The dreamer is a handsome young man, his naked muscular body decisively, dramatically posed. But the dream itself is tangled, ambiguous, dramatically confounding.

Amidst the tension between the calm of the central figure and the agitation swarming around it, Perl notes this may be a portrait of Michelangelo’s longtime lover, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. If true this offers an astonishing portrait of their often troubled relationship.

Whatever the source, The Dream inspires, disturbs, and challenges me, or as Perl puts it:

The Dream explodes the ordinary pleasures of allegory, which are the pleasures of piecing together a puzzle. Michelangelo’s puzzle, complete but still puzzling, is irreducible allegory—a whole thought to be grasped through the experiencing authority of the eye.

As the director states, “It was the first known instance of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in United States history.”

At 24 minutes it is an enjoyable watch if you are interested in queer history or just love seeing how deliciously crazy, and defiant, we are here in San Francisco. And I say that as a proudly crazy native!
 

After barbs were exchanged about Big Bird between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential election, The Daily Beast ran a lovely piece about Big Bird’s gay dads:

Lyall and Love were partners in work and life for half a century and in the 1980s traveled with Big Bird to the White House for the annual Easter egg roll. The most momentous results of that presidential nexus were the grass stains on Big Bird’s outsize feet. Nobody could have imagined that this puppet might someday play even the smallest role in deciding who would occupy the Oval Office. “We’ll see,” Lyall says. The possible political impact of this 8-foot-2 yellow plumed character takes a turn from the ridiculous to the delightfully apt when you consider this: Big Bird was the product of a profound partnership between two men that was in every way a marriage save for in the strictly legal sense that the law until very recently forbade.

Big Bird, left, and his creator Kermit Love, right. I think they both look like adorable muppets.

And hard as it is to believe, this lovely gay man who so influenced Sesame Street was in fact named Kermit Love. So. Cool.

On the bar-brothel of Innulus and Papilio:

Weep, you girls.  My penis has given you up.  Now it penetrates men’s behinds.  Goodbye, wondrous femininity!

On the house of the Citharist below a drawing of a man with a large nose:

Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you.  Salvius wrote this.

On the basilica:

Phileros is a eunuch!

On the Eumachia Building:

Secundus likes to screw boys.

On the house of Orpheus:

I have buggered men.

And who knows who wrote this one, male or female?

On the house of Poppaeus Sabinus: If you felt the fires of love, mule-driver, you would make more haste to see Venus.  I love a charming boy; I ask you, goad the mules; let’s go.  Take me to Pompeii, where love is sweet.  You are mine…

Of course Pompeii wasn’t all gay. Most of the graffitti is straight, like these from the walls of a brothel where we get bragging men and a client’s review:

Celadus the Thracier makes the girls moan!

Gaius Valerius Venustus, soldier of the 1st praetorian cohort, in the century of Rufus, screwer of women

Myrtis, you do great blow jobs.

And it is not just graffiti, as the art of Pompeii tells a similar story. There is a frieze on the walls of the Suburban Baths showing sixteen sex scenes, including male-male and female-female couples and same-sex pairings within group sex scenes. Both men and women went to the bathe there, sharing a singular changing room, so it appears these kinds of images where common and acceptable to the people of the day.
 

Two men and a woman having sex, from the Suburban Baths of Pompeii circa 79 BC.

Shy, he stepped off into the cornfield. I could see

his back muscles under the damp shirt quiver and go slack.


Turning again to face the shade, he smiled at me, not

squinted, smiled, and finished tugging shut his fly.


Now, when the cornstalks in the night wind slide

like fire, I see him. He steps closer in my dream.


I don’t know, where he sleeps, if sleep refreshes him,

but here it works me like hot metal over a flame.

From the poem “The Idea Of Beauty” by Meleagros, 3rd century, translated by Brooks Haxton in The Atlantic.

