians invaded Greece, blending with the older stocks. One landmark paper on Greek pederasty, Erich Bethe’s article of 1907, ascribed pederasty to the military culture of the Dorian conquerors, an innovation ostensibly reflected in the greater prominence of the institution among the Dorian city-states of history.”
“The sexual lives of the Greeks were free of ritualistic taboos, but enacted in a context of comrade simplified in the devotion of Achilles and Patroclus, which foreshadowed the pederastic ideal of the Golden Age. The lyric poetry composed in the dawn of Greek literature was rich in allusions to male love, between gods and between mortals.”
“In a mere 4 centuries Greek civilization had matured into a force that intellectually and militarily dominated the world – and laid the foundations not just for Western culture, but for the entire global meta-system of today. What followed was the Hellenistic era, in which Greek thought confronted the traditions of the peoples of the east with whom the colonists in the new cities founded in Egypt and Syria mingled. The emergence of huge bureaucratic monarchies effectively crushed the independence of the city-states, eroding the base of the pederastic institution with its emphasis on civic initiative. The outcome of this period, once Rome had begun its eastward expansion, was Roman civilization as a derivative culture that blended Greek and indigenous elements. Even under Roman rule the position of the Greek language was maintained, and the literary heritage of previous centuries was codified in the form in which, by and large, it has been transmitted to modern scholars and admirers.”
“For nearly 200 years scholars have argued the Homeric question: Did one, two, or many authors create the two great epic poems known as the Illiad and the Odyssey? What were the sources and techniques of composition of the author (or authors)? The current consensus favors a single author utilizing a traditional stock of legends and myths – the final redaction may have taken place as late as 640 BC. A second question arises in connection with these epic poems: Did they recognize homoerotic passion as a theme, or was this an accretion of later times?” “Homer may not have judged the details of their intimacy suitable for epic recitation, but he was not oblivious to a form of affection common to all the warrior societies of the Eastern Mediterranean in antiquity. The peculiar resonance of the Achilles-Patroclus bond probably is rooted in far older Near Eastern epic traditions, such as the liaison between Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Mesopotamian texts.”
PLATÃO CHATEADÍSSIMO: “The famous Athenian lawgiver Solon was also a poet, and in two surviving fragments (13 and 14) he speaks of pederasty as absolutely normal.”
“Despite the mutilated and fragmentary state in which Sappho’s poetry has been transmitted, she was hailed in antiquity as the <tenth Muse>, and her poetry remains one of the high points of lyric intensity in world literature. In the 19th century philologists tried to reconcile her with the Judeo-Christian tradition by dismissing the lesbian interpretation of her poems as libelous, and misinterpreting or misusing bits of biographical data to make her nothing but the strait-laced mistress of a girls’ finishing school.”
“Anacreon of Teos [Ceos?], who flourished in the mid-6th century, owes his fame to his drinking songs, texts composed for performance at the symposia, which inspired an entire genre of poetry: anacreontic.”
“Herodotus, the <Father of History>, used the data that he gathered on his
extensive travels to point up the relativism of moral norms. Among the phenomena that he reported was the Scythian institution of the Enarees, a shift in gender that puzzled the Greeks, who called it the nousos theleia or <feminine disease>, but can now be identified as akin to the shaman and the berdache/bardache of the sub-Arctic and New World cultures. Profiting from the insights of the pre-Socratic thinkers, Herodotus anticipated the findings of modern anthropology in regard to the role of culture in shaping social norms. The consequence of his relativistic standpoint was to discredit absolutist concepts of <revealed> or <natural> morality and to allow for a pluralist approach to sexual ethics.”
“Thanks to a surviving oration of Aeschines, the Contra Timarchum of 346 BC, we know of the restrictions that Athenian law placed on the homosexual activity of male citizens: the male who put his body in the power of another by prostituting himself incurred atimia or infamy, the gymnasia anathose who had authority over youth were subject to legal control, and a slave could not be the lover of a free youth. There is no evidence for parallel statutes elsewhere, and certainly no indication that homosexual behavior per se was ever the object of legal prohibition, or more stringently regulated than heterosexual, which had its own juridical norms.”
“In the writings of Plato and Xenophon, Socrates basks in a strongly homophile ambiance, as his auditors are exclusively male, even if he was no stranger to heterosexuality and had a wife named Xanthippe who has come down in history as the type of the shrewish wife. His chief disciple, Plato (ca. 429-347 BC), whose thought cannot easily be disentangled from that of his teacher, never married, and left a record of ambivalence toward sexuality and homosexuality in particular that is one of the problematic sides of his thinking. His influence on Western civilization has been incalculable. One of the ironies of history is that the atypical hostility to pederasty in the elderly Plato, probably reflecting both personal resentment and envy and the decline of the institution in the 4th century (while anticipating later <puritan> attitudes), was often received with enthusiasm in later centuries, becoming a Hellenic source of Christian homophobia.” “he inculcated the notion of sexual activity as ignoble and demeaning, which was integrated with the absolute <purity> of biblical Judaic ascetic ideal of complete asexuality which was to have fateful consequences for homosexuals in later centuries. A completely negative approach to pederasty emerges in one of his last works, the Laws, the product of the pessimism of old age disappointed by Athenian democracy and the failure of his ambitions at statecraft in Sicily. In the 1st book Plato calls homosexual acts <against nature> (para physin) because they do not lead to procreation, and in the 8th book (836b-839a) he proposes that homosexual activity can be repressed by law and by constant and unrelenting defamation, likening this procedure to the incest taboo. The designation of homosexual acts as <contrary to nature> found its way into the New Testament in a text that intertwined Judaic myth with Hellenic reasoning, Romans 1:18-32. This passage argues that <the wrath of God is revealed from heaven> in the form of the rain of water that drowned the Watchers and their human paramours and the rain of fire that obliterated the homosexual denizens of Sodom and Gomorrah. Later Christian thinkers were to insist that the morality of sexual acts was coterminous with procreation, and that any non-procreative gratification was <contrary to nature>, but this view never held sway in pagan antiquity, so that Plato himself cannot be charged with the tragic aftermath of this belief and the attempt to impose it upon the entire population by penal sanctions and by ostracism. The attempt of modern Christian historians to prove that Plato’s idiosyncratic later attitude corresponded to the mores of Athenian society, or of Greece as a whole, is unfounded.
Plato was succeeded by the almost equally influential Aristotle (384-322 BC), who sought to correct some of the imbalances in his teacher’s work and bring it more in line with experience.” “In the Nicomachean Ethics (1148b) he undertook to differentiate two types of homosexual inclination, one innate or constitutionally determined (<by nature>) and one acquired from having been sexually abused (<by habit>). He stated categorically that no fault attached to behavior that flowed from the nature of the subject (thereby contradicting Plato’s assertion that homosexuality per se was unnatural), while in the second type some moral fault could be imputed. In the 13th century Thomas Aquinas utilized this passage in arguing that sodomy was unnatural in general, but connatural in some human beings; yet in quoting Aristotle he suppressed the mention of homosexual urges as determined <by nature>, so that Christian theology has never been able to accept the claims of gay activists that their behavior had innate causes. At all events, Aristotle can be cited in favor of the belief that in some forms, at least, homosexuality is inborn and unmodifiable.
The successors of Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, are sometimes regarded as condemnatory of pederasty, but a closer examination of their texts shows that they approved of boy-love and engaged in it, but counseled their followers to practice it in moderation and with ethical concern for the interests of the younger partner [= Epicureans].”
“the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata (IV, 26) claims that the propensity to take the passive role in anal intercourse is caused by an accumulation of semen in the rectum that stimulates activity to relieve the tension.”
“pangenesis – the belief that the semen incorporated major parts of the body in microscopic form; yet the belief that the male seed alone determines the formation of the embryo (only in the 19th century was the actual process of fertilization of the ovum observed and analyzed).”
“The Hippocratic treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places touched upon the effeminacy of the Scythians, the so-called nasos theleia, which it ascribed to climate – a view that was to recur in later centuries. The Greek adaptation of late Babylonian astrology created the individual horoscope – which included the factors determining sexual characterology. Such authors as Teucer of Babylon and Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria named the planets whose conjunctions foretold that an individual would prefer his or her own sex or would be effeminate or viraginous. Because Greek religion and law did not condemn homosexual behavior, it fell into the category of an idiosyncrasy of temperament which the heavenly bodies had ordained, not of a pathological condition that entitled the bearer to reprieve from the severity of the law. Ptolemy taught, for example, that if the influence of Venus is joined to that of Mercury, the individuals affected <become restrained in their relations with women but more passionate for boys> (Tetrabiblos, III, 13). The astrological texts make it abundantly clear that the ancients were familiar with the whole range of sexual preferences – a knowledge that psychiatry was to recoup only in modern times.”
GREECE, MODERN
“The modern Greeks derived their sexual mores, like their music, cuisine, and dress, from their overlords the Turks rather than from ancient Greece. During the long Ottoman domination from the fall of Byzantium in 1453 to 1821 and in Macedonia and Crete until 1911, and in Anatolia and Cyprus even today, the descendants of the Byzantines who did not convert to Islam preserved their language and religion. Orthodox bishops were given wide political authority over their flocks whom they helped the Turks fleece. The black (monastic) clergy were forbidden to marry, and they were often inclined to homosexuality. Greeks, like Armenians, often rose in the hierarchy at the Sublime Porte, sometimes as eunuchs. Also they served as Janissaries in the Ottoman regiments which were taught to revere the Sultan as their father, the regiment as their family, and the barracks as their home. Forbidden to marry, they engaged in sodomy, particularly pederasty, and in such Ottoman vices as opium and bribery. Along with the Armenians, Greeks became the chief merchants of the Empire, especially dominating the relatively backward Balkan provinces where they congregated in the cities and towns as Jews did in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth.”
Winckelmann e Byron morreram durante a guerra de independência da Grécia.
GREEK ANTHOLOGY
“The Greek Anthology is another name for the Palatine Anthology preserved in a unique manuscript belonging to the Palatine Library in Heidelberg. It was assembled in the 10th century by the Byzantine scholar Constantine Cephalas on the basis of 3 older collections: (1) the Garland of Meleager, edited at the beginning of the 1st century BC; (2) the Garland of Philippus, which probably dates from the reign of Augustus; and (3) the Cycle of Agathias, collected in the reign of Justinian (527-535) and including only contemporary works. But in addition Cephalas incorporated in his anthology the Musa Puerilis or <Boy-love Muse> of Strato of Sardis, who probably flourished under Hadrian (second quarter of the 2nd century). It is probable that the segregation of the poems on boy-love from the rest of the anthology (with the mistaken inclusion of some heterosexual pieces) reflects the Byzantine attitude, quite different from that of the pagan Meleager who indifferently set the two themes side by side. These poems, assembled in the 12th book of the Anthology (with others scattered elsewhere in the collection), are monuments of the passion of an adult male for an adolescent boy (never another adult, as some modern scholars have suggested; XII, 4 is the most explicit testimony on this matter) that was an integral part of Greek civilization. The verses frankly reveal the mores and values of Greek pederasty, exalting the beauty and charm of the beloved youth, sounding the intensity of the lover’s attachment, and no less skillfully describing the physical practices to which these liaisons led, so that it is not surprising that the complete set of these poems was not published until 1764.”
HANDBALLING
“This sexual practice involves the insertion of one partner’s hand – and sometimes much of the arm – into the rectum of the other. Before attempting such insertion the nails are pared and the hand lubricated. Sometimes alcohol and drags are used by the receptive partner as relaxants. This practice acquired a certain popularity – and notoriety under the name of fistfucking – in a sector of the gay male leather/S&M community in the 1970s. A few lesbians have also reported engaging in it. A medical term, apparently uncommon, has been proposed for handballing: brachiproctic eroticism.
It need scarcely be stressed that handballing is dangerous in all its variations, as puncturing of the rectal lining may lead to infection and even death. Although handballing does not directly expose the passive partner to AIDS or to sexually transmitted diseases, by scratching or scarring the rectal wall it may create tiny portals for the invasion of microbes during a subsequent penetration. With the new emphasis on safe sex in the 1980s, handballing has greatly declined, and it will probably be relegated to history as one of the temporary excesses of the sexual revolution.”
“It may be conjectured that the recent resort to the practice is due to medical knowledge of operations in which the anus is dilated, since the ordinary individual scarcely credits that such enlargement is possible or desirable. In a late Iranian version of the binding and riding of the god of darkness Ahriman by the hero Taxmoruw, the demonic figure breaks loose by means of a trick and swallows the hero; by pretending to be interested in anal intercourse the brother of Taxmoruw manages to insert his arm into Ahriman’s anus and retrieve the body from his belly. The brother’s arm – the one that entered the demon’s anus – becomes silvery white and stinking, and the brother has to exile himself voluntarily so that others will not become polluted. The myth is interesting as linking the forbidden sexual activity with stigmatization and outlawry of the perpetrator. There seems to have been no term for handballing in the Greek language, though siphniazein (from the island of Siphnos) has been defined as to <insert a finger in the anus>. This harmless practice has long been known, and it may have served as a kind of modest precedent.”
HELIOGABALUS / ELAGABALUS
O imperador teria vivido apenas 18 anos – como regente, 4!
“he reigned in a style of luxury and effeminacy unprecedented even in the history of Rome. He sent out agents to comb the city for particularly well-hung partners for his couch, whom he made his advisers and ministers. His life was an endless search for pleasure of every kind, and he had his body depilated so that he could arouse the lusts of the greatest number. His extant portraits on coins suggest a sensual, even African type evolving through late adolescence. The refinements which he innovated in the spheres of culinary pleasure and of sumptuous interior decoration and household furnishing are mentioned by the historians of his reign as having survived him and found emulators among the Roman aristocracy of later times. For what Veblen called <conspicuous consumption> he set a standard probably unequaled until the Islamic middle ages.
His sexual personality cannot be reduced to a mere formula of passive-effeminate homosexuality, although this aspect of his erotic pleasure-seeking is the one stressed by his ancient biographers. He loved the role of Venus at the theatre and the passive role in his encounters with other men, yet he was married several times and even violated a Vestal virgin, but remained childless.”
“As high priest of the Syrian deity Elagabal he sought to elevate the cult of the latter to the sole religion of the Empire, yet he did not persecute the Christians. Family intrigues ultimately cost him the favor of the soldiers who murdered him and his mother on March 11, 222. Unique as he was in the history of eroticism and of luxury, he has inspired writers from the 3rd century biographer Aelius Lampridius in the Scriptores Historiae Augustas through the later treatments of Jean Lombard, Louis Couperus, and Stefan George to Antonin Artaud and Alberto Arbasino.”
HOLOCAUST, GAY
“The genocide of Jews and Gypsies in Nazi-occupied Europe has overshadowed the persecution and murder of male homosexuals, which is only now beginning to be recognized and analyzed from the few surviving documents and memoirs. Regrettably, in the immediate post-war period most of those who wrote about the concentration and extermination camps, and even courts which dealt with the staffs and inmates of the camps, treated those sent there for violating the laws against homosexual offenses as common criminals deserving the punishment meted out to them by the Third Reich. The final insult to the victims of Nazi intolerance was the decision of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) in Karlsruhe on May 10, 1957, which not only upheld the constitutionality of the more punitive 1935 version of Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code because it <contained nothing specifically National-Socialist> and homosexual acts <unquestionably offended the moral feelings of the German people>, but even recommended doubling the maximum penalty – from 5 to 10 years. If any other victims of National-Socialism had been rebuffed in this manner by a West German court, there would have been outraged demonstrations around the globe; but this one went unprotested and ignored – above all by the psychiatrists who until recently never missed an opportunity to assert that <homosexuality is a serious disease> – for which ostracism and punishment were the best if not the only therapy. Until the late 1980s homosexuals, along with Gypsies, were denied compensation by the West German authorities for their suffering and losses under the Nazis.”
