PREFACE

“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 20^th 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 paiderasteia in Greece toward the beginning of the sixth century before our era.”

(o artigo de William Percy foi 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 16^th and 17^th 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 16^th and 17^th 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 20^th 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 V^e 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 19^th 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 17^th 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 20^th-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 16^th 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 force S/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 Lunch became 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 Machine and The Ticket That Exploded to 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 20^th-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 19^th 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 17^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 2^nd 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-16^th 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 9^th 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 20^th 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 36^th 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;

Caesar, Gallic Wars (uma prosa bélica comemorativa cortante)

CAPOTE

“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.”

CASTRATI

“The castrati were male singers emasculated in boyhood to preserve the soprano or contralto range of their voices, who from the 16^th century to the 19^th 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 15^th 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 16^th 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 16^th 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 2^nd 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 12^th 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 17^th 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-19^th 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 19^th-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 13^th 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 of Verres, 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.”

“The term patientia used with reference to Verres implies the passivity in sexual relations that is degrading and unworthy of a free man, just as in the case of Mark Antony, charged with having <prostituted himself to all>, much like the Timarchus whom Aeschines had denounced centuries earlier in Athens for a like failing [op. cit. – para mais detalhes, vide seção OBRAS RECOMENDADAS em https://seclusao.art.blog/2019/09/28/do-espirito-das-leis-de-montesquieu-abreviado-na-traducao-de-jean-melville-com-comentarios-e-aprofundamentos-de-rafael-aguiar-indicacoes-de-leituras-durante-o-tratado-e-ao-final/].”

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 8^th 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 20^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 13^th 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 13^th 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 14^th 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 12^th 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 1950 Andre 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 2^nd and 3^rd 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 16^th 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 2^nd 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 12^th and 13^th 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 13^th to the 16^th 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 17^th 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 20^th 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 18^th-century English term molly for an effeminate homosexual is a reminiscence of Latin mollis.”

“In the 16^th 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 17^th and 18^th 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.”

“19^th-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 20^th 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 20^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 20^th 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 Marquis Cesare 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’s Reflections 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.”