Replica of the paleolithical drawings in the cave of Addaura from the Museo Regionale Archeologico in Palermo. (Photographer: Bernhard J. Scheuvens aka Bis)

If the caves of Addaura point to same-sex sexuality, the recent discovery of a male skeleton of a buried as a woman points to ancient gender variations. Five thousand years ago, a tribe of Stone Age humans lived near what is now Prague. We know little about them other than what we glean from their burial customs. Men were buried on their right sides with their heads facing east along with their weapons, flint knives, and tools like hammers. Women were buried with their heads facing west with their necklaces made from teeth, pets, copper earrings, and distinctive egg shaped jars. In 2011 scientists dug up a male skeleton buried in the female position without weapons but with household jugs and the egg shaped jar at his feet. There is no way to know how this man lived his life, if he was gay and loved men or transexual and lived his life as a woman. All we do know is that when he died his people gave him a respectful and traditional burial, as a woman.

Early gay man from around 2900-2500 B.C., found outside Prague.

With passengers and crew of 2,223 people, and using the standard current guess of 4% gay, that would mean 89 gay men and women on board. However, knowing homosexuality was (and is) common in both marine and travel industries, we can guess the numbers below decks where significantly higher than that 4% figure.

Archie Butt (right) and President Howard Taft

There were certainly gay people among the gentry as well. Historians have looked most carefully at one pair of passengers, Archie Butt, an aide to President Howard Taft, and Frank Millet, a painter. After sharing a stateroom together in Berlin they traveled in separate berths on the doomed ship. Butt was a lifelong bachelor who courted rumors of interests in women but declared he would not marry. He was close to his mother, loved his flashy uniforms which he kept in top shape at all times, and took seven steamer trunks along with him for his six week trip to Europe. (Ahem.) Millet was older than Butt, and well known to be gay. He was married but lived apart from his wife. Millet was the man who convinced Butt to join him on the trip to Europe.

While people of that time didn’t spoke openly of homosexuality, the relationship between Butt and Millet was so well known their friends erected a fountain in the pair’s honor in Washington, DC after their deaths. As the Secretary of the American Civic Association, Richard Walrous, said in the New York Times of the April 17, 1912:

“No Damon and Pythias* friendship could have been closer than the friendship of Major Butt and Millet,” said Mr. Watrous. “The two kept quarters together and were inseparable when both were in Washington. They lived near the Metropolitan Club, Butt being, as is well known, a bachelor, and Mr. Millet’s family being quartered at his home in England… Among all of us who knew of the close friendship of Major Butt and Mr. Millet there has been the tensest of feeling since the news of disaster to the Titanic reached us.”

* Damon and Pythias were used as a code for gay relationships as they where two male mythical figures who demonstrated their undying love for each other.

[Update, July 2012]

I recently dined with my buddy Kamran in the original dining room of the Titanic.

Kami and I were blessed with a cruise to Alaska with my family on the Celebrity Millenium. (Loved Alaska! Proof in our way-too-many pics here.) On top of being overstuffed daily, we booked a table one night in the ship’s upscale restaurant, the Olympic, a room originally built as the fancy dining room of the Titanic.

The Olympic was the sister ship of Titanic, and according to the story Celebrity tells the Olympic was finished first, so Cunard switched the names of the ships so the first shipped launched would be named Titanic. So this dining room was actually built to be the Titanic’s, but sailed with the moniker Olympic. After years of service the dining room paneling was dismantled and installed in a stately old English home, and then later sold off as a setting for fancy cruise ship dining.

Regardless. The food was unbelievable, the service impecable and fun, and we ate until we were bursting. Hard to imagine the Titanic’s passengers ate better, and if nothing else it makes for a great story. ;-)

We know Alan Turing as one of the greatest men of the 20th Century and inventor of the computer, but he was persecuted for the crime of homosexuality and finally committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

Apple’s original logo was an apple, and rainbow stripped, a common symbol of gay diversity. So did Steve Jobs choose an emblem that represented this brilliant but tragic story?

