Regardless of the title and the picture, this post is (semi)
serious business. I was sitting around, thinking and the thought of
shudo crossed my mind.
Shudo was a system of age-structured homosexuality in ancient Japan. Homosexuality was found in Buddhist temples, among samurai and even regular relationships between men were seen as deeper and held more meaning than a heterosexual relationship. In the warrior class, it was customary for a young man to be apprenticing a more experienced samurai. The older men were permitted to take the younger boy as their lover if they both agreed to it, if they did, both would have to sign a "brotherhood" contract. If both men signed this contract, it was an agreement that they should take no other lovers and to remain only together. Similar to marriage, no?
Before Japan adopted the ways of the Europeans, Japan was open about sexuality with old paintings depicting orgies and women being tentacle-raped by giant octopi. Today, sexuality is something that is kept behind closed doors in Japan. (Well, at least where I stayed, I didn't see anyone holding hands or hugging there. Not one.) Some gays and lesbians are fighting to be acknowledged, but many others hide their sexuality by marrying people and keep that part of themselves a secret. This led me to wonder, "Were other ancient cultures open to homosexuality? What happened?"
First off, let's start with China. China, like Japan, was once open to homosexuality in the ancient times, but have completely closed their minds to the knowledge that men who like men exist. I've heard that Hong Kong has a gay scene, but most of the men and women there are told by their parents that they will have to settle down, get married and have children one day. As though they will grow out of this "ridiculous stage".
One day, a young Chinese scholar came to an interesting (and in my opinion, hilarious) conclusion:
Nearly every emperor in the Han dynasty has had a least one or more male lovers.
- Emperor Gaozu of Han, who favored Jiru
- Emperor Hui of Han, who favored Hongru
- Emperor Wen of Han, who favored Beigong Bozi, Deng Tong, and Zhao Tan
- Emperor Jing of Han, who favored Zhou Ren
- Emperor Wu of Han, who favored Han Yan, Han Yue, and Li Yannian
- Emperor Zhao of Han, who favored Jin Shang
- Emperor Xuan of Han, who favored Zhang Pengzu
- Emperor Yuan of Han, who favored Hong Gong and Shi Xian
- Emperor Cheng of Han, who favored Chunyu Zhang and Zhang Fang
- Emperor Ai of Han, who favored Dong Xian
Sorry girls, but there is little to no reference of lesbians as of yet, just wait a little longer, okay? Moving on, during the dynasties, poems and stories revolving around homosexual love flourished. Records dating from the Liu Song dynasty (420-479 AD) claimed that homosexuality was just as common as homosexuality in the third century.
"All the gentlemen and officials esteemed it. All men in the realm followed this fashion to the extent that husbands and wives were estranged. Resentful unmarried women became jealous."
Ancient China, like ancient Japan also had actor-prostitutes. In those days, women were not allowed to act. Just like the Elizabethan era, all female roles were played by young men. These young actors, would engage in
other activities when they were not on stage, it was more common than you think. It's a living, right?
It was not until the Tang dynasty did a change occur.
The ways of the other countries bled into the east and new opinions arose. China became influenced by the sexual morals of foreigners and female companions of emperors began to gain political power that used to be accumulated by the male companions. At the same time, the power of the imperial court was declining due to the ruling of scholar-bureaucrats. During this time, the first negative word for homosexuality appears. This attitude continues into the Song dynasty, homosexual behavior was documented among the commoners, since it was the working class people who did most of the writing of poetry and stories. In addition to central Asian influence, the nation began adopting Indian Buddhism as well, which derided sexuality in general. Monetization of all kinds of sexuality was caused by the increase of urbanization. The first law against male prostitutes went into effect. However, not effectively enforced.
Then, good ol' whitey walked in the street of China and he did not like what he saw. This missionary preached about their 'perverted ways' openly. Sure, the homosexual men of China never faced the kind of persecution as the European homosexuals did. Hell, marriage-like ceremonies between men were still held (they were even allowed to adopt/ raise children who weren't their own) and were meant to last 20 years until they were to be separated to find a wife to procreate. Most of the homosexual activity centered around the province of Fujian. However, the government did come to like the "cults" promoting sexual perversions, so China officially instilled a law prohibiting consensual, non-monetized homosexuality in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). The punishment? A month in prison and 100 heavy blows, and that was the lightest punishment you could get. Thanks Europeans, for bringing science and homophobia to the wonderful land of China, they won't even show gay movies anymore, unless you're in Hong Kong and want to see a heavily-edited version. :[
Though often ignored or suppressed by European explorers and colonialists, homosexual expression in native Africa was also present and took a variety of forms. Anthropologists
Stephen Murray and
Will Roscoe reported that women in
Lesotho engaged in socially sanctioned "long term, erotic relationships" called
motsoalle. Only if a woman acted "man-enough", she was treated as such. Those women were even able to take on wives and hunt like a regular man.