“Günther (1891-1968), professor of rural sociology and racial science first at Berlin and then at Freiburg im Breisgau, the chief authority on such matters in the Third Reich, held that the genetically inferior elements of the population should be given complete freedom to gratify their sexual urges in any manner that did not lead to reproduction because they would painlessly eliminate themselves from the breeding pool.”
“National-Socialism in Germany, like Marxism-Leninism in Russia, was a conspiracy of the 17th and the 19th centuries against the 18th-century Enlightenment” OK
“Among all modern states for which figures can be compiled, Nazi Germany offers the horrible example of suicides increasing rather than decreasing in wartime.”
HOMER
“Although dramatically dated to Mycenean times, the late 2nd millennium BC, the epics sometimes refer to things that cannot predate 650 or even 570, because interpolations existed in one form or another when 7th century poets cited the epics.”
“It is difficult to detect all interpolations and changes, especially additions of Attic terms as high culture became increasingly centered in Athens, where the Peisistratids in the mid-6th century had the epics recited annually at a festival, and many believe the first texts written well over a century after the latest possible date for Homer’s death. A definitive text resulted only from the efforts of 2nd century editors in Alexandria. These texts became almost sacred to the Greeks, whose education was based on them even until the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.”
“Homer failed to depict institutionalized pederasty, to which almost all subsequent writers referred, many making it central. Though poets and artists around 600 BC make the earliest unmistakable references to institutionalized pederasty, Homer mentioned Ganymede twice, <the loveliest born of the race of mortals, and therefore the gods caught him away to themselves, to be Zeus’ wine-pourer, for the sake of his beauty, so he might be among the immortals> (Iliad, 20, 233-35) and Zeus’ giving Tros, Ganymede’s father, <the finest of all horses beneath the sun and the daybreak> (Iliad, 5, 265ff.) as compensation for his son. Sir Moses Finley concluded that <the text of the poems offers no directly affirmative evidence at any point; even the two references to the elevation of Ganymede to Olympus speak only of his becoming cup-bearer to Zeus.>Sir Kenneth Dover denied that these passages implied pederasty: <It should not be impossible for us … to imagine that the gods on Olympus, like the souls of men in the Muslim paradise … simply rejoiced in the beauty of their servants as one ingredient of felicity.> However, the Abrahamic religions’ taboo on homosexuality did not exist in Hellenic and Etruscan antiquity. Societies that had the formula <eat, drink, and be merry> held that banquets should fittingly issue in sexual revelry. Anachronisms such as those of Finley and Dover should therefore be dismissed, even though Homer’s allusions to Ganymede may be pederastic interpolations like those ordered by the Peisistratids – successors of Solon, who introduced institutionalized pederasty into Athens – to antedate the cultural prominence of Athens.”
HUMBOLDT
MAGNUM OPUS: Voyage aux regions equinoxiales du nouveau continent (30 vols.!)
Mas não só: Cosmos: Outline of a Physical Description of the World (5 vols.!) (1862)
O FIM DE UMA ERA: “It was the last attempt by a single individual to collect within the pages of a work of his own the totality of human knowledge of the universe; after his time the increasing specialization of the sciences and the sheer accumulation of data made such a venture impossible.” Embora Le Bon seja um respeitável polímata, outrossim.
“Through the accounts of his findings – models for all subsequent undertakings – he made significant contributions to oceanography, meteorology, climatology, and geography, and furthered virtually all the natural sciences of his time; but above all else he was responsible for major advances in the geographical and geological sciences.”
HYDRAULIC METAPHOR
“The idea that sexual energy accumulates in the body until sufficient pressure is generated to require an outlet has over the centuries had considerable appeal. The notion acquires plausibility through observation of the wet dream, which eventually occurs in males if the semen is not evacuated through intercourse or masturbation.”
“The first statement of the doctrine is probably owing to the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius who says that the semen gradually builds up in the body until it is discharged in any available body (On the Nature of Things, IV, 1.065).”
“As a device for relieving erotic tension, a homosexual outlet stands on the same plane as a heterosexual one. A curious attestation of the hydraulic concept comes from colonial America. In his reflections on an outbreak of <sodomy and buggery> in the Bay Colony, William Bradford (1590-1637) noted: <It may be in this case as it is with water when their streams are stopped or dammed up; when they get passage they flow with more violence and make more noise and disturbance, than when they are suffered to run quietly in their own channels.>”
“Some Victorians defended prostitution as a necessary evil. Without this safety valve, they held, the pent-up desires of men would be inflicted on decent women, whose security depends, ironically, on their <fallen> sisters. The Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler even extended this belief by analogy to hustlers and male homosexuals.”
“Despite its appeal, the metaphor is not unproblematic. The hydraulic idea rests upon materialist reductionism, identifying the accumulation of semen with the strengthening of sexual desire. Yet the two do not necessarily act in concert, as anyone knows who has visited some sexual resort such as a sauna and felt sexual desire far more frequently than the body is able to replenish its supply of semen.”
INCARCERATION MOTIF
“This term refers not to literal incarceration or confinement but to an aspect of gender dysphoria – the idea that a human body can contain, locked within itself, a soul of the other gender. In their adhesion to this self-concept, many pre and post-operative transsexuals unknowingly echo a theme that has an age old, though recondite history.”
“Foreign as this idea is to the rationalistic Jew of the 20th century, and to the Biblical and Talmudic periods of Judaism as well, it is first mentioned by Saadiah Gaon (882-942), the spiritual leader of Babylonian Jewry, who rejected it as an alien doctrine that had found its way into Judaism from the Islamic cultural milieu.”
“The transmigration of a man’s soul into the body of a woman was considered by some Kabbalists a punishment for the commission of heinous sins, such as man’s refusing to give alms or to communicate his own wisdom to others.”
“In the Hollywood film Dog Day Afternoon (1975), which was based upon a real incident in Brooklyn a few years earlier, the character Leon asserts that <My psychiatrist told me I have a female soul trapped in a male body> (…) So a doctrine of medieval Jewish mysticism has entered the folklore of the gay subculture, and thence passed into the mainstream of American popular culture as a metaphor for a profound state of alienation.”
JUNG
“The two thinkers increasingly diverged, particularly after Jung published his own ideas in a book entitled The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), later renamed Symbols of Transformation. At the first meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association in Munich in 1913, the rift between Jung and Freud turned to open hostility, and the two never met again. In April 1914 Jung resigned as President of the Association. Between 1913 and 1917 Jung went through a period of deep and intensive self-analysis; he now asserted that he had never been a Freudian, and set about creating his own school, which he dubbed analytical psychology in contrast to psychoanalysis.” Diferentão…
“his Collected Works amount to eighteen volumes.” “He treated not only psychology and psychotherapy, but also religion, mythology, social issues, art and literature, and such occult and mystical themes as alchemy, astrology, telepathy and clairvoyance, yoga, and spiritualism.”
KEYNES
“A polymath [raça resiliente!], Keynes cultivated many interests, from book collecting to probability theory. His real importance, however, stems from the epistemic break he achieved with the classical theory of economics, changing the landscape of that discipline for all time. Keynes was no ivory-tower theorist, and the 30-year boom in Western industrial countries (1945-75) has been called the Age of Keynes.”
“In the Apostles he met his lifelong friends Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. Believing himself ugly, Keynes tended to be shy in the presence of the undergraduates he admired. In 1908, however, he began a serious affair with the painter Duncan Grant, whom he later said to be the only person in whom he found a truly satisfying combination of beauty and intelligence.”
“In 1908, however, he obtained a lecturer-ship in economics at King’s College, and the courses he gave there were the foundation of his later writings in the field. As editor of the Economic Journal he actively promoted new trends in the discipline outside of Cambridge. Yet he did not turn immediately to the core of the subject, as he spent a number of years writing a challenging Treatise on Probability, which was published in 1921.”
ESCASSEZ DE RECURSOS (GAYS) & SEMENTES DO NAZISMO: “Keynes elected to enter the Treasury where, despite the chronic disapproval of the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, he worked wonders in managing the wartime economy. During this period the homosexual members of Bloomsbury (Keynes included) found their supply of eligible young men cut off, and began to engage in flirtations and even liaisons with women. After the end of the war Keynes spent a frustrating period as an adviser at the Paris peace conference [for British to see!], trying to limit voracious Allied demands for reparations from defeated Germany. Returning to London, he set down his pungent reflections on the event in what became his most widely read book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), which eroded the resolve of the Allies to enforce the Treaty of Versailles, at least in its financial provisions.
In 1925 Keynes, now famous, married the noted ballerina Lydia Lopokova. He became an adviser to government and business, consolidating his practical knowledge of economic affairs. These experiences contributed to his great book, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).”
[PET-ROYAL]TIES: “Economic difficulties after 1975 subjected Keynesian views, which had become orthodoxy, to contemporary reassessment.”
“Surprisingly, in the decades after the conviction of Oscar Wilde, his numerous affairs with young men never caused the slightest legal or even social trouble. This charmed life can be explained only by his combination of extreme personal brilliance, family and professional connections, and remarkable self-confidence.”
KLEIST HEINRICH VON (1777-1811)
“German playwright and short story writer, whose The Broken Pitcher is esteemed as possibly the greatest of (and among the few) German comedies. Overshadowed by his contemporary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kleist’s significance came to light only after his suicide at age 34, a secretive joint pact made with a terminally ill female friend.
Kleist’s slim literary production (8 plays and 8 short stories) vividly and violently captures the historical break between Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic mysticism, often framed as either a psychological conflict (Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, Penthesilea) or a political one (Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Die Hermannsschlacht). A profound sense of the irrational and absurd permeates Kleist’s works. In stories such as Michael Kohlhaas or Earthquake in Chile, individuals stand powerless before arbitrary circumstances. Kleist’s remarkable heroines, who bear uncanny resemblance to Kleist psychologically, act from the unconscious, for example when The Marquise of O. places a newspaper ad in hopes of discovering the gentleman responsible for her pregnant condition, or when Penthesilea’s confusion between love and war leads her, while intending to kiss her lover Achilles, instead to tear him from limb to limb with her bare hands and teeth.”
LAUTRÉAMONT, o Conde que faltava ao Marquês
“Ducasse [nome de batismo] certainly shows more strongly the influence of Baudelaire and Sade than does any other writer. Like Sade, he is rarely studied in universities.”
LAWRENCE, DAVID HERBERT (1885-1930)
“Born in a mining area of Nottinghamshire, Lawrence derived much of the problematic of his work from the tension between his coal-miner father, representing for him the physical and the elemental, and his mother, a former school-teacher, who stood for the world of higher culture, politeness, and civilization. Having attended a 2-year teacher training course in Nottingham (his only higher education), Lawrence wrote two early novels, The White Peacock (1911) and The Ties-passer (1912), while teaching at Croydon. In 1912 he eloped with the German-born Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, and the two led a bohemian life of wandering on the continent until the outbreak of World War I. During this period he wrote and published his first masterpiece, Sons and Lovers (1913), an intensely autobiographical novel [more so?].
“Women in Love(1921) [currently reading!] has, despite the title, an extraordinary emphasis on the male love affair (though it is non-genitally expressed [forçação de barra, i.m.o.]) between the wealthy Gerald Crich and the school-teacher Rupert Birkin. These aspects were further explored in the Prologue to the book [!], which Lawrence withheld from publication.”
LORCA
“In the famous Residencia de Estudiantes, he met and collaborated with such future celebrities as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, with the latter of whom he had an amorous relationship of several years’ duration.”
“An extensive literature exists concerning the mechanics of and motives for his death, which immediately became an international incident and a symbol of fascist stupidity and anti-intellectualism. Lorca’s leftist sympathies, friends, and relatives would be sufficient to explain his execution, but much evidence suggests that his sexual orientation, activities, and writings were at least as important.”
A CANALHA (ESPERO QUE NÃO CUIDEM DO MEU ESPÓLIO!): “The House of Bernarda Alba, suppressed by his family, in 1945.”
MCCARTHYISM (BOECHATISMO NO BRASIL CONTEMPORÂNEO)
“The political tactics of the United States Senator from Wisconsin Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957)(*) have since the 50s been labeled McCarthyism. They consisted in poorly founded but sensationally publicized charges against individuals in government service or public life whom McCarthy accused on the Senate floor of being Communists, security risks, or otherwise disloyal or untrustworthy. Senator McCarthy’s campaign did not spare <sex perverts in government>, and so it made homosexuality an issue in American political life for the first time since the founding of the republic.” Homossexualidade restrita ao Triângulo das Bermudas.
(*) Oxalá nosso expoente morresse tão jovem! (P.S.: Escrito antes de sua inesperada – hoho, que clichê – morte!)
“It is also noteworthy that the danger of blackmail which Magnus Hirschfeld and his Berlin Scientific-Humanitarian Committee had used as an argument for the repeal of Paragraph 175 was now turned against homosexuals to deny them employment in the name of <national security>. This factor and others worked so strongly in McCarthy’s favor that despite bitter opposition he was reelected in 1952 in the Eisenhower landslide that brought the Republican Party back to the White House after 20 years of Democratic rule.
Once the Republicans had become the majority party for a brief time, McCarthy’s tactics became a source of embarrassment to them [huhu, quantas semelhanças…], and in 1954 a campaign was launched against him in the Senate which included the (true) accusation that a young University of Wisconsin graduate employed in his office in 1947 to handle veterans’ affairs had been arrested as a homosexual and then promptly fired, and the (probably false) accusation that McCarthy himself was a homosexual, which Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont included in his denunciation. However, it was alleged that McCarthy’s marriage in 1953 at the age of 45 was motivated by his need to squelch the rumors of his own sexual deviation; the marriage remained childless, though the couple did adopt a little girl. What is significant in retrospect is that Roy Cohn, a young attorney who was one of McCarthy’s chief aidés [sponsored by him] during his heyday, was a lifelong homosexual who died of AIDS in 1986 [meme Cazuza de direita]. Censured by the Senate in 1954, McCarthy thereafter faded in political importance, and when he died in 1957 no great wave of emotion went through the ranks of either his friends or his enemies.”
“The policy of denying employment to homosexuals on moral grounds and as security risks, however, remained long after McCarthy himself.”
“In France, after André Gide published his negative reflections on his trip to the Soviet Union in 1936-37, he was attacked by his former Communist associates as a pédé (faggot).”
“The sexual aspect of McCarthyism has an ancestry going as far back as Aeschines, Cicero, and the Byzantine Emperor Justinian (r. 527-565), whose laws against sodomites forged the <crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed>, a weapon for political intimidation and blackmail that even the enlightened 20th century has not deprived of its cutting edge.”