No. But the famously secretive Steve Jobs never denied it either, leaving the question of the origin of Apple’s apple open to all our projections, and making Apple all the more interesting for it.

Scientific America discusses why our brains love a good story, regardless of the truth.

In 1936, at twenty four, Alan Turing announced that, “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence.” Taking advantage of Turing’s brilliance, the Allies made him a key member of the secret code cracking team at Bletchley Park where he and his thinking machines cracked the Nazi Enigma code. From that point on the Allies could intercept commands sent to German U-boats in real time, turning the course of the war. Sir Harry Hinsley, a veteran of the Bletchley Park team and the official historian of British Intelligence in World War II said that Turing’s work shortened the war “by not less than two years and probably by four years.”

Sadly, saving the world was not enough to prove a gay life acceptable in his day. Turing was convicted by a court for being a homosexual in 1952, a felony. Publicly humiliated and chemically castrated, his career and life destroyed, he committed suicide in 1954 at the age of 41.

The brilliance of Alan Turing remains current through the Turing Test, a challenge he developed to determine if machines can think. While it is dauntingly difficult to define thinking, Turning’s test proposed a profoundly human interaction. An interrogator asks questions of two unseen subjects using a keyboard. One of the subjects is human and the other a computer. The test is passed if the interrogator cannot tell which is subject is the machine. No computer has yet passed the Turing Test.

Now that we can see gay people as human beings, the world is seeing Turing for the genius he truly was. In 2000, Alan Turing was named one of the 100 most important people of the 20th Century by Time Magazine. In 2009 the British Prime Minister offered an official governmental apology to Alan Turing noting, “We’re sorry, you deserved so much better.” The science journal Nature recently devoted an entire issue to Turing, and there is a petition currently circulating to put Turing on the UK ten-pound note.

Turing said that when we build intelligent machines we are not creating souls, but rather building the mansions for the souls God creates. While touring Google a few years ago, science historian George Dyson noted:

I walked around and saw what they were doing and realized they were building a very large distributed AI, much as Turing had predicted. And I thought, my God, this is not Turing’s mansion — this is Turing’s cathedral. Cathedrals were built over hundreds of years by thousands of nameless people, each one carving a little corner somewhere or adding one little stone. That’s how I feel about the whole computational universe. Everybody is putting these small stones in place, incrementally creating this cathedral that no one could even imagine doing on their own.

Turing would be 100 this year.

On October 2, 1977, Burke was a charismatic and popular player for the Los Angeles Dodgers, where a crowded stadium watched… As ESPN tells it:

It was the last day of the regular season, and Dodgers leftfielder Dusty Baker had just gone deep off the Astros’ J.R. Richard. It was Baker’s 30th home run, making the Dodgers the first team in history to have four sluggers — Baker, Ron Cey, Steve Garvey and Reggie Smith — with at least 30 homers each. It was a wild, triumphant moment and a good omen as the Dodgers headed to the playoffs. Burke, waiting on deck, thrust his hand enthusiastically over his head to greet his friend at the plate. Baker, not knowing what to do, smacked it. “His hand was up in the air, and he was arching way back,” says Baker, now 62 and managing the Reds. “So I reached up and hit his hand. It seemed like the thing to do.”

Burke then stepped up and launched his first major league home run. And as he returned to the dugout, Baker high-fived him. From there, the story goes, the high five went ricocheting around the world. (According to Dodgers team historian Mark Langill, the game was not televised, and no footage survives.)

Burke was the hero of the Dodgers, and their charismatic soul, but he also had a relationship of unspecified intimacy with Tommy Lasorda’s embarrassment of an effeminate son. The Dodger’s traded Burke to the Oakland A’s in a weak trade designed mostly to get rid of him.

Burke retired in 1980, after some frustrating years. He then became a fixture in the Castro, known for sitting on whatever car was in front of the Pendulum bar giving high fives…a great image.