E. E. Evans-Pritchard also recorded that male
Azande warriors in the northern
Congo routinely took on young male lovers between the ages of twelve and twenty, who helped with household tasks and participated in
intercrural sex with their older husbands. The practice had died out by the early 20th century, after Europeans had gained control of African countries, but was recounted to Evans-Pritchard by the elders to whom he spoke.
The first recorded homosexual couple in history is commonly regarded as
Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, an Egyptian male couple, who lived around the 2400 BCE. The pair are portrayed in a nose-kissing position, the most intimate pose in Egyptian art, surrounded by what appear to be their heirs.
Yet another case of European expansion repressing a culture's view of something that was once seen as miniscule into perversion. You wouldn't think that ancient Africa would have homosexuality embedded into some of the culture, but there it is. Not much of it is known, all I could gather was this ancient Egyptian story of gods, sex, manipulation and humiliation.
One of the most famous displays of homosexuality in Ancient Egypt is in the battle for kingship between the Gods
Horus and
Set. It is told in a story known as the 'Contendings of Horus and Seth.' In one part of this story Seth invites Horus to his house, and in the evening a bed is prepared for the both of them. In a shrewd plan Horus manages to catch the semen of Seth and disposes of it. He then goes to his mother who comes up with an idea to trick Seth into ingesting Horus' semen by placing it in a lettuce, which was Seth's favorite food. In the end, the god
Thoth declares that the semen of Horus comes-forth; Seth is humiliated and loses his fight for the throne.
In the pre-European colonized Americas, the type of same-sex sexuality centered around the figure a 'two-spirited' person. Normally, this person is recognized early in life and was given a choice by the parents to follow the path and, if the child accepted the role, raised in the appropriate manner, learning the customs of the gender they had chosen. The two-spirit was considered to be a person with masculine and feminine souls, or possesses the souls of a warrior and a clan-mother at the same time. The two-spirits were commonly shamans and were revered as having powers of that of no ordinary shamans. Their sexual life was with the ordinary tribe members of the same sex.
Meanwhile, in what is now known was Latin America, homosexuality was also common among the Aztec, Mayan, Tupinambá, etc. Of course, this terrified the Spanish colonists and they attempted to squish out the sodomy by executing those who 'practiced' it by burning and having them torn to pieces by dogs, in public. You called
them "savages"? The natives seemed to possess a caring, openness and acceptance that took Europeans generations to develop. Who exactly is barbaric?
Hell, in some islands of the Pacific, heterosexuality was seen as a sin, but once again, colonization settled in. Set 'em straight. (lol c wut i did thar?)
Butt-sex vase? Anyone?
Finally, we get to the heart of the matter. The Europeans. Everyone has heard of the ancient Greeks and Romans who dominated Europe. It was even said that 1 in 3 men were gay during those days (I forgot where I heard that statistic from), it was a social norm. How did this come to be? How did they turn from promiscuous, fun-loving people into homophobic missionaries forcing their way of life to every other country in the known world? First, let's examine the history:
(You may now cheer, lesbians are
finally mentioned.)
The earliest Western documents concerning same-sex relationships came from ancient Greece.
In regard of male homosexuality such documents depict a world in which relationships with women and relationships with youths were the essential foundation of a normal man's love life. Same-sex relationships were a social institution variously constructed over time and from one city to another. The formal practice, an erotic yet often restrained relationship between a free adult male and a free adolescent, was valued for its pedagogic benefits and as a means of population control, though occasionally blamed for causing disorder.
Plato praised its benefits in his early writings, but in his late works proposed its prohibition.
In the
Symposium (182B-D), Plato equates acceptance of homosexuality with democracy, and its suppression with despotism, saying that homosexuality "is shameful to barbarians because of their despotic governments, just as philosophy and athletics are, since it is apparently not in best interests of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or physical unions, all of which love is particularly apt to produce".
Aristotle, in the
Politics, dismissed Plato's ideas about abolishing homosexuality; he explains that barbarians like the Celts accorded it a special honor, while the Cretans used it to regulate the population .
Little is known of female homosexuality in antiquity. Sappho, born on the island of Lesbos (LOL), was included by later Greeks in the canonical list of
nine lyric poets. The adjectives deriving from her name and place of birth (Sapphic and Lesbian) came to be applied to female homosexuality beginning in the 19th century.