PEDOPHILIA
“the term <p(a)edophilia> was first used in English only as recently as 1906, by Havelock Ellis. It had previously appeared as a specific form of sexual pathology in a German article of 1896 by Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Because the term <pedophilia> originated in a medical context and today connotes disease, efforts have been made to replace it. Pederasty is sometimes used as a synonym, or as a term restricted to post-pubescent adolescents, but in the present writers’ view, it should properly be restricted to the Greek custom it originally designated, which, though a form of pedophilia as we understand it, is not congruent with it.” “The earlier average age for puberty within the last century also means that classical texts (and even more recent ones) which speak of relations with mid-teenage boys were not necessarily referring to sexually mature individuals. (The term ephebophile has been used to describe erotic attraction to boys in their late teens, who are considered adults in many if not all cultures.)” “woman/girl (korophile)” “<Child molestation> or <abuse>, terms current in the media, and in psychological and legal discourse, are neither descriptive of the phenomenon, nor value-free, as academic discourse requires.
That variant of pedophilia occurring between men and boys – male homosexual pedophilia – will be the chief focus of this article. This choice is dictated by several considerations, including the context of the article, the dearth [escassez] of research on korophile relationships, and the fact that until very recently man/boy relationships were accepted as a part, and indeed were a major part, of male homosexuality.”
“pedophilia might be considered a remnant, more evident in some persons than others, of the instinct to nurture and protect the young of the species, which in human development has come to serve an educational (including sex-educational) or initiatory purpose in some societies. The attempt to root pedophilia in man’s biological inheritance is controversial, but a cross-cultural survey of man/boy pedophilia at least suggests that it is a universal phenomenon, which, when accepted by a society, generally carries a socially constructed meaning related to the acculturation process for boys.”
“Several of these societies (as the Melanesians) believe that without receiving the man’s semen through fellatio the boy cannot physically mature.”
TRANSIÇÃO GRÉCIA-ROMA: “As the function of same-sex relationships increasingly became hedonistic, the age limits broke down: we find increasing references to homosexuality between men (particularly in the satiric poets, who make it clear that this was still scorned) and, to a lesser extent, to the sexual use of very young children.”
“That Ganymede was more than an artistic convention is shown by the number of artists who were charged with sodomy with boys, especially their studio assistants. Histories of the Renaissance record similar charges involving popes, poets, and nobles.”
“Incarcerated pedophiles continue to be subject to coercive procedures to alter their sexual interest or reduce its level. Although surgical castration is no longer employed, chemical dosages and aversion therapy may be used without the subject’s consent.”
“Much of the <research> that exists on pedophilia today reflects a predetermination that adult-child sexual contacts are evil or pathological, and merely documents the point of view with which the authors began. There has been no lack of evidence by which such negative pre-suppositions could be supported, because in the same way that studies of homosexuality until quite recently were limited by the source of their research subjects, resulting in a portrayal of homosexuals as criminal, troubled, and unhappy, most studies of pedophilia examine only cases which have come before either courts or psychiatrists, precisely those where the subjects are most under stress or disturbed. In many countries, research into pedophile relationships under other circumstances is legally
impossible: if a researcher should find a healthy, quietly functioning relationship he or she would be required to report it for prosecution under <child protection> laws. These factors, plus the sensationalism surrounding the topic, assure that much of what is written on the subject is, and will continue to be, worthless.”
“Pedophile organizations have linked their arguments to support of the rights of children. While emphasizing that these rights most certainly include the power to say ‘no’ to any unwanted sexual contact as well as the opportunity to say ‘yes’ to contacts children desire, some groups go further than others in espousing a broad range of children’s liberation issues. Related to the question of legal rights for children is the issue of the child’s consent in pedophile relationships. Those speaking for the protection of children frequently assert that children are incapable of consenting to such sexual relationships, sometimes justifying this assertion by the child’s lack of experience or knowledge of long-range consequences of an act. It has been answered that children can and do consent, or at least are quite capable of rejecting experiences they find distasteful, and that the proper response is to empower children to be able to say ‘no’ effectively. This impasse raises the issue of what consent means – freedom to refuse, simple assent, or an <informed> consent that is probably not realized in most human relationships? Closely related to this is the issue of power, and the assertion that the power imbalance between the adult and the younger partner in a pedophile relationship is so great that it inevitably leads to coercion and exploitation. Various responses have been made: either that the power imbalance is not so clear-cut as the critics state, particularly citing the power of the child to terminate the relationship; or that while power imbalances are inherent in all human relationships, they do not necessarily lead to exploitation, but can be used for benevolent ends, and the real issue is not the power imbalance but the use of power.
Child pornography is the sharpest point of attack on pedophilia and pedophiles. Included in this attack are the imputation that children are always abused in the production of such images, and the fear that such images will stimulate the abuse of children. It has been shown that this issue has been exploited for political purposes, and the statistics on the amount of such material exaggerated beyond proportion. Despite rhetoric, it has not been demonstrated that any more connection exists between pedophilia and child pornography than between any other sexuality and its pornography: either to show that pedophiles are more likely to create or use pornography than other persons, or that child pornography encourages sexual contacts with children. Indeed, the Kutschinsky study of the Danish experience with pornography, which has never been refuted, demonstrated that sexual assaults on children declined with the availability of pornography. Pedophiles who have responded to this issue have noted that there is no reason that depictions of children nude or even engaged in sexual actions should be any more or less objectionable than such depictions of adults, and argue that the true issue, as with all pornography, is whether coercion actually is employed in making it. The issues of child prostitution and the sexual exploitation of children in Third World countries have also been used to attack pedophiles and, by implication, pedophilia. Once it is acknowledged that pedophiles are by no means the only persons who engage in <sex tourism> or patronize prostitutes, the debate again seems to resolve itself into issues of power and consent. A defense has been offered that the right of self-determination in sexual behavior for the individual choosing prostitution should apply here. Poverty, however, may diminish the individual freedom of choice in these situations.”
???, Men and Boys[“America’s first anthology of homosexual poetry”];
Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, Tabu Homosexualität: Die Geschichte eines Vorurteils (The taboo of homosexuality: The history of a prejudice), 1978;
______., Mannbarkeitsriten: Zur institutionellen Päderastie bei Papuas und Melanesiern (Rites of passage into manhood: On institutional paederasty in Papuas and Melanesians), 1980;
______., Der Weibmann: Kultischer Geschlechtswechsel im Schamanismus, eine Studie zur Transvestition und Transsexualität bei Naturvölkern (Androgynous: Cultic sex change in shamanism, a study on transvestism and transsexualism in primitives), 1984;
______., Paidika 1/3 (The Journal of Paedophilia): Der pädophile Impuls: Wie lernt ein junger Mensch Sexualität? (The paedophile impulse: Toward the Development of an Aetiology of Child-Adult Sexual Contacts from an Ethological and Ethnological Viewpoint), 1988;
Cook & Howells, Adult Sexual Interest in Children, 1981;
Fraser, Death of Narcissus, 1976;
Mackay, Books of the Nameless Love, 1913(sécs. XIX-XX; o pai do “associacionismo pedofílico”);
Theo Sandfort, The sexual aspect of paedosexual relations: The experiences of 25 boys with men, 2000.
SCHOPENHAUER
“Through a large inheritance from his father the celebrated misanthrope enjoyed financial independence so that he could devote his life completely to philosophy. Even today Schopenhauer’s ethic of compassion possesses great philosophical significance.”
“Schopenhauer’s teleologically oriented conception of nature therefore had to assume in male homosexual behavior – the only form he discussed – a <stratagem of nature> (in the words of Oskar Eichler). Referring to Aristotle he hypothesized that young men (supposedly boys just past puberty) and likewise men who are too old (the magic boundary is here the age of 54) are not capable of begetting healthy and strong offspring, because their semen is too inferior. As nature is interested in perfecting every species, in men older than 54 <a pédérastie tendency gradually and imperceptibly makes its appearance>. When he formulated this argument Schopenhauer himself was 71 years old, so that he could have harbored a homosexual tendency for some years.”
“Schopenhauer was himself the father of at least two illegitimate children and had many unhappy affairs with women. He passionately admired Lord Byron and like him came to the conclusion that women could be considered beautiful only by <the male intellect clouded by the sexual instinct>. In intellectual and aesthetic respects Schopenhauer had homosexual preferences. In a letter to his admirer Julius Frauenstadt he stressed that <even women’s faces are nothing alongside those of handsome boys>. Bryan Magee hypothesizes that the philosopher systematically suppressed his gay tendencies, a view shared by Oskar Eichler and others. Thirty years after the publication of the third edition ofThe World as Will and RepresentationOswald Oskar Hartmann adopted Schopenhauer’s teleological explanation of homosexuality, suggesting that the first champions of homosexual rights voluntarily followed Schopenhauer’s arguments.”
SEPARATISM, LESBIAN
“In its strongest form, lesbian separatism means social, cultural, and physical separation from all who are not lesbians. As society is now constituted this option is possible only for a very few. Many lesbians who regard themselves as separatists seek to live and work in circumstances that are as far as possible <women’s space>, without insisting on the absolute exclusion of men.”
“Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata (411 BC) shows Athenian women seceding from their city in a <sex strike>, but only temporarily – until the men agree to make peace. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), a pioneering American socialist and feminist, wrote a novel, Herland (1915; reprinted 1979), depicting a Utopia in Africa populated only by women.”
“Outsiders tend to label lesbian separatists as <women who hate men>. In their defense, separatists often say that what they are opposed to are the domineering, aggressive aspects of male behavior, rather than men themselves. They wish to make a clear statement that will set them apart from the ambivalent stance of heterosexual women, even those who profess feminism. Separatists believe that such straight women enter too readily into complicity with the power structure of patriarchy; by continuing to meet the sexual and emotional needs of men, these women give aid and comfort to the enemy.
Some women choose to form communes on <women’s land>, setting themselves apart from all males, including male children and animals. In so doing they hold that they are creating liberated zones in which their natures can grow unhampered by the dictates of patriarchy.”
“Some women have entered lesbian separatism for a number of years as part of a process of personal growth, only to emerge later with a more complex position. This seems to have been the experience of a principal theorist of the movement, Charlotte Bunch, who remains a radical lesbian feminist.”
SHAKESPEARE
“Of tenant farmer stock and the son of a glover, Shakespeare was born in the provincial town of Stratford-upon-Avon in England; however, the very few facts known about his life are derived from various legal documents. In 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had 3 children within the next 3 years; the following 5 years are unaccounted for, but by 1594 he was involved in the theatre world in London as both an actor and a playwright. He enjoyed an increasingly successful theatrical career until his retirement in 1612 and his return to Stratford.”
“Shakespeare’s prolonged separation from his wife and the stipulation in his will that she inherit his <second best bed> has sparked much debate about his sexuality.”
“Historically, theatrical companies of Shakespeare’s time did not employ women; instead, their roles were played by boys, apprentices to the companies. In adherence to the laws and sympathies of the times, the plays were, therefore, unable to display any overtly sexual behavior, but one of Shakespeare’s most frequent plot devices was to have his heroines disguise themselves as boys, particularly in the comedies. Thus, what in reality was a boy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a boy leads to some psychologically acute and complex scenes with homoerotic suggestions, such as the encounters between Rosalind (as Ganymede, a name rich in suggestiveness) and Orlando in As You Like It and Viola (as Caesario) and Orsino in Twelfth Night.
“For more substantive evidence, one must turn instead to Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 poems in the form of sonnets, published surreptitiously in 1609 and immediately protested by their author. Probably intended as a personal exercise for private circulation, the sonnets may be the works that reveal something of the man himself; in them, Shakespeare names the persona Will, an obviously personal and intimate diminution of William, and, as in most of the Renaissance sonnet sequences, their subject is erotic love. Dedicated to Mr. W.H., who has been variously identified as the Earl of Southampton, a boy actor named Willy Hewes, Shakespeare himself (in a misprint of his initials), someone unknown to history, or someone invented, the first 126 are clearly homoerotic, while most of the others concern a woman conventionally called <the Dark Lady>. Historically, those scholars who begrudgingly admit to their subject matter try to discount their message. Most claim that the attraction the persona feels for the fair young man is either platonic or unconsummated; others assert that the poems are only examples of the Renaissance male friendship tradition. Still others insist on the fallacy of equating the persona with the poet and confusing literature with autobiography.”
Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
SOCRATES
“In early life he was interested in the scientific philosophy of his time and is said to have associated with Archelaus the physicist, but in the period best known to posterity he had abandoned these interests and was concerned solely with the right conduct of life, a quest which he conducted by the so-called <Socratic> method of cross-examining the individuals whom he encountered. While serving in the army he gained a great reputation for bravery, and as one of the presidents of the Athenian Assembly at the trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae, he courageously refused to put an illegal motion to the vote despite the fury of the multitude.”
“There has been considerable dispute over the precise meaning of the indictment, but the first part seems not to have been serious, while the second amounted to a charge that he had a <subversive> influence on the minds of the young, which was based on his known friendship with some of those who had been most prominent in their attacks on democracy in Athens. He made no attempt to placate the jury and was found guilty and sentenced to die by drinking a cup of hemlock.”
“He probably rejected the conventional Greek religious beliefs of his time, yet professed or created no heterodox religious doctrines. From time to time he had paranormal experiences, signs, or warnings which he interpreted as guideposts to his own conduct.
His sexual life, apart from the unhappy marriage, reflected the Greek custom of paiderasteia to the fullest. He was both the teacher of the young men who frequented his circle and the lover of at least some of them. As a boy of 17 he had been the favorite of Archelaus, because he was in the bloom of youthful sensuality, which later gave place to serious intellectual concerns.”
“he was never given to a coarse and purely sensual pederasty; if the beauty of the young Alcibiades made an intense and lasting impression on him, he never forgot his duty as a teacher to guide his youthful pupils toward perfection.” “As a bisexual Hellene, Socrates was always responsive to the beauty of the male adolescent and craved the companionship of young men; as a philosopher he practiced and taught the virtues of moderation and self-control. He endures as one of the outstanding examples in antiquity of a teacher for whom eros was an inspiration and a guide.
Because Socrates is a major figure in Western tradition, his sexual nature posed a continual problem. From Ficino to Johann Matthias Gesner (1691-1761) scholars sought to address the question discreetly. The Marquis de Sade was bolder, using socratiser as a verb meaning to sodomize. Even today, however, many classicists choose to evade the problem.”
SODOM AND GOMORRAH
“These legendary cities have been traditionally located in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, where they constituted two members of a pentapolis, the Cities of the Plain. According to the Old Testament account in Genesis 14, 18, and 19, God overthrew 4 of the 5 cities in a rain of brimstone and fire. The names of Sodom and Gomorrah, especially the former, have become proverbial. Echoes of the episode recur in the Bible and in the Koran, as well as in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic exegetical and homiletic writings. From the first city, Jewish Hellenistic Greek formed the derivative sodomites, from which medieval Latin obtained the noun of agent sodomita – as a result, the connection with male homosexuality is for many axiomatic. However the matter is more complex.”
“The ancient world’s rudimentary science of geology correctly related this barrenness to the circumstance that the water level of the Dead Sea had in prehistoric times been far higher; the sinking of the water level had exposed the previously inundated, now strikingly arid and sterile region to the gaze of the traveler.”