The full story from ESPN and another article in the Los Angeles Times.

A quick Wikipedia refresher reminded me of the profound contribution Evelyn Hooker made to my life. In 1957, at a time when homosexuality was widely considered a mental illness, Hooker devised a brilliantly simple way to test that assumption. She gave straight and gay volunteers a series of standard psychological tests, and then asked experts to identify the homosexuals based on the tests alone. They couldn’t.

In 1952, the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association labelled homosexuality a disorder. Hooker helped to prove that this assumption was based on social prejudice rather than scientific evidence. By 1973 the APA removed homosexuality as a disorder. Evelyn Hooker was a practicing therapist, largely for gay men, for most of her career. She died in 1996. Thank you, Evelyn.

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

Malcom X may have “serviced” an older man when he was young. One of Gandhi’s great loves was a German bodybuilder. I am not sure either qualifies as gay. A poor black kid spreading talcum powder (and whatever) on an old white guy for pay does not make him gay. And while Gandhi was clearly smitten with his buddy (much like Abraham Lincoln, or David and Jonathan from the Bible) we also know he wrestled with attraction to women later in life, not a common affliction for gay men.

Gandhi, Sonja Schlesin, and Hermann Kallenbach in Johannesburg, 1913; and the ever-powerful Malcom X

So how can we think of these men’s sexuality? We currently view sexuality as two polarities, straight and gay, with bisexuals the muddle in the middle. This was not always so.

First of all, gay is a modern invention. The scientific revolution unleashed by Darwin sorted everything into a rational taxonomy, and Freud applied that logic to our psychologies. The idea that someone was “gay” as a category of human being did not exist before the Victorian era. There were, of course, homosexual acts since the beginning of time, and there were people who partnered with people of the same sex, but the idea that this constituted a different category of human is recent. (That’s part of why the idea the Bible is against gay people is nonsense. The concept of gay as we now understand it did not exist in biblical times, so it couldn’t speak to it.)

Even after Freud, we had not really settled on categories. In pre-WWII New York, they divided homosexuals into three categories: fairies, queers, and trade. Fairies were the overtly effeminate men, also referred to as pansies and fags. Queers were homosexuals who were more masculine so they could pass as straight, a double life we now call living in the closet, a more modern term in itself.

Note that these categories were not describing sexual attraction, which is how we think of sexual identity today. These terms described effeminacy, not sexuality, indicating the degree of deviation from the public norms of masculine behavior.

Trade is the really interesting category, as it has disappeared in our modern language. Trade was a man who had sex with other men, but only in the active role. A classic example of trade was the sailor on shore leave, drunkenly hanging out in an area known for fairies, and letting another man suck his cock, or even more intimate sex play, without questioning his straight identity. The word only survives in the antiquated phrase “rough trade,” which derives from trade who were abusive, not necessarily a negative for the fairy with low-self esteem. (See teh literature on abused women to make sense of that dynamic.)

In his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, George Chauncey quotes a man lamenting the loss of trade in America:

Most of the crowd [in the 1930s and 1940s] wanted to have sex with a straight man. There was something very hot about a married man! And a lot of straight boys let us have sex with them. People don’t believe it now. People say now that they must have been gay. But they weren’t. They were straight. They wouldn’t look for [it] or suck a guy’s thing, but they’d let you suck theirs. If you want to say they were gay because they had sex with a man, go ahead, but I say only a man who wants to have sex with a man is gay.

Addison’s complaint also suggests that “trade,” as a practical matter, had become harder to find in the 1960s, a change in sexual practice that suggests “straight” men as well as gay had redefined the boundaries of normalcy.

As Chauncey says, “It had become more difficult for men to consider themselves ‘straight’ if they had any sexual contact with other men, no matter how carefully they restricted their behavior to the ‘masculine’ role.” In that way, gay liberation caused trade to go away. There used to be a middle gray zone that was not “bisexual.”