Sappho's poetry centers on passion and love for various personages and both genders. The narrators of many of her poems speak of infatuations and love for various females, but descriptions of physical acts between women are few.
In ancient Rome the young male body remained a focus of male sexual attention, but relationships were between older free men and slaves or freed youths who took the receptive role in sex. (Sound familiar?) All the emperors with the exception of
Claudius took male lovers. The Hellenophile emperor
Hadrian is renowned for his relationship with
Antinous, but the
Christian emperor Theodosius I decreed a law on August 6, 390, condemning passive males to be burned at the stake.
Justinian, towards the end of his reign, expanded the proscription to the active partner as well (in 558),
warning that such conduct can lead to the destruction of cities through the "wrath of God". Notwithstanding these regulations, taxes on brothels of boys available for homosexual sex continued to be collected until the end of the reign of
Anastasius I in 518.
During the
Renaissance, wealthy cities in northern Italy (particularly Florence and Venice) were renowned for their widespread practice of same-sex love, engaged in by a considerable part of the male population and constructed along the classical pattern of Greece and Rome.
Even as many of the male population were engaging in same-sex relationships, the authorities, under the aegis of the
Officers of the Night court, were prosecuting, fining, and imprisoning a good portion of that population. The eclipse of this period of relative artistic and erotic freedom was precipitated by the rise to power of the moralizing monk
Girolamo Savonarola. In northern Europe the artistic discourse on sodomy was turned against its proponents by artists such as
Rembrandt, who in his
Rape of Ganymede no longer depicted
Ganymede as a willing youth, but as a squalling baby attacked by a rapacious bird of prey.
The relationships of socially prominent figures, such as
King James I and the
Duke of Buckingham, served to highlight the issue, including in anonymously authored street pamphlets: "The world is chang'd I know not how, For men Kiss Men, not Women now;...Of J. the First and Buckingham: He, true it is, his Wives Embraces fled, To slabber his lov'd Ganimede" (
Mundus Foppensis, or The Fop Display'd, 1691).
Love Letters Between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr. Wilson was published in 1723 in England and was presumed by some modern scholars to be a novel. The 1749 edition of
John Cleland's popular novel
Fanny Hill includes a homosexual scene, but this was removed in its 1750 edition. Also in 1749, the earliest extended and serious defense of homosexuality in English,
Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplified, written by
Thomas Cannon, was published, but was suppressed almost immediately. It includes the passage, "Unnatural Desire is a Contradiction in Terms; downright Nonsense. Desire is an amatory Impulse of the inmost human Parts."
Around 1785
Jeremy Bentham wrote another defense, but this was not published until 1978.
Executions for sodomy continued in the Netherlands until 1803, and in England until 1835.
Between 1864 and 1880
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published a series of twelve tracts, which he collectively titled
Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love. In 1867 he became the first self-proclaimed homosexual person to speak out publicly in defense of homosexuality when he pleaded at the
Congress of German Jurists in
Munich for a resolution urging the repeal of anti-homosexual laws.
Sexual Inversion by
Havelock Ellis, published in 1896, challenged theories that homosexuality was abnormal, as well as stereotypes, and insisted on the ubiquity of homosexuality and its association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Although medical texts like these (written partly in Latin to obscure the sexual details) were not widely read by the general public, they did lead to the rise of
Magnus Hirschfeld's
Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which campaigned from 1897 to 1933 against anti-sodomy laws in Germany as well as a much more informal, unpublicized movement among British intellectuals and writers, led by such figures as
Edward Carpenter and
John Addington Symonds. Beginning in 1894 with
Homogenic Love, Socialist activist and poet Edward Carpenter wrote a string of pro-homosexual articles and pamphlets, and "came out" in 1916 in his book
My Days and Dreams. In 1900,
Elisar von Kupffer published an anthology of homosexual literature from antiquity to his own time,
Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur. His aim was to broaden the public perspective of homosexuality beyond its being viewed simply as a medical or biological issue, but also as an ethical and cultural one. In a backlash to this, the
Third Reich specifically targeted LGBT individuals as well in the holocaust
.
Homosexuals were even marked with the upside-down pink triangle to identify them in the concentration camps. That same triangle is used as a symbol for pride today. Looking through the European history, there seems as though there was a time when the church was accepting of homosexuality. There are even records of gay priests dating before the 1200's, such as
Saint Aelred, whose poetry remains to this day. I've found two theories as to why the Christian religion suddenly declared that homosexuality is deemed "unclean" after some rigorous searching on the internet. (In my opinion, all sex is 'unclean'. Don't you agree?)