“to the Bedouin living east and south of the Dead Sea it suggested the etiological inference that at one time the area surrounding this salinized body of water had been a fruitful garden belt. Yet the inhabitants of the cities of the plain had even in the midst of their abundance and prosperity denied hospitality to the poverty-stricken and the wayfarer, while the luxury in which they wallowed led them inevitably into effeminacy and vice (the parallel in the Hellenistic world was the city of Sybaris, whose proverbial self-indulgence gave the English language the word sybaritic). For this reason they were punished by the destruction of their cities and the conversion of the whole area into a lifeless desert.”
“In Genesis 14:12 Lot is taken captive when Sodom is conquered by the 4 kings who have allied themselves against the Cities of the Plain; Abraham saves him by military intervention in the manner of a tribal sheikh with his retinue of 318 warriors. In 19:4-9 the Sodomites threaten Lot’s guests with gang rape, but are miraculously blinded and repelled, and in 19:13, 15 the angelic visitors warn Lot of the imminent destruction of the city so that he and his family can leave just in time to escape the rain of brimstone and fire. This underlying motif explains why Lot later <feared to dwell in Zoar> (19:30), even though God has spared the place as a reward for his model hospitality toward the 2 visitors. Over the centuries Sodom and Gomorrah, along with the Babylon of the Book of Revelation, came to symbolize the corruption and depravity of the big city as contrasted with the virtue and innocence of the countryside, a notion cherished by those who idealized rural life and is still present, though fading in 20th century America.”
“These volcanic eruptions, which have left traces still to be seen at the present day, inspired the <rain of brimstone and fire> (burning sulfur) of Genesis 19:24, which supplemented the notion that the 4 cities had been <overthrown> (destroyed by an earthquake) that figures in Genesis 19:25.” Sempre o nº 4!
+ Judges 19; Romans 1:18
“the currency in antiquity of world destruction legends, in which the earth is annihilated either by water (kataklysmos) or by fire (ekvyrosis). The story of Noah and the deluge is the rendering of the first in the book of Genesis, while the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is a localization of the second, in which the catastrophe is limited to 4 cities in the vicinity of the Dead Sea (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim) even though the epilogue involving Lot and his daughters clearly derives from a universal conflagration myth.”
“If the human race were annihilated with the exception of a single family, the earth could be repeopled only by means of sexual unions ordinarily condemned as incestuous.”
“World destruction fantasies [are] associated in modern clinical experience with the early stages of schizophrenia.”
“Astrological literature supplied the ancients with an entire list of calamities that betokened divine wrath, as in Luke 21:11, all of which were later ascribed to retribution for <sodomy>. Fear of homosexual aggression plays a role in these paranoid fantasies, of the sort analyzed by Freud in the classic Schreber case.”
“The notion of sodomy is an innovation of Latin Christianity toward the end of the 12th century; it is not found in Jewish or Byzantine writings.” “In the late Middle Ages the tendency of the allegorizing mind to parallelism led to the notion that Gomorrah, the twin city of Sodom, had been a hotbed of lesbianism, even though there was nothing in either Testament that would suggest such a construction.”
TURING, ALAN (1912-1954)
“He seems to have been a brilliant, awkward boy whose latent genius went unnoticed by all his teachers; he also had no friends until his very last years at Sherborne. Then he fell in love with a fellow science enthusiast, Christopher Morcom: the Platonic friendship was returned, and Alan Turing was for the first time in his life a happy young man. He had dreams of joining Christopher at Trinity, to pursue science together – unfortunately, Christopher Morcom suddenly died (from a much earlier infection with bovine tuberculosis).”
“Turing spent two years in America, at Princeton University, and, on his return to Britain, was drafted into British cryptanalysis for the war effort. Turing was already unusual among mathematicians for his interest in machinery; it was not an interest in applied mathematics so much as something which did not really have a name yet – applied logic. His contribution to the design of code-breaking machines during the war led him deeper and deeper into the field of what would now be called computer programming, except that neither concept existed at the time. He and a colleague named Welshman designed the Bombe machines which were to prove decisive in breaking the main German Enigma ciphers. For his contribution to the Allied victory in World War II Turing was named an Officer of the British Empire (O.B.E.) in 1946. (…) He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951.”
“The earliest inventor of such a device was the eccentric 19th century Charles Babbage, who could not obtain the necessary hardware to implement his ideas.”
“He was brought to trial and sentenced to a year’s probation under the care of a psychiatrist, who proceeded to administer doses of female hormone to his patient, this being the current <wonder-therapy> which replaced castration as an attempt to kill the sexual instinct. For the entire year, Turing underwent the humiliation of femininization (<I’m growing breasts!>, he confided to a friend), but emerged seemingly intact from the public ordeal. He committed suicide in 1954, by eating an apple he had laced with cyanide.”
WHITMAN, WALT
A VIDA TEM DESSAS: “Often acclaimed as America’s greatest poet, Whitman, of working-class background, was self-taught, but as a printer, school teacher, journalist, and editor he contributed fiction and verse in the worst modes of the day to the best literary journals. There is no evidence of his genius until he suddenly began to write scraps of what was to become Leaves of Grassin his notebooks.”
“It has in fact been argued that Leaves is an inverted mystical experience. This work, which encompassed his complete poetic opus, was first published in 1855 with 12 poems (Song of Myself being rather lengthy); the second edition (1857) had 32, the third (1860) 156, and so on through various printings and editions until 1881. Beginning in 1860, Whitman not only added poems (including the homoerotic Calamus collection), but dropped them, changed them, and rearranged the order. He has often been criticized for making changes, but he clearly did not do so for purposes of concealment.”
“In his more programmatic poems, Whitman was always careful to say he and she, him and her. Women are permitted to have sexual lives, and he sympathizes with a prostitute, but they are generally thought of and idealized as perfect mothers for the new race of Americans.”
“It was his explicitness about male-female sex that shocked his early readers. Only a few homosexuals in England and some readers in Germany caught what is now obvious to any reader who can admit what he sees on the page. The 2nd and 3rd sections of Song of Myself are homosexual in their imagery, as is the subsequent discussion of the body and soul, which climaxes in the intercourse between body and soul in the 5th section. One might also cite the tremendous sweep of eroticism from section 24 to the climax of fulfillment in male intercourse in section 29.”
“He was not merely the poet of an idealized Jacksonian democracy nor of a new political structure, but of a culture bound together by love and religious faith in which each person could fulfill his or her own sexual nature.”
“Whitman, who was disappointed at his contemporary reception, would have been gratified by his reputation in the 20th century, which is too widespread to more than mention. He is the democratic poet and a progenitor of the development of poetry beyond traditional metrical practice in the United States and foreign countries. A remarkable number of modern poets have paid him tribute in prose or verse, among the most notable being Ezra Pound, Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, and Allen Ginsberg.”
WOOLF, VIRGINIA
“Virginia Woolf was educated largely through reading books in the family library. Unlike her brothers, she did not go to university, and this perceived slight was later to sustain her feminist critique of discrimination against women. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a brilliant Cambridge graduate who had served as a judge in Ceylon, and her sister Vanessa married the art critic Clive Bell. The two couples were major figures in the Bloomsbury group, which also included such male homosexual writers as E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey. Through much of her life Virginia suffered from severe spells of mental depression, and it was partly to provide work therapy that she and Leonard founded the Hogarth Press in 1917.”
“Virginia Woolf remained a virgin until her marriage, and found the idea of sex with a man repellent. At the time of their engagement she warned Leonard of this aversion, and their sexual relations seem to have been rare. Before marriage Virginia Stephen was closely attached to her sister Vanessa – loving her almost to the point of <thought-incest> –, and was deeply involved platonically with Madge Vaughan, a daughter of John Addington Symonds, and Violet Dickinson, to whom she wrote an enormous number of letters. Throughout her life, Woolf was to draw emotional sustenance from her intense relations with other women.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), concerns the trip of a young Englishwoman to South America, followed by her engagement and death there. While this novel was conventional in form, Jacob’s Room (1922) joined the mainstream of innovative modernism through its poetic impressionism and indirection of narrative development. After this work, which marks her real beginning as a literary artist, Woolf secured her place in modernism by a series of carefully wrought books. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) blends interior monologue with the sights and sounds of a single day in central London. To the Lighthouse (1927) explores the tensions of the male-female dyad in the form of a holiday trip of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey. Its fantastic form notwithstanding, Orlando (1928) is of great personal significance, tracing the biography of the hero-heroine through 4 centuries of male and female existence. This book is a tribute to, and portrait of, her lover Vita Sackville-West, whom she had met in 1922. Woolf’s most ambitious novel is probably The Waves (1931) which presents the contrasting personalities of 6 characters through a series of <recitatives> in which their inner consciousness is revealed.
Shortly after completing her last book, Between the Acts (1941), she suffered a final bout of mental illness and drowned herself in a river near her country home. The posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s Letters and Diaries have revealed some unattractive aspects of her personality: she was xenophobic and snobbish, sometimes given to expressions of personal malice, as well as anti-Semitic and homophobic sides. Yet she participated wholeheartedly in the Bloomsbury ethic of individual fulfillment and social enlightenment. Her use of stream-of-consciousness techniques, and other sophisticated literary devices, places her very near the front rank – if not within it – of modernist writers in English.
With the general decline of the Bloomsbury ethos in the middle decades of the century, Woolf’s reputation seemed to fade. In the 1970s, however, feminist critics hailed her as a major champion of then-cause. There is no doubt that A Room of One’s Own (1929), and its sequel, Three Guineas (1938), are powerful pleas for women’s creative independence. Yet her own feminism was fluid and variable, and thus not easily accommodated to present-minded uses. Throughout her life she struggled valiantly against mental illness, succeeding in building up an imposing corpus of writings while expressing her own emotional feelings in her deep relationships with women.”
WORKING CLASS, EROTICIZATION OF
“One of the reasons why Walt Whitman had such an impact on English homosexuals of this period was that his praise of democracy was (mis)understood in large part as a veiled plea for such prince-and-pauper liaisons.”
“In 1978, in a brief Appendix to the collected papers of the 1976 Louvain Colloquium on Literature and Translation, André Lefevere proposed that the name Translation Studies should be adopted for the discipline that concerns itself with <the problems raised by the production and description of translations>.”
“The art of translation is a subsidiary art and derivative. On this account it has never been granted the dignity of original work, and has suffered too much in the general judgement of letters.” Belloc
“studies purporting to discuss translation <scientifically> are often little more than idiosyncratic value judgements of randomly selected translations of the work of major writers such as Homer, Rilke, Baudelaire or Shakespeare. What is analysed in such studies is the product only, the end result of the translation process and not the process itself.”
“1791 had seen the publication of the first theoretical essay on translation in English, Alexander Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation”
“Hence Dante Gabriel Rossetti could declare in 1861 that the work of the translator involved self-denial and repression of his own creative impulses” “At the opposite extreme Edward Fitzgerald, writing about Persian poetry in 1851, could state <It is an amusement to me to take what liberties I like with these Persians, who, (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, and who really do want a little Art to shape them.>” “These two positions are both quite consistent with the growth of colonial imperialism in the nineteenth century. From these positions derives the ambiguity with which translations have come to be regarded in the twentieth century.” “Hence a growing number of British or North American students read Greek and Latin authors in translation or study major nineteenth-century prose works or twentieth-century theatre texts whilst treating the translated text as if it were originally written in their own language.”
“Some scholars, such as Theodore Savory, define translation as an <art>; others, such as Eric Jacobsen, define it as a <craft>; whilst others, perhaps more sensibly, borrow from the German and describe it as a <science>. Horst Frenz even goes so far as to opt for <art> but with qualifications, claiming that <translation is neither a creative art nor an imitative art, but stands somewhere between the two.>”
“The most important advances in Translation Studies in the twentieth century derive from the ground-work done by groups in Russia in the 1920s and subsequently by the Prague Linguistic Circle and its disciples. Vološinov’s work on Marxism and philosophy, Mukařovský’s on the semiotics of art, Jakobson, Prochazka and Levý on translation have all established new criteria for the founding of a theory of translation and have showed that, far from being a dilettante pursuit accessible to anyone with a minimal knowledge of another language, translation is, as Randolph Quirk puts it, <one of the most difficult tasks that a writer can take upon himself.>” “To divorce the theory from the practice, to set the scholar against the practitioner as has happened in other disciplines, would be tragic indeed.”
“The fourth category, loosely called Translation and Poetics, includes the whole area of literary translation, in theory and practice. Studies may be general or genre-specific, including investigation of the particular problems of translating poetry, theatre texts or libretti and the affiliated problem of translation for the cinema, whether dubbing or sub-titling. Under this category also come studies of the poetics of individual, translators and comparisons between them, studies of the problems of formulating a poetics, and studies of the interrelationship between SL [Source Language] and TL [Target Language] texts and author—translator—reader.” “It is important for the student of translation to be mindful of the four general categories, even while investigating one specific area of interest, in order to avoid fragmentation.”
“All too often, in discussing their work, translators avoid analysis of their own methods and concentrate on exposing the frailties of other translators. Critics, on the other hand, frequently evaluate a translation from one or other of two limited standpoints: from the narrow view of the closeness of the translation to the SL text (an evaluation that can only be made if the critic has access to both languages) or from the treatment of the TL text as a work in their own language. And whilst this latter position clearly has some validity—it is, after all, important that a play should be playable and a poem should be readable—the arrogant way in which critics will define a translation as good or bad from a purely monolingual position again indicates the peculiar position occupied by translation vis-à-vis another type of metatext (a work derived from, or containing another existing text), literary criticism itself.
In his famous reply to Matthew Arnold’s attack on his translation of Homer, Francis Newman declared that
Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge; and to it I wish to appeal. Even scholars collectively have no right, and much less have single scholars, to pronounce a final sentence on questions of taste in their court.”
A TRADUÇÃO DEFINITIVA DO CLÁSSICO DEFINITIVO DO ESCRITOR DEFINITIVO
A BÍBLIA DA LITERATURA OU A LITERATURA DA BÍBLIA?
“In his useful book Translating Poetry, Seven Strategies and a Blueprint, André Lefevere compares translations of Catullus’ Poem 64 with a view not to comparative evaluation but in order to show the difficulties and at times advantages of a particular method. For there is no universal canon according to which texts may be assessed. There are whole sets of canons that shift and change and each text is involved in a continuing dialectical relationship with those sets. There can no more be the ultimate translation than there can be the ultimate poem or the ultimate novel”
“The nineteenth-century English concern with reproducing <period flavour> by the use of archaisms in translated texts, often caused the TL text to be more inaccessible to the reader than the SL text itself. In contrast, the seventeenth-century French propensity to gallicize the Greeks even down to details of furniture and clothing was a tendency that German translators reacted to with violent opposition. Chapman’s energetic Renaissance Homer is far removed from Pope’s controlled, masterly eighteenth-century version.”
“if there are criteria to be established for the evaluation of a translation, those criteria will be established from within the discipline and not from without.”
1. LINGUAGEM E CULTURA
“The first step towards an examination of the processes of translation must be to accept that although translation has a central core of linguistic activity, it belongs most properly to semiotics, the science that studies sign systems or structures, sign processes and sign functions (Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, London 1977).”
“Language, then, is the heart within the body of culture, and it is the interaction between the two that results in the continuation of life-energy. In the same way that the surgeon, operating on the heart, cannot neglect the body that surrounds it, so the translator treats the text in isolation from the culture at his peril.”