One reason this concept is important is that the gay-bi-straight categories may not be accurate. They don’t apply to women so well, who turn out to be more fluid than men, the subject of a future post. It also doesn’t apply to a lot of other cultures. Places like Brazil and the Muslim world are famous for men being available for same-sex experiences without considering themselves gay in the slightest.

My favorite description of this phenomenon is from the gay pornographer Kristen Bjorn. Bjorn tends to film exotic casts from around the world, so he’s worked with many men who call themselves straight but are willing to have extensive sex with other men for the paycheck, or “gay for pay.” Filming men having sex certainly makes him a keen observer of male sexuality.

In response to a question about the gay-for-pay phenomenon, he offers his perspective on male sexuality:

I suppose that after having worked in this field for so many years, I have long ago reconciled myself to the fact that straight identified men can and do have sex with other men when they have the right motivation to do so, such as money. This is probably difficult for us as gay men to understand because we envision (or try not to envision) ourselves having sex with women, and can’t. However, I think that, from everything that I have witnessed over the years, that “gay” men have a far narrower scope to their sexual nature that “straight” men do. “Straight” men have much more bisexual tendencies than “gay” men do. So are they “really” straight? Well, as far as I know, that is the lifestyle they lead, and their behavior during filming is different from that of the gay models. One of the basic differences I see between the gay and straight identified models while filming is this: the “straight” models get turned on if anyone sucks their dick. The “gay” models get turned on only when they are sucking someone else’s dick. I suggest that everyone just get used to the idea that sexual categories aren’t as defined as we seem to think. That is the reality.

Amen, Brother Bjorn.

Rudolf Brazda and Jean-Luc Schwab in 2010 (Patrick Korben/WPA)

This is Rudolf Brazda, at nearly 97 years old he is the only living survivor of the Nazi incarceration of homosexuals, shown here with Jean-Luc Schwab who worked on Berlin’s Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism. He continues to tell his story and publicize the persecution gay people suffered under the Nazis.

Rudolf grew up in Brossen, Germany, near Leizig, and was first arrested in 1937 on suspicion of homosexual activities. Interestingly, he openly gay from a young age, as his Czech parents accepted his open love of men. The persecution began when the Nazis came to power when he was 20, and after repeated arrests and incarcerations, they sent Rudolf to Buchenwald in 1942. He was released when the camp was liberated by Allied forces.

Rudolf, left, with his friend Fernand at Buchenwald days after liberation. (Photo by fellow ex-prisoner, Albert Stüber. From Rudolph's personal collection.)

Rudolf ended up in France where he met his lover Edi. They remained together for the next 50 years until Edi’s death in 2003.

Given the gay undertone of the Third Reich (masculine idealization, fetishization of hot men in uniforms, overly orchestrated event planning, emphasis on aesthetics) it is no surprise rumors of self-hating homosexuality among prominent Nazi leaders is common. Self-hating closeted homosexuals are always the most aggressive towards the openly gay. Plus the creative are always a threat to the rigid (see Mormons, Catholics, Islam, etc.), and few were more rigid than the Nazis.

In Germany alone, 100,000 men were classified as homosexuals, and 50,000 convicted and sent to prison. Many hundreds were castrated or mutilated in Nazi experiments to “cure” them. (At least Mormon electroshock cures only scarred me on the inside. They stopped at emasculation, so thank God for small favors.) While Jews wore two overlapping gold triangles to form the Star of David, homosexuals wore pink triangles to label them deviants, a symbol the modern gay movement reclaimed as its own. 5-10,000 gay men where sent to concentration camps where they were among the worst treated inmates.

I have never been a fan of the pink triangle except as a symbol of persecution. While I am glad we reclaimed it, the origin is too horrific to enjoy as a symbol of gay identity. The pink triangle’s ties to the Star of David link it to the far greater tragedy the Jews suffered, rendering it too painful a symbol to see on display in anything but a mourning context.