Theory 1: "
After a dismal loss in the Crusades the church began an intense legalistic campaign that would climax with the Inquisition and last until the 17th Century. Of course, this led to all kinds of repression. The first to feel it were the Jews and Muslims of Europe, then came all women practicing midwifery and traditional healing, all racial minorities and of course homosexuals. In the face of growing Islamic threat from the Mediterranean and Middle East and Pagan invaders from Eastern Europe, Mongol and China, there was a zealous thrust to replenish diminished European armies and increase the population and power of the Church’s domain. It was at the Lateran III Council of 1179 the Church took its first official position to outlaw all forms of non-procreative sex. In the 1200's the writings of Thomas Aquinas, reinforced the new thinking of the Catholic Church that semen was thought to be life itself and must never be wasted. Early illustrations of sperm in those times depicted them as tiny human souls. Sex for pleasure was sinful, even between a husband and wife and should only be used for reproduction. Any men caught in the act of anal or oral copulation were burned, this traditional punishment led to the derogatory term of “faggot”, which means a piece of wood for burning."
Theory 2: "The early church fathers, particularly those who founded the monastic orders, often looked to "nature" for examples of morality and immorality. This rather risky business was fraught with difficulties, not the least of which was the fact that nature itself was very poorly understood during this period of history. Nature was considered inherently beautiful and moral, even though almost any activity of man considered to be immoral can be shown to be engaged in by animals. This inconvenient fact was simply ignored by the ancients, or they were not aware of it. The exceptions were animals that the ancients considered to be revolting or disgusting for whatever reason, or were believed to engage in bizarre behaviors. For example, it was believed during this time that hyenas were fond of digging up graves and eating the corpses. It was also believed that hares grew a new anal opening every year, and that weasels mated through the mouth and bore their young through the ear.
Because hyenas were considered to be rather disgusting animals, and because they were believed to engage in homosexual sex predominantly, homosexuality itself began to be considered to be disgusting by them through their association with the animals the ancients considered disgusting. Because homosexuality became associated with hyenas, an animal believed to rob graves and eat the corpses, it's not surprising that early church fathers and monastics held homosexuality itself to be repugnant since it was associated with such repugnant animals.
Thus began a campaign against homosexuality by certain church fathers, among them Augustine, and Clement, a man who mistakenly associated homosexuality with a form of child slavery in which male children were often sold into slavery as prostitutes. These two men and others like them began to associate homosexuality not just with unsavory animal practices, but with other practices they didn't happen to like, such as paganism, or pederastry, etc."
Both theories are understandable. In case you were wondering, females hyenas have a
mock penis. Which is what would give the second theory some credibility, but I'm not too keen on the fact that priests would look out their stained glass windows and see hyenas. Unless they were missionaries centered in Africa or something. I'm going to just rule that one out and go with the first, which makes much more sense than the latter. How often is premarital sex spoken against in the bible? Want me to prove it?
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind. (First Corinthians 6:9)
But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints. (Ephesians 5:3)
For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication. (First Thessalonians 4:3)
The dictionary defines fornication as, "voluntary sexual intercourse between persons not married to each other."
Therefore, the bible condemns premarital sex.
If you have people marrying each other, then they have a duty to fulfill by producing children. If people should have sex before wedlock, then they have having sex for pleasure, which is a sin. However, people are forgetting one major thing:
It's 2010.
People don't marry to produce heirs these days. People marry for love now. Hell, people marry because they're shit-faced drunk in Vegas. The world is over-populated out the wazoo and hey, barren couples are allowed to marry, why not homosexual ones? You've done your job, clergy, but I think it's time to restore things to how they used to be before you decided, centuries ago, that homosexuals are unable to produce children and since they are having sex for pleasure, it is wrong. You've done your job, you've repressed homosexuality so that those under your thumb may multiply. Congratulations. However, how people began to believe that the acceptance of homosexuality will destroy the world, I have no idea. Hell, if that were true, the earth would've magically exploded thousands of years ago when emperors and everyone's dad was screwing around with an actor-prostitute in China.
Yeah, some Christians believe that Rome and Greece fell because of their acceptance of homosexuality.
That's
totally the reason.
The fall of those great empires had
nothing to do with rapid expansion and having little to no control over their lands that were obviously prone to invasion because of poor governmental management. Nope.
This took me forever to write and I'm far too lazy to edit it. I doubt anyone is actually going to read this all the way through. Whatever, I'm tired. Good night.
P.S: In case you were wondering why I was thinking of
shudo. It's for a fanfiction plot-bunny. And I ended up writing/ copy-pasting this instead.