“Jakobson declares that all poetic art is therefore technically untranslatable” “Jakobson gives the example of the Russian word syr (a food made of fermented pressed curds [tecnicamente, coalhada, tofu ou queijo coalho]) which translates roughly into English as cottage cheese. In this case, Jakobson claims, the translation is only an adequate interpretation of an alien code unit and equivalence is impossible.”
“consider the question of translating yes and hello into French, German and Italian. This task would seem, at first glance, to be straightforward, since all are Indo-European languages, closely related lexically and syntactically, and terms of greeting and assent are common to all three. For yes standard dictionaries give:
French: oui, si
German: ja
Italian: si
It is immediately obvious that the existence of two terms in French involves a usage that does not exist in the other languages. Further investigation shows that whilst oui is the generally used term, si is used specifically in cases of contradiction, contention and dissent. The English translator, therefore, must be mindful of this rule when translating the English word that remains the same in all contexts.” “French, German and Italian all frequently double or <string> affirmatives in a way that is outside standard English procedures (e.g. si, si, si; ja, ja, etc). Hence the Italian or German translation of yes by a single word can, at times, appear excessively brusque, whilst the stringing together of affirmatives in English is so hyperbolic that it often creates a comic effect.”
“Whilst English does not distinguish between the word used when greeting someone face to face and that used when answering the telephone, French, German and Italian all do make that distinction. The Italian pronto can only be used as a telephonic greeting, like the German hallo. Moreover, French and German use as forms of greeting brief rhetorical questions, whereas the same question in English How are you? or How do you do? is only used in more formal situations. The Italian ciao, by far the most common form of greeting in all sections of Italian society, is used equally on arrival and departure, being a word of greeting linked to a moment of contact between individuals either coming or going and not to the specific context of arrival or initial encounter.” “Jakobson would describe this as interlingual transposition, while Ludskanov would call it a semiotic transformation”
“butter in British English carries with it a set of associations of whole-someness, purity and high status (in comparison to margarine, once perceived only as second-rate butter though now marketed also as practical because it does not set hard under refrigeration).
When translating butter into Italian there is a straight–forward word-for-word substitution: butter—burro. Both butter and burro describe the product made from milk and marketed as a creamy-coloured slab of edible grease for human consumption. And yet within their separate cultural contexts butter and burro cannot be considered as signifying the same. In Italy, burro, normally light coloured and unsalted, is used primarily for cooking, and carries no associations of high status, whilst in Britain butter, most often bright yellow and salted, is used for spreading on bread and less frequently in cooking. Because of the high status of butter, the phrase bread and butter is the accepted usage even where the product used is actually margarine.” “The butter—burro translation, whilst perfectly adequate on one level, also serves as a reminder of the validity of Sapir’s statement that each language represents a separate reality.” “Good appetite in English used outside a structured sentence is meaningless. Nor is there any English phrase in general use that fulfills the same function as the French.”
“The translator, Levý believed, had the responsibility of finding a solution to the most daunting of problems, and he declared that the functional view must be adopted with regard not only to meaning but also to style and form. The wealth of studies on Bible translation and the documentation of the way in which individual translators of the Bible attempt to solve their problems through ingenious solutions is a particularly rich source of examples of semiotic transformation.”
“Hence Albrecht Neubert’s view that Shakespeare’s Sonnet <Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?> cannot be semantically translated into a language where summers are unpleasant is perfectly proper”
“Giovanni sta menando il can per I’aia.
becomes
John is leading his dog around the threshing floor.
The image conjured up by this sentence is somewhat startling and, unless the context referred quite specifically to such a location, the sentence would seem obscure and virtually meaningless. The English idiom that most closely corresponds to the Italian is to beat about the bush, also obscure unless used idiomatically, and hence the sentence correctly translated becomes
John is beating about the bush.”
Não é que seja tradução livre. É que estamos condenados a ir além da liberdade!
OS NÓS DA TRANSLITERAÇÃO
#TítulodeLivro
“o <elo perdido> entre os componentes de uma teoria completa das traduções parece ser a teoria das relações de equivalência que possam ser estabelecidas tanto para o modelo dinâmico quanto para o modelo estático.”
E que valência têm seus vãos louros?
“E.V.Rieu’s deliberate decision to translate Homer into English prose because the significance of the epic form in Ancient Greece could be considered equivalent to the significance of prose in modern Europe, is a case of dynamic equivalence applied to the formal properties of a text which shows that Nida’s categories can actually be in conflict with each other.”
Formules are for mules
“Hence a woman writing to a friend in 1812 would no more have signed her letters with love or in sisterhood as a contemporary Englishwoman might, any more than an Italian would conclude letters without a series of formal greetings to the recipient of the letter and his relations.”
stress that you are stressed
“It is again an indication of the low status of translation that so much time should have been spent on discussing what is lost in the transfer of a text from SL to TL whilst ignoring what can also be gained, for the translator can at times enrich or clarify the SL text as a direct result of the translation process.”
“Nida cites the case of Guaica, a language of southern Venezuela, where there is little trouble in finding satisfactory terms for the English murder, stealing, lying, etc., but where the terms for good, bad, ugly and beautiful cover a very different area of meaning. As an example, he points out that Guaica does not follow a dichotomous classification of good and bad, but a trichotomous one as follows:
(1) Good includes desirable food, killing enemies, chewing dope in moderation, putting fire to one’s wife to teach her to obey, and stealing from anyone not belonging to the same band.
(2) Bad includes rotten fruit, any object with a blemish, murdering a person of the same band, stealing from a member of the extended family and lying to anyone.
(3) Violating taboo includes incest, being too close to one’s mother-in-law, a married woman’s eating tapir before the birth of the first child, and a child’s eating rodents.”
“Nida cita o caso do Guaica, uma língua do sul da Venezuela, em que não é complicado encontrar termos satisfatórios para os vocábulos do Inglês assassinato, furto, mentir, etc., mas em que os termos bom, ruim, feio e bonito se estendem a uma zona de significados muito distinta. Por exemplo, ele assinala que o Guaica não segue uma classificação dicotômica de bom e ruim, mas uma classificação tricotômica, como segue:
(1) Bom inclui a comida desejável, matar inimigos, mastigar maconha com moderação, provocar queimaduras nas esposas como repreensão pela insubordinação ao marido, roubar alguém desde que não seja do seu clã.
(2) Ruim inclui frutas podres, qualquer objeto maculado, matar alguém do próprio clã, roubar de um membro da própria linhagem familiar e mentir sob quaisquer circunstâncias.
(3) Violar o tabu inclui incesto, ser muito íntimo da sogra, se uma mulher casada come carne de anta antes de dar a luz ao primeiro filho, uma criança comer roedores.”
“Nor is it necessary to look so far beyond Europe for examples of this kind of differentiation. The large number of terms in Finnish for variations of snow, in Arabic for aspects of camel behaviour, in English for light and water, in French for types of bread, all present the translator with, on one level, an untranslatable problem. Bible translators have documented the additional difficulties involved in, for example, the concept of the Trinity or the social significance of the parables in certain cultures [eu não sabia o tamanho de um grão de mostarda!]. In addition to the lexical problems, there are of course languages that do not have tense systems or concepts of time that in any way correspond to Indo-European systems. Whorf’s comparison (which may not be reliable, but is cited here as a theoretical example) between a <temporal language> (English) and a <timeless language> (Hopi) serves to illustrate this aspect.”
“If I’m going home is translated as Je vais chez moi, the content meaning of the SL sentence (i.e. self-assertive statement of intention to proceed to place of residence and/or origin) is only loosely reproduced. And if, for example, the phrase is spoken by an American resident temporarily in London, it could either imply a return to the immediate <home> or a return across the Atlantic, depending on the context in which it is used, a distinction that would have to be spelled out in French. Moreover the English term home, like the French foyer, has a range of associative meanings that are not translated by the more restricted phrase chez moi. Home, therefore, would appear to present exactly the same range of problems as the Finnish or Japanese bathroom.”
POLISSEMIA: A MISSÃO (IMAGINA SE INCLUÍSSEM O MUNDO ANTIGO)
“the American Democratic Party
the German Democratic Republic
the democratic wing of the British Conservative Party.”
“Against Catford, in so far as language is the primary modelling system within a culture, cultural untranslatability must be de facto implied in any process of translation.”
“A slightly more difficult example is the case of the Italian tomponamento in the sentence C’è stato un tamponamento.
There has been/there was a slight accident (involving a vehicle).
Because of the differences in tense-usage, the TL sentence may take one of two forms depending on the context of the sentence, and because of the length of the noun phrase, this can also be cut down, provided the nature of the accident can be determined outside the sentence by the receiver. But when the significance of tomponamento is considered vis-à-vis Italian society as a whole, the term cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of Italian driving habits, the frequency with which <slight accidents> occur and the weighting and relevance of such incidents when they do occur. In short, tomponamento is a sign that has a culture-bound or context meaning, which cannot be translated even by an explanatory phrase. The relation between the creative subject and its linguistic expression cannot therefore be adequately replaced in the translation. [Barbeiragem?]”
SUPERESTIMANDO A ALTURA DAS MONTANHAS: “Boguslav Lawendowski, in an article in which he attempts to sum up the state of translation studies and semiotics, feels that Catford is <divorced from reality>, while Georges Mounin feels that too much attention has been given to the problem of untranslatability at the expense of solving some of the actual problems that the translator has to deal with.”
“Mounin acknowledges the great benefits that advances in linguistics have brought to Translation Studies; the development of structural linguistics, the work of Saussure, of Hjelmslev, of the Moscow and Prague Linguistic Circles has been of great value, and the work of Chomsky and the transformational linguists has also had its impact, particularly with regard to the study of semantics. Mounin feels that it is thanks to developments in contemporary linguistics that we can (and must) accept that:
(1) Personal experience in its uniqueness is untranslatable.
(2) In theory the base units of any two languages (e.g. phonemes, monemes, etc.) are not always comparable.
(3) Communication is possible when account is taken of the respective situations of speaker and hearer, or author and translator.”
“Translation theory tends to be normative, to instruct translators on the OPTIMAL solution; actual translation work, however, is pragmatic; the translator resolves for that one of the possible solutions which promises a maximum of effect with a minimum of effort. That is to say, he intuitively resolves for the so-called MINIMAX STRATEGY.” Levý
“literary criticism does not seek to provide a set of instructions for producing the ultimate poem or novel, but rather to understand the internal and external structures operating within and around a work of art.”
“it would seem quite clear that any debate about the existence of a science of translation is out of date: there already exists, with Translation Studies, a serious discipline investigating the process of translation, attempting to clarify the question of equivalence and to examine what constitutes meaning within that process. But nowhere is there a theory that pretends to be normative, and although Lefevere’s statement about the goal of the discipline suggests that a comprehensive theory might also be used as a guideline for producing translations, this is a long way from suggesting that the purpose of translation theory is to be proscriptive.”
2. HISTÓRIA DA TEORIA DA TRADUÇÃO
“The persecution of Bible translators during the centuries when scholars were avidly translating and retranslating Classical Greek and Roman authors is an important link in the chain of the development of capitalism and the decline of feudalism. In the same way, the hermeneutic approach of the great English and German Romantic translators connects with changing concepts of the role of the individual in the social context. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the study of translation, especially in its diachronic aspect, is a vital part of literary and cultural history.”
“George Steiner, in After Babel, divides the literature on the theory, practice and history of translation into 4 periods. The first, he claims, extends from the statements of Cicero and Horace on translation up to the publication of Alexander Fraser Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation in 1791. (…) Steiner’s second period, which runs up to the publication of Larbaud’s Sous I’invocation de Saint Jérome in 1946 is characterized as a period of theory and hermeneutic enquiry with the development of a vocabulary and methodology of approaching translation. The third period begins with the publication of the first papers on machine translation in the 1940s, and is characterized by the introduction of structural linguistics and communication theory into the study of translation. Steiner’s fourth period, coexisting with the third has its origins in the early 1960s and is characterized by <a reversion to hermeneutic, almost metaphysical inquiries into translation and interpretation>” “his first period covers a span of some 1700 years while his last two periods cover a mere thirty years.” “His quadripartite division is, to say the least, highly idiosyncratic, but it does manage to avoid one great pitfall: periodization, or compartmentalization of literary history. It is virtually impossible to divide periods according to dates for, as Lotman points out, human culture is a dynamic system.”
“Classical philology and comparative literature, lexical statistics and ethnography, the sociology of class-speech, formal rhetoric, poetics, and the study of grammar are combined in an attempt to clarify the act of translation and the process of <life between languages>.” Ge.St.
“There is a large body of literature that attempts to decide whether Petrarch and Chaucer were medieval or Renaissance writers, whether Rabelais was a medieval mind post hoc, or whether Dante was a Renaissance mind two centuries too soon.”
“André Lefevere has compiled a collection of statements and documents on translation that traces the establishment of a German tradition of translation, starting with Luther and moving on via Gottsched and Goethe to the Schlegels [?] and Schleiermacher and ultimately to Rosenzweig.”
BRANCHES FOR #TCC:
“All too often, however, studies of past translators and translations have focused more on the question of influence; on the effect of the TL product in a given cultural context, rather than on the processes involved in the creation of that product and on the theory behind the creation. So, for example, in spite of a number of critical statements about the significance of translation in the development of the Roman literary canon, there has yet to be a systematic study of Roman translation theory in English. The claims summed up by Matthiesson when he declared that <a study of Elizabethan translations is a study of the means by which the Renaissance came to England> are not backed by any scientific investigation of the same.”
“Eric Jacobsen claims rather sweepingly that translation is a Roman invention, and although this may be considered as a piece of critical hyperbole, it does serve as a starting point from which to focus attention on the role and status of translation for the Romans. The views of both Cicero and Horace on translation were to have great influence on successive generations of translators, and both discuss translation within the wider context of the two main functions of the poet: the universal human duty of acquiring and disseminating wisdom and the special art of making and shaping a poem.
The significance of translation in Roman literature has often been used to accuse the Romans of being unable to create imaginative literature in their own right, at least until the first century BC. Stress has been laid on the creative imagination of the Greeks as opposed to the more practical Roman mind, and the Roman exaltation of their Greek models has been seen as evidence of their lack of originality. But the implied value judgement in such a generalization is quite wrong. The Romans perceived themselves as a continuation of their Greek models and Roman literary critics discussed Greek texts without seeing the language of those texts as being in any way an inhibiting factor. The Roman literary system sets up a hierarchy of texts and authors that overrides linguistic boundaries and that system in turn reflects the Roman ideal of the hierarchical yet caring central state based on the true law of Reason. Cicero points out that mind dominates the body as a king rules over his subjects or a father controls his children, but warns that where Reason dominates as a master ruling his slaves, <it keeps them down and crushes them>. With translation, the ideal SL text is there to be imitated and not to be crushed by the too rigid application of Reason. Cicero nicely expresses this distinction: <If I render word for word, the result will sound uncouth, and if compelled by necessity I alter anything in the order or wording, I shall seem to have departed from the function of a translator.>”
“Horace, whilst advising the would-be writer to avoid the pitfalls that beset <the slavish translator> [o imitador barato], also advised the sparing use of new words. He compared the process of the addition of new words and the decline of other words to the changing of the leaves in spring and autumn, seeing this process of enrichment through translation as both natural and desirable, provided the writer exercised moderation. The art of the translator, for Horace and Cicero, then, consisted in judicious interpretation of the SL text so as to produce a TL version based on the principle non verbum de verbo, sed sensum exprimere de sensu (of expressing not word for word, but sense for sense), and his responsibility was to the TL readers.
