Seriously, Now
We're getting those letters to the editor again. "Homosexuality is a choice."
Let's think about that, Mr. Letter Writer. You can choose to order a Corona or a Heineken, and enjoy either one. You can choose to wear a raincoat or carry an umbrella, and stay dry either way. Do you mean to tell you also think you can choose between having Tara Reid slink into your bed and make mad passionate love to you and being repeatedly anally penetrated by a Kansas City Chiefs linebacker and find complete sexual fulfillment in either one? So that you'd never have even a desire for the other?
I'm no expert on any of this. But is it possible that male homosexuality could have more than one source, or that more than one path leads to that place? Is it possible that social forces, early childhood experiences, and biology all could have roles? It at least seems possible, to me, that gay men with an overwhelming urge to be the "pitcher" in the relationship might have a different interior sexual map from those who seek out the "catcher" role. I'm straight and uneducated in psychology, so forgive me if I offend anyone by blundering into this seminar without doing the homework.
But historically, there's a fuzziness to the stark line we draw nowadays between "hetero-" and "homo-," which, after all, was not usually drawn before the late 19th century. Attempts to fit, say, Walt Whitman or Lord Byron into a comfortable diagnosis of "homosexual" falter on the realities of their time and place.
Nowadays, gay or fag is hurled as a generic insult. But a great many Western and other cultures throughout history differentiated between catchers and pitchers. Male sexuality, the urge to copulate, was presumed to be powerful and general and not particularly or necessarily limited to women. To insult an enemy, you imputed not that he was gay, but that he desired to take the female position. To the vikings, for instance, implying that a man was sansorðinn -- "used in the position of a female by another man" -- could be punished by fullrettirsorð "full penalty," meaning that the insulted man could kill the insulter with impunity. The authorities would look the other way.
The insult didn't have to be that direct, as long as the meaning was clear. Calling a man a "mare," or a "woman" could also call down the weight of fullrettirsorð. There was so much emotion about Viking sexual insults that the thirteenth-century Gulaðing proscribed the use of these words in public. Among more educated Vikings sexual name-calling continued, often wrapped in sometimes obscure mythological or literary allusions. The stealth version includes trenið, or "wood-insult," which was an alternative to muðnið (verbal insult). If you wanted to imply that a man was sansorðinn, you set up two figures made out of wood, one behind the other in a suggestive position, and you put the skull of a mare on the figure in front. (Think about it.)
Interesting, too, that the cultures where male homosexual love flourished most prominently (ancient Greece, samurai Japan) were those in which women were most thoroughly excluded from the male world of war and politics. You can't love where you can't respect.
Let's think about that, Mr. Letter Writer. You can choose to order a Corona or a Heineken, and enjoy either one. You can choose to wear a raincoat or carry an umbrella, and stay dry either way. Do you mean to tell you also think you can choose between having Tara Reid slink into your bed and make mad passionate love to you and being repeatedly anally penetrated by a Kansas City Chiefs linebacker and find complete sexual fulfillment in either one? So that you'd never have even a desire for the other?
I'm no expert on any of this. But is it possible that male homosexuality could have more than one source, or that more than one path leads to that place? Is it possible that social forces, early childhood experiences, and biology all could have roles? It at least seems possible, to me, that gay men with an overwhelming urge to be the "pitcher" in the relationship might have a different interior sexual map from those who seek out the "catcher" role. I'm straight and uneducated in psychology, so forgive me if I offend anyone by blundering into this seminar without doing the homework.
But historically, there's a fuzziness to the stark line we draw nowadays between "hetero-" and "homo-," which, after all, was not usually drawn before the late 19th century. Attempts to fit, say, Walt Whitman or Lord Byron into a comfortable diagnosis of "homosexual" falter on the realities of their time and place.
Nowadays, gay or fag is hurled as a generic insult. But a great many Western and other cultures throughout history differentiated between catchers and pitchers. Male sexuality, the urge to copulate, was presumed to be powerful and general and not particularly or necessarily limited to women. To insult an enemy, you imputed not that he was gay, but that he desired to take the female position. To the vikings, for instance, implying that a man was sansorðinn -- "used in the position of a female by another man" -- could be punished by fullrettirsorð "full penalty," meaning that the insulted man could kill the insulter with impunity. The authorities would look the other way.
The insult didn't have to be that direct, as long as the meaning was clear. Calling a man a "mare," or a "woman" could also call down the weight of fullrettirsorð. There was so much emotion about Viking sexual insults that the thirteenth-century Gulaðing proscribed the use of these words in public. Among more educated Vikings sexual name-calling continued, often wrapped in sometimes obscure mythological or literary allusions. The stealth version includes trenið, or "wood-insult," which was an alternative to muðnið (verbal insult). If you wanted to imply that a man was sansorðinn, you set up two figures made out of wood, one behind the other in a suggestive position, and you put the skull of a mare on the figure in front. (Think about it.)
Interesting, too, that the cultures where male homosexual love flourished most prominently (ancient Greece, samurai Japan) were those in which women were most thoroughly excluded from the male world of war and politics. You can't love where you can't respect.
Labels: sexuality