But there is also an additional dimension to the Roman concept of enrichment through translation, i.e. the pre-eminence of Greek as the language of culture and the ability of educated Romans to read texts in the SL. When these factors are taken into account, then the position both of translator and reader alters. The Roman reader was generally able to consider the translation as a metatext in relation to the original. The translated text was read through the source text, in contrast to the way in which a monolingual reader can only approach the SL text through the TL version.”
Ser compilador não era algo degradante per se.
“The good translator, therefore, presupposed the reader’s acquaintance with the SL text and was bound by that knowledge, for any assessment of his skill as translator would be based on the creative use he was able to make of his model.”
Bien que…: “Longinus, in his Essay On the Sublime, cites <imitation and emulation of the great historians and poets of the past> as one of the paths towards the sublime and translation is one aspect of imitation in the Roman concept of literary production.”
“Moreover, it should not be forgotten that with the extension of the Roman Empire, bilingualism and trilingualism became increasingly commonplace, and the gulf between oral and literary Latin widened. The apparent licence of Roman translators, much quoted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, must therefore be seen in the context of the overall system in which that approach to translation was applied.”
“With the spread of Christianity, translation came to acquire another role, that of disseminating the word of God. A religion as text-based as Christianity presented the translator with a mission that encompassed both aesthetic and evangelistic criteria. The history of Bible translation is accordingly a history of western culture in microcosm. Translations of the New Testament were made very early, and St Jerome’s famous contentious version that was to have such influence on succeeding generations of translators was commissioned by Pope Damasus in AD 384.” “but the problem of the fine line between what constituted stylistic licence and what constituted heretical interpretation was to remain a major stumbling block for centuries. § Bible translation remained a key issue well into the seventeenth century, and the problems intensified with the growth of concepts of national cultures and with the coming of the Reformation. Translation came to be used as a weapon in both dogmatic and political conflicts as nation states began to emerge and the centralization of the church started to weaken, evidenced in linguistic terms by the decline of Latin as a universal language. § The first translation of the complete Bible into English was the Wycliffite Bible produced between 1380 and 1384, which marked the start of a great flowering of English Bible translations linked to changing attitudes to the role of the written text in the church, that formed part of the developing Reformation. John Wycliffe (c. 1330–84), the noted Oxford theologian, put forward the theory of <dominion by grace> according to which man was immediately responsible to God and God’s law (by which Wycliffe intended not canon law but the guidance of the Bible). Since Wycliffe’s theory meant that the Bible was applicable to all human life it followed that each man should be granted access to that crucial text in a language that he could understand, i.e. in the vernacular.” “his disciple John Purvey revised the first edition some time before 1408 (the first dated manuscript).”
WIKIPÉDIA NOS TEMPOS DO RONCA
“(1) a collaborative effort of collecting old Bibles and glosses and establishing an authentic Latin source text;
(2) a comparison of the versions;
(3) counselling <with old grammarians and old divines> about hard words and complex meanings; and
(4) translating as clearly as possible the <sentence> (i.e. meaning), with the translation corrected by a group of collaborators.”
“After the Wycliffite versions, the next great English translation was William Tyndale’s (1494–1536) New Testamentprinted in 1525. Tyndale’s proclaimed intention in translating was also to offer as clear a version as possible to the layman, and by the time he was burned at the stake in 1536 he had translated the New Testament from the Greek and parts of the Old Testament from the Hebrew.”
“In 1482, the Hebrew Pentateuch had been printed at Bologna and the complete Hebrew Bible appeared in 1488, whilst Erasmus, the Dutch Humanist, published the first Greek New Testament in Basle in 1516. This version was to serve as the basis for Martin Luther’s 1522 German version. Translations of the New Testament appeared in Danish in 1529 and again in 1550, in Swedish in 1526–41, and the Czech Bible appeared between 1579–93. Translations and revised versions of existing translations continued to appear in English, Dutch, German and French.”
“I would desire that all women should reade the gospell and Paules episteles and I wold to God they were translated in to the tonges of all men so that they might not only be read and knowne of the scotes and yrishmen/
But also of the Turkes and the Sarracenes…. I wold to God the plowman wold singe a texte of the scripture at his plow-beme. And that the wever at his lowme with this wold drive away the tediousnes of tyme. I wold the wayfaringeman with this pastyme wold expelle the weriness of his iorney. And to be shorte I wold that all the communication of the christen shuld be of the scripture for in a manner such are we oure selves as our daylye tales are.” Erasmus
“Coverdale’s Bible (1535) was also banned but the tide of Bible translation could not be stemmed, and each successive version drew on the work of previous translators, borrowing, amending, revising and correcting.”
“(1) To clarify errors arising from previous versions, due to inadequate SL manuscripts or to linguistic incompetence;
(2) To produce an accessible and aesthetically satisfying vernacular style;
(3) To clarify points of dogma and reduce the extent to which the scriptures were interpreted and re-presented to the lay–people as a metatext.
In his Circular Letter on Translation of 1530 Martin Luther lays such emphasis on the significance of (2) that he uses the verbs übersetzen (to translate) and verdeutschen (to Germanize) almost indiscriminately.”
“In an age when the choice of a pronoun could mean the difference between life or condemnation to death as a heretic, precision was of central importance.”
“In the Preface to the King James Bible of 1611, entitled The Translators to the Reader, the question is asked <is the kingdom of God words or syllables?>”
“With regard to English, for example, the Lindisfarne Gospels (copied out c. AD 700), had a literal rendering of the Latin original inserted between the lines in the tenth century in Northumbrian dialect. These glosses subordinated notions of stylistic excellence to the word-for-word method, but may still be fairly described as translations, since they involved a process of interlingual transfer. However, the system of glossing was only one aspect of translation in the centuries that saw the emergence of distinct European languages in a written form. In the ninth century King Alfred (reign 871–99), who had translated (or caused to be translated) a number of Latin texts, declared that the purpose of translating was to help the English people to recover from the devastation of the Danish invasions that had laid waste the old monastic centres of learning and had demoralized and divided the kingdom. In his Preface to his translation of the Cura Pastoralis (a handbook for parish priests) Alfred urges a revival of learning through greater accessibility of texts as a direct result of translations into the vernacular, and at the same time he asserts the claims of English as a literary language in its own right. Discussing the way in which the Romans translated texts for their own purposes, as did <all other Christian nations>, Alfred states that <I think it better, if you agree, that we also translate some of the books that all men should know into the language that we can all understand.> In translating the Cura Pastoralis, Alfred claims to have followed the teachings of his bishop and priests and to have rendered the text hwilum word be worde, hwilum andgiet of andgiete (sometimes word by word, sometimes sense by sense), an interesting point in that it implies that the function of the finished product was the determining factor in the translation process rather than any established canon of procedure. Translation is perceived as having a moral and didactic purpose with a clear political role to play, far removed from its purely instrumental role in the study of rhetoric that coexisted at the same time.
The concept of translation as a writing exercise and as a means of improving oratorical style was an important component in the medieval educational system based on the study of the Seven Liberal Arts. This system, as passed down from such Roman theoreticians as Quintilian (first century AD) whose Institutio Oratoria was a seminal text, established two areas of study, the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy), with the Trivium as the basis for philosophical knowledge.” “Quintilian recommends translating from Greek into Latin as a variation on paraphrasing original Latin texts in order to extend and develop the student’s imaginative powers.”
“In his useful article on vulgarization and translation, Gianfranco Folena suggests that medieval translation might be described either as vertical, by which he intends translation into the vernacular from a SL that has a special prestige or value (e.g. Latin), or as horizontal, where both SL and TL have a similar value (e.g. Provençal into Italian, Norman-French into English).” “And whilst the vertical approach splits into two distinct types, the interlinear gloss, or word-for-word technique, as opposed to the Ciceronian sense-for-sense method, elaborated by Quintilian’s concept of para-phrase, the horizontal approach involves complex questions of imitatio and borrowing.”
“Within the opus of a single writer, such as Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) there is a range of texts that include acknowledged translations, free adaptations, conscious borrowings, reworkings and close correspondences.”
“One of the first writers to formulate a theory of translation was the French humanist Étienne Dolet (1509–46) who was tried and executed for heresy after <mistranslating> one of Plato’s dialogues in such a way as to imply disbelief in immortality. In 1540 Dolet published a short outline of translation principles, entitled La manière de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre (How to Translate Well from one Language into Another)”
“the frequent replacement of indirect discourse by direct discourse in North’s translation of Plutarch (1579), a device that adds immediacy and vitality to the text”
“Translation was by no means a secondary activity, but a primary one, exerting a shaping force on the intellectual life of the age, and at times the figure of the translator appears almost as a revolutionary activist rather than the servant of an original author or text.”
O DEMORADO ECO ITALIANO: “Translation of the classics increased considerably in France between 1625 and 1660, the great age of French classicism and of the flowering of French theatre based on the Aristotelian unities. French writers and theorists were in turn enthusiastically translated into English.”
“for it is not his business alone to translate Language into Language, but Poesie into Poesie; and Poesie is of so subtile a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum.”John Denham
“o prefácio de Cowley foi tomado como o manifesto dos <tradutores libertinos dos fins do século XVII>.”
PINTOR AB EXTRATO
“I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.” Dryden
NÓS OS JURAMENTADOS HÁ 200 ANOS ÉRAMOS MAIS DESIMPEDIDOS: “The impulse to clarify and make plain the essential spirit of a text led to large-scale rewritings of earlier texts to fit them to contemporary standards of language and taste. Hence the famous re-structuring of Shakespearian texts, and the translations/reworkings of Racine. Dr. [nem existia doutorado nessa época, fala sério] Johnson (1709–84), in his Life of Pope [que não era o Papa] (1779–80), discussing the question of additions to a text through translation, comments that if elegance is gained, surely it is desirable, provided nothing is taken away [mais é mais], and goes on to state that <the purpose of a writer is to be read> [diria que acertou em cheio, mas não é muito difícil…], claiming that Pope wrote for his own time and his own nation. The right of the individual to be addressed in his own terms, on his own ground is an important element in eighteenth-century translation and is linked to changing concepts of <originality>.”
“Pope’s Andromache [Ilíada] suffers and despairs, whilst Chapman’s Andromache comes across as a warrior in her own right. Chapman’s use of direct verbs gives a dramatic quality to the scene, whilst Pope’s Latinate structures emphasize the agony of expectation leading up to the moment when the horror is plain to see. And even that horror is quite differently presented—Pope’s <god-like Hector> contrasts with Chapman’s longer description of the hero’s degradation:
(…)
Too soon her Eyes the killing Object found,
The god-like Hector dragg’d along the ground.
A sudden Darkness shades her swimming Eyes:
She faints, she falls; her Breath, her colour flies. (Pope)
(…)
Round she cast her greedy eye, and saw her Hector slain, and bound
T’Achilles chariot, manlessly dragg’d to the Grecian fleet,
Black night strook through her, under her trance took away her feet. (Chapman)”
“Goethe (1749–1832) argued that every literature must pass through three phases of translation, although as the phases are recurrent all may be found taking place within the same language system at the same time. The first epoch <acquaints us with foreign countries on our own terms>, and Goethe cites Luther’s German Bible as an example of this tendency. The second mode is that of appropriation through substitution and reproduction, where the translator absorbs the sense of a foreign work but reproduces it in his own terms, and here Goethe cites Wieland and the French tradition of translating (a tradition much disparaged by German theorists). The third mode, which he considers the highest, is one which aims for perfect identity between the SL text and the TL text, and the achieving of this mode must be through the creation of a new <manner> which fuses the uniqueness of the original with a new form and structure. Goethe cites the work of Voss, who translated Homer, as an example of a translator who had achieved this prized third level. Goethe is arguing for both a new concept of <originality> in translation, together with a vision of universal deep structures that the translator should strive to meet. The problem with such an approach is that it is moving dangerously close to a theory of untranslatability.”
“the translator cannot use the same colours as the original, but is nevertheless required to give his picture <the same force and effect>.”
“With the affirmation of individualism came the notion of the freedom of the creative force, making the poet into a quasi-mystical creator, whose function was to produce the poetry that would create anew the universe, as Shelley argued in The Defence of Poesy (1820).”
“In England, Coleridge (1772–1834) in his Biographia Literaria (1817) outlined his theory of the distinction between Fancy and Imagination, asserting that Imagination is the supreme creative and organic power, as opposed to the lifeless mechanism of Fancy. This theory has affinities with the theory of the opposition of mechanical and organic form outlined by the German theorist and translator, August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) in his Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1809), translated into English in 1813.” “A.W. Schlegel, asserting that all acts of speaking and writing are acts of translation because the nature of communication is to decode and interpret messages received, also insisted that the form of the original should be retained (for example, he retained Dante’s terza rima in his own translations). Meanwhile, Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) conceived of translation as a category of thought rather than as an activity connected only with language or literature.”
“The idea of writers at all times being involved in a process of repeating what Blake called <the Divine Body in Every Man> resulted in a vast number of translations, such as the Schlegel-Tieck translations of Shakespeare (1797–1833), Schlegel’s version and Cary’s version of the Divina Commedia (1805–14) and the large intertraffic of translations of critical works and of contemporary writings across the European languages. Indeed, so many texts were translated at this time that were to have a seminal effect on the TL (e.g. German authors into English and vice versa, Scott and Byron into French and Italian, etc.) that critics have found it difficult to distinguish between influence study and translation study proper. Stress on the impact of the translation in the target culture in fact resulted in a shift of interest away from the actual processes of translation.”
“If poetry is perceived as a separate entity from language, how can it be translated unless it is assumed that the translator is able to read between the words of the original and hence reproduce the text-behind-the-text; what Mallarmé would later elaborate as the text of silence and spaces?” “with the shift of emphasis away from the formal processes of translation, the notion of untranslatability would lead on to the exaggerated emphasis on technical accuracy and resulting pedantry of later nineteenth-century translating.”
“an explanation of the function of peculiarity can be found in G.A. Simcox’s review of Morris’ translation of The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs (1870) when he declared that the <quaint archaic English of the translation with just the right outlandish flavour> did much to <disguise the inequalities and incompletenesses of the original>”
“What emerges from the Schleiermacher—Carlyle—Pre-Raphaelite concept of translation, therefore, is an interesting paradox. On the one hand there is an immense respect, verging on adulation, for the original, but that respect is based on the individual writer’s sureness of its worth. In other words, the translator invites the intellectual, cultivated reader to share what he deems to be an enriching experience, either on moral or aesthetic grounds. Moreover, the original text is perceived as property, as an item of beauty to be added to a collection, with no concessions to the taste or expectations of contemporary life. On the other hand, by producing consciously archaic translations designed to be read by a minority, the translators implicitly reject the ideal of universal literacy. The intellectual reader represented a very small minority in the increasingly diffuse reading public that expanded throughout the century, and hence the foundations were laid for the notion of translation as a minority interest.”
“Let not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought of him; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what the ordinary English reader thinks of him; he will be taking the blind for his guide. Let him not trust to his own judgement of his own work; he may be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry.” Matthew Arnold [vide polêmica elencada acima]
“But although archaizing [afetação, hermetismo]has gone out of fashion, it is important to remember that there were sound theoretical principles for its adoption by translators. George Steiner raises important issues when he discusses the practice, with particular reference to Émile Littré’s theory and his L’Enfer mis en vieux longage François (1879) and to Rudolf Borchardt and his Dante Deutsch:
<The proposition ‘the foreign poet would have produced such and such a text had he been writing in my language’ is a projective fabrication. It underwrites the autonomy, more exactly, the ‘meta-autonomy’ of the translation. But it does much more: it introduces an alternate existence, a ‘might have been’ or ‘is yet to come’ into the substance and historical condition of one’s own language, literature and legacy of sensibility.>
The archaizing principle, then, in an age of social change on an unprecedented scale, can be compared to an attempt to <colonize> the past. (…) The distance between this version of translation and the vision of Cicero and Horace, also the products of an expanding state, could hardly be greater.”
IANQUES, VANGUARDA DO ATRASO: “The increased isolationism of British and American intellectual life, combined with the anti-theoretical developments in literary criticism did not help to further the scientific examination of translation in English. Indeed, it is hard to believe, when considering some of the studies in English, that they were written in the same age that saw the rise of Czech Structuralism and the New Critics, the development of communication theory, the application of linguistics to the study of translation: in short, to the establishment of the bases from which recent work in translation theory has been able to proceed.”
“The work of Ezra Pound [Literary Essays] is of immense importance in the history of translation, and Pound’s skill as a translator was matched by his perceptiveness as critic and theorist.”
“George Steiner, taking a rather idiosyncratic view of translation history, feels that although there is a profusion of pragmatic accounts by individuals the range of theoretic ideas remains small:
[OS TREZE CAVALEIROS]<List Saint Jerome, Luther, Dryden, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Ezra Pound, Valéry, MacKenna, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Quine—and you have very nearly the sum total of those who have said anything fundamental or new about translation.>”
3. PROBLEMAS ESPECÍFICOS
“Anne Cluysenaar goes on to analyse C.Day Lewis’ translation of Valéry’s poem, Les pas and comes to the conclusion that the translation does not work because the translator <was working without an adequate theory of literary translation>.” “what is needed is a description of the dominant structure of every individual work to be translated.”
“Every literary unit from the individual sentence to the whole order of words can be seen in relation to the concept of system. In particular, we can look at individual works, literary genres, and the whole of literature as related systems, and at literature as a system within the larger system of human culture.” Robert Scholes
Entram num bar: um conteudista, um contextualista, um interesseiro (ou pragmatista) e um deviacionista (selecionador de citações). Qual deles sou eu?
devil acionista
Um concurseiro, um leitor dinâmico, um diletante, um político e um filho de escritor numa roda intelectual-boêmia. Todos falam, mas só o próprio falante se escuta.
“The translator is, after all, first a reader and then a writer and in the process of reading he or she must take a position.”
“CHOICER”: “The twentieth-century reader’s dislike of the Patient Griselda motif is an example of just such a shift in perception, whilst the disappearance of the epic poem in western European literatures has inevitably led to a change in reading such works.”
suco de palavras
(brincadeira de adultocriança)
“the reader/translator will be unable to avoid finding himself in Lotman’s fourth position[aquele que seleciona conteúdos conforme seu interesse humanista-cultural, eu no Seclusão: menos um nazista que cita Nietzsche com propósitos escusos do que alguém que busca simplesmente tirar proveito de algo que possa ainda repercutir num mar de coisas que perderam a referência e o sentido para o homem contemporâneo…] without detailed etymological research. So when Gloucester, in King Lear, Act III sc. vii, bound, tormented and about to have his eyes gouged out, attacks Regan with the phrase <Naughty lady>, it ought to be clear that there has been considerable shift in the weight of the adjective, now used to admonish children or to describe some slightly comic (often sexual) peccadillo.” Danadinha… Perniciosa, insidiosa. Erva daninha!
PIRE(PYRE) COM MODERAÇÃO(FOGO BAIXO): “Quite clearly, the idea of the reader as translator and the enormous freedom this vision bestows must be handled responsibly. The reader/translator who does not acknowledge the dialectical materialist basis of Brecht’s plays or who misses the irony in Shakespeare’s sonnets or who ignores the way in which the doctrine of the transubstantiation is used as a masking device for the production of Vittorini’s anti-Fascist statement in Conversazioni in Sicilia is upsetting the balance of power by treating the original as his own property.”
4. TRADUZINDO POESIA
“Catullus, after all, was an aristocrat, whose language, although flexible, is elegant, and Copley’s speaker is a caricature of a teenager from the Johnny [sic – Johnnie] Ray generation. Copley’s choice of register makes the reader respond in a way that downgrades the material itself. The poem is no longer a rather suave and sophisticated mingling of several elements, it is located very precisely in a specific time and context. And, of course, in the relatively short time since the translation appeared, its language and tone have become almost as remote as that of the original!” “The great difference between a text and a metatext is that the one is fixed in time and place, the other is variable. There is only one Divina Commedia but there are innumerable readings and in theory innumerable translations.”
“Both English versions appear to stress the I pronoun, because Italian sentence structure is able to dispense with pronouns in verbal phrases. Both opt for the translation make out for distinguo, which alters the English register. The final line of the poem, deliberately longer in the SL version, is rendered longer also in both English versions, but here there is substantial deviation between the two. Version B keeps closely to the original in that it retains the Latinate abandoned as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon adrift in version A. Version B retains the single word infinite, that is spelled out in more detail in version A with infinite space, a device that also adds an element of rhyme to the poem.
The apparent simplicity of the Italian poem, with its clear images and simple structure conceals a deliberate recourse to that process defined by the Russian Formalists as ostranenie, i.e. making strange, or consciously thickening language within the system of the individual work to heighten perception (see Tony Bennet, Formalism and Marxism, London 1979). Seen in this light, version A, whilst pursuing the ‘normalcy’ of Ungaretti’s linguistic structures, loses much of the power of what Ungaretti described as the ‘word-image’. Version B, on the other hand, opts for a higher tone or register, with rhetorical devices of inverted sentence structure and the long, Latinate final line in an attempt to arrive at a ‘thickened’ language by another route.”
“The most striking aspect of any comparison of these three sonnets is the range of variation between them. Petrarch’s sonnet splits into octet and sestet and follows the rhyme scheme a b b a/a b b a/c d c/c d c. Wyatt’s poem is similarly divided, but here the rhyme scheme is a b b a/a b b a/c d c/c d d which serves to set the final two lines apart. Surrey’s poem varies much more: a b a b/c d c d/e c e c/f f and consists of three four-line sections building to the final couplet. The significance of these variations in form becomes clear once each sonnet is read closely.”
“What can I do, he asks, since my Lord Amor is afeared (and I fear him), except to stay with him to the final hour? and adds, in the last line, that he who dies loving well makes a good end.” “He does not act but is acted upon, and the structure of the poem, with the first person singular verbal form only used at the end, and then only in a question that stresses his helplessness, reinforces this picture.” “But it is not enough to consider this poem in isolation, it must be seen as part of Petrarch’s Canzoniere and linked therefore through language structures, imagery and a central shaping concept, to the other poems in the collection.”
“Wyatt creates the image of ‘the hertes forrest’, and by using nouns ‘with payne and cry’, instead of verbs lessens the picture of total, abject humiliation painted by Petrarch.” “The Lover in Wyatt’s poem asks a question that does not so much stress his helplessness as his good intentions and bravery. The Italian temendo il mio signore carries with it an ambiguity (either the Lord fears or the Lover fears the Lord, or, most probably, both) whilst Wyatt has stated very plainly that ‘my master fereth’. The final line, ‘For goode is the liff, ending faithfully’ strengthens the vision of the Lover as noble. Whereas the Petrarchan lover seems to be describing the beauty of death through constant love, Wyatt’s lover stresses the virtues of a good life and a faithful end.” “Love shows his colours and is repulsed and the Lover sets up the alternative ideal of a good life. We are in the world of politics, of the individual geared towards ensuring his survival, a long way from the pre-Reformation world of Petrarch.”
“It is in Surrey’s version that the military language prevails, whilst Wyatt reduces the terminology of battle to a terminology of pageantry.” “The Lover is ‘captyve’, and he and Love have often fought. Moreover, the Lady is not in an unreachable position, angered by the display of Love. She is already won and is merely angered by what appears to be excessive ardour.”“Moreover, in the final line of the third quartet, the Lover states plainly that he is ‘fawtless’ and suffers because of ‘my lordes gylt’. The device of splitting the poem into three four-line stanzas can be seen as a way of reshaping the material content. The poem does not build to a question and a final line on the virtues of dying, loving well. It builds instead to a couplet in which the Lover states his determination not to abandon his guilty lord even in the face of death. The voice of the poem and the voice of the Lover are indistinguishable, and the stress on the I, apparent in Wyatt’s poem already, is strengthened by those points in the poem where there is a clear identification with the Lover’s position against the bad behaviour of the false lord Love.”
“But Wyatt and Surrey’s translations, like Jonson’s Catullus translation, would have been read by their contemporaries through prior knowledge of the original, and those shifts that have been condemned by subsequent generations as taking something away from Petrarch, would have had a very different function in the circles of Wyatt and Surrey’s cultured intellectual readership.” Now nobody reads Petrarch!
5. TRADUZINDO PROSA
“although analysis of narrative has had enormous influence since Shlovsky’s early theory of prose, there are obviously many readers who still adhere to the principle that a novel consists primarily of paraphrasable material content that can be translated straight-forwardly. And whereas there seems to be a common consensus that a prose paraphrase of a poem is judged to be inadequate, there is no such consensus regarding the prose text.”
Belloc points out that the French historic present must be translated into the English narrative tense, which is past, and the French system ofdefining a proposition by putting it into the form of a rhetorical question cannot be transposed into English where the same system does not apply.”
“Let us consider as an example the problem of translating proper names in Russian prose texts, a problem that has bedevilled generations of translators. Cathy Porter’s translation of Alexandra Kollontai’s Love of Worker Bees contains the following note:
Russians have a first (‘Christian’) name, a patronymic and a surname. The customary mode of address is first name plus patronymic, thus, Vasilisa Dementevna, Maria Semenovna. There are more intimate abbreviations of first names which have subtly affectionate, patronizing or friendly overtones. So for instance Vasilisa becomes Vasya, Vasyuk, and Vladimir becomes Volodya, Volodka, Volodechka, Volya.”
“So in discussing The Brothers Karamazov Uspensky shows how the naming system can indicate multiple points of view, as a character is perceived both by other characters in the novel and from within the narrative. In the translation process, therefore, it is essential for the translator to consider the function of the naming system, rather than the system itself. It is of little use for the English reader to be given multiple variants of a name if he is not made aware of the function of those variants, and since the English naming system is completely different the translator must take this into account and follow Belloc’s dictum to render ‘idiom by idiom’.”
6. TRADUZINDO PEÇAS
“Arguably, the volume of ‘complete plays’ has been produced primarily for a reading public where literalness and linguistic fidelity have been principal criteria. But in trying to formulate any theory of theatre translation, Bogatyrev’s description of linguistic expression must be taken into account, and the linguistic element must be translated bearing in mind its function in theatre discourse as a whole.” Platão seria Teatro?
“The leaden pedantry of many English versions of Racine, for example, is apt testimony to the fault of excessive literalness, but the problem of defining ‘freedom’ in a theatre translation is less easy to discern.”
* * *
7. (MAIS) APROFUNDAMENTO
André Lefevere, Translating Literature: The German Tradition. From Luther to Rosenzweig (Assen and Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977)
Anton Popovič, Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation (Dept. of Comparative Literature, University of Alberta, 1976)
De Beaugrande, Robert, Shunnaq, Abdulla and Heliel, Mohamed H., (eds.), Language, Discourse and Translation in the West and Middle East (Amsterdam: John Bejamins, 1994)
Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality (Selected Writings) ed. J.B.Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1956)
Chan, Sin-Wai, and Pollard, David, (eds), An Encyclopaedia of Translation. Chinese/English, English/Chinese (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994)
Cicero, ‘Right and Wrong’, in Latin Literature, ed. M.Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Preface to his translations of Early Italian Poets, Poems and Translations, 1850–1870 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968)
Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum (Basle: Froben, 1516). 1529, tr. W. Tindale.
Francis Newman, ‘Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice’ in Essays by Matthew Arnold (London: Oxford University Press, 1914)
Hilaire Belloc, On Translation (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931)
Horace, On the Art of Poetry, in Classical Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965)
Jacobsen, Eric, Translation: A Traditional Craft (Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag, 1958) “This book contains much interesting information about the function of translation within the terms of medieval rhetorical tradition, but, as the author states in the introduction, avoids as far as possible discussion of the general theory and principles of translation.”
Joachim du Bellay – Défense et lllustration de la Langue française
Josephine Balmer, Classical Women Poets (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books 1997)
Keir Elam, Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980)
Levý, Jiří, ‘The Translation of Verbal Art’, in L.Matejka and I.R.Titunik (eds), Semiotics of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976)
Liu, Lydia H., Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity in China 1900–7937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)
Luis, William and Rodriguez-Luis, Julio, (eds), Translating Latin America. Culture as Text (Binghamton: Centre for Research in Translation: State University of New York at Binghamton, 1991)
Mukherjee, Sujit, Translation as Discovery and Other Essays on Indian Literature in English Translation (New Delhi: Allied Publishers/London: Sangam Books, 1981), 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1994)
Nirenburg, S. (ed.), Machine Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Issues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Oittinen, Riita, I am Me—I am Other: On the Dialogics of Translating for Children (Tampere: University of Tampere, 1993)
Rafael, Vicente, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988)
Simon, Sherry, Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London: Routledge, 1996)
Somekh, Sasson, ‘The Emergence of two sets of Stylistic Norms in the early Literary Translation into Modern Arabic Prose’, Poetics Today, 2, 4, 1981, pp. 193–200.
Vanderauwera, Ria, Dutch Novels Translated into English: The Transformation of a ‘Minority’ Literature (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1985)
Wollin, Hans and Lindquist Hans, (eds), Translation Studies in Scandinavia (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1986)
ACTION (Moral). “une femme qui a été violée passe pour coupable, en partie, lorsquelle s’est exposée imprudemment à aller dans les lieux où elle pouvoit prévoir qu’elle couroit risque d’être forcée.” (X)
ACTION (Physique). “M. de Maupertuis a cherché à concilier l’explication de M. Newton avec les principes métaphysiques. Au lieu de supposer avec MM. de Fermat & Leibnitz qu’un corpuscule de lumiere va d’un point à un autre dans le plus court tems possible, il suppose qu’un corpuscule de lumiere va d’un point à un autre, de maniere que la quantité d’action soit la moindre qu’il est possible. Cette quantité d’action, dit-il, est la vraie dépense que la nature ménage. Par ce principe philosophique, il trouve que non-seulement les sinus [senos, relações dos raios com as perpendiculares das figuras geométricas] sont en raison constante, mais qu’ils sont en raison inverse des vitesses, (ce qui s’accorde avec l’explication de M. Newton) & non pas en raison directe, comme le prétendoient MM. de Fermat & Leibnitz.”
ACTION (Belles-Lettres). “L’action des nôtres, quoique plus modérée que celle des Italiens, est infiniment plus vive que celle des Anglois, dont les Sermons se réduisent à lire froidement une dissertation Théologique sur quelque point de l’Écriture, sans aucun mouvement.”
ACTION (Poësie). “Ainsi dans l’Eneïdeun Héros échappé des ruines de sa patrie, erre longtems avec les restes de ses Concitoyens qui l’ont choisi pour Roi; & malgré la colere de Junon qui le poursuit sans relâche, il arrive dans un pays que lui promettoient les destins, y défait des ennemis redoutables; & après mille traverses surmontées avec autant de sagesse que de valeur, il y jette les fondemens d’un puissant Empire. Ainsi la conquête de Jérusalem par les Croisés; celle des indes par les Portugais; la réduction de Paris par Henri le Grand, malgré les efforts de la Ligue, sont le sujet des Poëmes du Tasse, du Camoens, & de M. de Voltaire; d’où il est aisé de conclurre qu’une historiette, une intrigue amoureuse, ou telle autre aventure qui fait le fonds de nos romans, ne peut jamais devenir la matiere d’un Poëme Epique, qui veut dans le sujet de la noblesse & de la majesté.”
“Il y a deux manieres de rendre l’action épique intéressante: la premiere par la dignité & l’importance des personnages. C’est la seule dont Homere fasse usage, n’y ayant rien d’ailleurs d’important dans ses modeles, & qui ne puisse arriver à des personnages ordinaires. La seconde est l’importance de l’action en elle-même, comme l’établissement ou l’abolition d’une Religion ou d’un Etat, tel qu’est le sujet choisi par Virgile, qui en ce point l’emporte sur Homere. L’action de la Henriade réunit dans un haut degré ce double intérêt.”
“L’Iliade n’est que l’histoire de la colere d’Achille, & l’Odyssée, que celle du retour d’Ulysse à Itaque. Homere n’a voulu décrire ni toute la vie de ce dernier, ni toute la guerre de Troie. Stace au contraire dans son Achilléide, & Lucain dans sa Pharsale, ont entassé trop d’évenemens décousus pour que leurs ouvrages méritent le nom de Poëmes Epiques. On leur donne celui d’héroïques, parce qu’il s’y agit de Héros. Mais il fant prendre garde que l’unité du Héros ne fait pas l’unité de l’action. La vie de l’homme est pleine d’inégalités; il change sans cesse de dessein, ou par l’inconstance de ses passions, ou par les accidens imprévûs de la vie. Qui voudroit décrire tout l’homme, ne formeroit qu’un tableau bisarre, un contraste de passions opposées sans liaison & sans ordre. C’est pourquoi l’épopée n’est pas la loüange d’un Héros qu’on se propose pour modele, mais le récit d’une action grande & illustre qu’on donne pour exemple.”
P. le Bossu – Traité du Poëme Epique
“L’action de l’Epopée doit être merveilleuse, c’est-à-dire, pleine de fictions hardies, mais cependant vraissemblables. Telle est l’intervention des divinités du paganisme dans les Poëmes des Anciens, & dans ceux des Modernes celle des passions personnifiées. Mais quoique le Poëte puisse aller quelquefois au-delà de la nature, il ne doit jamais choquer la raison. Il y a un merveilleux sage & un merveilleux ridicule. On trouvera sous les mots Machines & Merveilleux cette matiere traitée dans une juste étendue.”
“Le P. le Bossu donne pour regle que plus les passions des principaux personnages sont violens, & moins l’action doit durer: qu’en conséquence l’action de l’Iliade, dont le courroux d’Achille est l’ame, ne dure que 47 jours; au lieu que celle de l’Odyssée, où la prudence est la qualité dominante, dure huit ans & demi; & celle de l’Eneïde, où le principal personnage est un Héros pieux & humain, près de sept ans.”
“Il est vrai qu’Ulysse chez Alcinoüs, & Enée chez Didon, racontent leurs aventures passées, mais ces récits n’entrent que comme récits dans la durée de l’action principale; & le cours des années qu’ont pour ainsi dire consumé ces évenemens, ne fait en aucune maniere partie de la durée du Poëme. Comme dans la Tragédie, les évenemens racontés dans la Protase, & qui servent à l’intelligence de l’action dramatique, n’entrent point dans sa durée; ainsi l’erreur du P. le Bossu est manifeste.”
“ACTION (Peinture & Sculpture). C’est l’attitude ou la position des parties du visage & du corps des figures représentées, qui fait juger qu’elles sont agitées de passions. On dit: cette figure exprime bien par son action les passions dont elle est agitée; cette action est bien d’un homme effrayé. L’on se sert également de ce terme pour les animaux; l’on dit: voilà un chien dont l’action exprime bien la fureur; d’un cerf aux abois [berros]: voilà un cerf qui par son action exprime sa douleur, &c.” (R)
“Diga-se o que se disser a este respeito, a verdade é que nenhum dos regimes democráticos nascidos na Europa após a Segunda Guerra Mundial foi abatido por uma ditadura, como ocorrera após a Primeira. Ao contrário, algumas ditaduras que sobreviveram à catástrofe da guerra transformaram-se em democracias. Enquanto o mundo soviético é sacudido por frêmitos democráticos, o mundo das democracias ocidentais não está seriamente ameaçado por movimentos fascistas.” Como o tempo passa, sr. Bobbio!
“Existe inclusive quem empregou, com ou sem razão, o conceito de despotismo oriental para explicar a situação da União Soviética.”
“Pode-se definir a democracia das maneiras as mais diversas, mas não existe definição que possa deixar de incluir em seus conotativos a visibilidade ou transparência do poder. (…) Os construtores dos primeiros regimes democráticos propuseram-se a dar vida a uma forma de governo na qual este núcleo duro fosse definitivamente destruído”
“Retomo a minha velha idéia de que direito e poder são as duas faces de uma mesma moeda: só o poder pode criar direito e só o direito pode limitar o poder. O estado despótico é o tipo ideal de estado de quem se coloca do ponto de vista do poder; no extremo oposto encontra-se o estado democrático, que é o tipo ideal de estado de quem se coloca do ponto de vista do direito. Quando exaltavam o governo das leis em contraposição ao governo dos homens, os antigos tinham em mente leis derivadas da tradição ou forjadas pelos grandes legisladores. Hoje, quando falamos de governo das leis pensamos em primeiro lugar nas leis fundamentais, capazes de estabelecer não tanto aquilo que os governados devem fazer quanto como as leis devem ser elaboradas, sendo normas que vinculam, antes ainda que os cidadãos, os próprios governantes: temos em mente um governo das leis num nível superior, no qual os próprios legisladores estão submetidos a normas vinculatórias. Um ordenamento deste gênero apenas é possível se aqueles que exercem poderes em todos os níveis puderem ser controlados em última instância pelos possuidores originários do poder fundamental, os indivíduos singulares.”
autoformação gregária
rebanho que ensina
“a direita reacionária perene, que ressurge continuamente sob as mais diversas vestes mas com o mesmo rancor de sempre contra os <princípios imortais>.”
“Em suas lições sobre a filosofia da história na universidade de Berlim, Hegel, respondendo a um estudante que dele queria saber se os Estados Unidos deveriam ser considerados como o país do futuro —, assim se manifestou, visivelmente irritado: <Como país do futuro, a América não me diz respeito. O filósofo não se afina com profecias (…) A filosofia ocupa-se daquilo que é eternamente, ou melhor, da razão, e com isto já temos muito o que fazer>.”
“Na sua célebre conferência, proferida aos estudantes da universidade de Mônaco no final da guerra, sobre a ciência como vocação, Max Weber assim respondeu aos seus ouvintes que lhe pediam insistentemente um parecer sobre o futuro da Alemanha: <A cátedra não existe nem para os demagogos nem para os profetas>.”
“É por isto que as previsões feitas pelos grandes mestres do pensamento sobre o curso do mundo acabaram por se revelar, no final das contas, quase sempre erradas, a começar daquelas feitas por aquele que boa parte da humanidade considerou e ainda considera o fundador de uma nova e infalível ciência da sociedade, Karl Marx.”
“Estado liberal e estado democrático são interdependentes em dois modos: na direção que vai do liberalismo à democracia, no sentido de que são necessárias certas liberdades para o exercício correto do poder democrático, e na direção oposta que vai da democracia ao liberalismo, no sentido de que é necessário o poder democrático para garantir a existência e a persistência das liberdades fundamentais.”
“Algum tempo atrás, um meu ouvinte chamou minha atenção para as palavras conclusivas que Pasternak põe na boca de Gordon, o amigo do doutor Jivago: <Aconteceu mais vezes na história. O que foi concebido como nobre e elevado tornou-se matéria bruta. Assim a Grécia tornou-se Roma, assim o iluminismo russo tornou-se a revolução russa>.”
“A democracia representativa, que é a única forma de democracia existente e em funcionamento, é já por si mesma uma renúncia ao princípio da liberdade como autonomia. A hipótese de que a futura computadorcracia, como tem sido chamada, permita o exercício da democracia direta, isto é, dê a cada cidadão a possibilidade de transmitir o próprio voto a um cérebro eletrônico, é uma hipótese absolutamente pueril. A julgar pelas leis promulgadas a cada ano na Itália, o bom cidadão deveria ser convocado para exprimir seu próprio voto ao menos uma vez por dia. O excesso de participação, produto do fenômeno que Dahrendorf chamou depreciativamente de cidadão total, pode ter como efeito a saciedade de política e o aumento da apatia eleitoral.”
“a presença do poder invisível (máfia, camorra, lojas maçônicas anômalas, serviços secretos incontroláveis e acobertadores dos subversivos que deveriam combater)”
“No <Apêndice II> à Paz Perpétua, Kant enunciou e ilustrou o princípio fundamental segundo o qual <todas as ações relativas ao direito de outros homens cuja máxima não é suscetível de se tornar pública são injustas>”
“O ideal do poderoso sempre foi o de ver cada gesto e escutar cada palavra dos que estão a ele submetidos (se possível sem ser visto nem ouvido): hoje este ideal é inalcançável. Nenhum déspota da antiguidade, nenhum monarca absoluto da idade moderna, apesar de cercado por mil espiões, jamais conseguiu ter sobre seus súditos todas as informações que o mais democrático dos governos atuais pode obter com o uso dos cérebros eletrônicos.” Bobbio é bobinho.
“o desmantelamento do estado de serviços — estado este que exigiu um aparato burocrático até agora jamais conhecido — esconde o propósito, não digo de desmantelar, mas de reduzir a limites bem circunscritos o poder democrático. Que democratização e burocratização caminharam no mesmo passo é algo evidente, como de resto havia já observado Max Weber. Quando os proprietários eram os únicos que tinham direito de voto, era natural que pedissem ao poder público o exercício de apenas uma função primária: a proteção da propriedade. Daqui nasceu a doutrina do estado limitado, do estado carabiniere ou, como se diz hoje, do estado mínimo, e configurou-se o estado como associação dos proprietários para a defesa daquele direito natural supremo que era exatamente, para Locke, o direito de propriedade. A partir do momento em que o voto foi estendido aos analfabetos tornou-se inevitável que estes pedissem ao estado a instituição de escolas gratuitas; com isto, o estado teve que arcar com um ônus desconhecido pelo estado das oligarquias tradicionais e da primeira oligarquia burguesa. Quando o direito de voto foi estendido também aos não-proprietários, aos que nada tinham, aos que tinham como propriedade tão-somente a força de trabalho, a conseqüência foi que se começou a exigir do estado a proteção contra o desemprego e, pouco a pouco, seguros sociais contra as doenças e a velhice, providências em favor da maternidade, casas a preços populares, etc. Assim aconteceu que o estado de serviços, o estado social, foi, agrade ou não, a resposta a uma demanda vinda de baixo, a uma demanda democrática no sentido pleno da palavra.”
“Terminada a Primeira Guerra Mundial foram suficientes poucos anos na Itália, e dez anos na Alemanha, para ser abatido o estado parlamentar; após a segunda, a democracia não voltou a ser abatida nos lugares em que foi restaurada e em outros países foram derrubados governos autoritários. Mesmo num país de democracia não governante e mal governante como a Itália, a democracia não corre sério perigo, embora eu diga isto com um certo temor.”
“embora admitindo que possa estar correndo um certo risco, creio ser possível fazer uma constatação final: nenhuma guerra explodiu até agora [1984] entre estados dirigidos por regimes democráticos. O que não quer dizer que os estados democráticos não tenham feito guerras, mas apenas que jamais as fizeram entre si. A observação é temerária, como já reconheci, mas prefiro fazê-la e aguardar um desmentido. Será que estava certo Kant quando proclamou como primeiro artigo definitivo de um possível acordo pela paz perpétua que <a constituição de cada estado deve ser republicana>? Certo, o conceito de <república> ao qual se referia Kant não coincide com o conceito atual de <democracia>, mas a idéia de que a constituição interna dos estados viesse a ser um obstáculo à guerra foi uma idéia forte, fecunda, inspiradora de muitos projetos pacifistas elaborados ao longo dos dois últimos séculos (e importa pouco que eles tenham permanecido, na prática, letra morta).”
“Foram os movimentos estudantis os primeiros a mandar pelos ares os seus organismos representativos pelo fato de que os representantes eram fiduciários e não delegados, e a impor através de suas assembléias o princípio do mandato imperativo. Imediatamente ficou claro que se tratava de uma representação orgânica, isto é, dos interesses particulares, isto é, daquela representação na qual o representante deve pertencer à mesma categoria do representado.
O oposto ocorre na representação política da maior parte dos estados que se governam à base de um sistema representativo: o que caracteriza uma democracia representativa é, com respeito ao <quem>, que o representante seja um fiduciário e não um delegado; e é, com respeito ao <que coisa>, que o fiduciário represente os interesses gerais e não os interesses particulares. (E exatamente porque são representados os interesses gerais e não os interesses particulares dos eleitores, nela vigora o princípio da proibição de mandato imperativo.)” “O princípio foi retomado e reafirmado várias vezes por Lênin, a começar no Estado e Revolução, e subsistiu como princípio normativo nas várias constituições soviéticas. O artigo 105 da constituição em vigor diz: <O deputado tem o dever de informar os eleitores sobre sua atividade e sobre a atividade dos Soviets. O deputado que não se demonstrar digno da confiança dos eleitores pode ser privado do mandato a qualquer momento por decisão da maioria dos eleitores e segundo as modalidades previstas pela lei>. Este princípio foi transmitido à maior parte das constituições das democracias populares (ao contrário do que ocorre na maior parte das constituições das democracias ocidentais, como por exemplo a italiana, cujo artigo 67 diz: <Cada membro do Parlamento representa a Nação e exerce suas funções sem vínculo de mandato>).”
“A assembléia dos cidadãos — a democracia que Rousseau tinha em mente — é um instituto, como de resto Rousseau sabia muito bem, que pode ter vida apenas numa pequena comunidade, como era a do modelo clássico por excelência, a Atenas do V e do IV séculos, quando os cidadãos não passavam de poucos milhares e a sua assembléia, considerando