As usual, women are not a big part of this story. The Nazis viewed women as adjuncts to men who should know their place was with children and domestic duties. Nazism’s obsession with masculine power lead to blindness towards women. (Strangely, that’s just like the Mormon culture I grew up with.) Lesbians were, of course, only women, and therefore largely ignorable.

In a horrifying postscript, most gay men liberated from the camps were immediately thrown back into prison. Being a homosexual remained a crime in post-war Germany, even if their conviction occurred under Nazi courts. After serving their full Nazi-mandated sentence, these men were labeled sex offenders by the post-war German government and denied all reparations and state pensions given to other Holocaust survivors.

What a hauntingly beautiful song. It is hard to imagine today, but I loved this song back when I heard it on the radio in Salt Lake City in 1972 without ever understanding its meaning.

This song also speaks to a time when gay culture celebrated its feminine side, something lost in today’s push to appear “normal” and assimilate.

Sadly, we no longer have “underground” cultures as everything spreads instantly across the internet, but this song stands as a tribute to a time when insiders could say astonishing things without the umbrella culture reading the code. Consider the lyrics –

Holly Woodlawn:

Hitch-hiked her way across the USA
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she

Candy Cane:

In the backroom she was everybody’s darlin’
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head

Little Joe:

Little Joe never once gave it away
Everybody had to pay and pay
A hustle here and a hustle there

Backrooms, hustlers, and trannies? How did the meaning ever escape us? Even today I will point out the song’s meaning to gay friends who are surprised they never caught it.

(OK, I did not know what a backroom was in 1972, but I did in 1982 and I didn’t get it then, either. And for my straight readers – a backroom was a dark space at the back of a gay bar where men went to have sex, a convenience shut down when AIDS hit.)

Harvey Milk and Joe Campbell

Missing from the YouTube video is the Sugar Plum Fairy, slang for drug dealer, which may be why it was left out. The Sugar Plum Fairy was Joe Campbell who played a character of that name in Andy Warhol’s film My Hustler. Joe met Harvey Milk in 1955 when Joe was 19 and Harvey 26, and to Harvey’s amazement, Joe fell instantly in love, and they lived together for 7 years in New York. Harvey moved to San Francisco’s Castro after they broke up.

Amazingly, Joe Campbell had another famous lover named Oliver “Billy” Sipple. Sipple was an ex-Marine who became famous on September 22, 1975 when he went to hear a speech by President Gerald Ford in San Francisco’s Union Square. Standing next to Sipple was a woman named Sara Jane Moore who pulled out a gun and tried to shoot the President, but was thwarted when Sipple, acting fast, knocked the gun away, saving the President. Sipple was closeted, but Harvey Milk thought this was a great opportunity to show Americans that gay men could be heroic. The San Francisco Chronicle printed the information that Sipple was gay, but the resulting press onslaught on Sipple and his parents was devastating to them, and Sipple unsuccessfully sued the Chronicle for outing him. It appears he then sank into alcoholism until his death in 1989.

A little research turned up something else interesting about the other, “Little” Joe. Joe Dallesandro is alive and well and living in Los Angeles, at least according to Wikipedia. Hard to imagine he was a hustler in New York in the 70s and made it through alive. In fact, it is Joe Dallesandro’s crotch that is memorialized on one of the most famous album covers ever, The Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers:

Update: Note Mixxie’s comments below for an even fuller picture of the time and people of the song.

Yellow Emperor of China

Just as Western history begins in a time so ancient that we cannot tell fact from myth, so too in China. We can go all the way back to the Yellow Emperor, one of the founders of human civilization, to get our first story. He is credited with inventing the wheel, and the magnet, around 2600 BC. The Yellow Emperor is an important figure in Taoism, and like King Solomon of the Bible, he was famous for his prodigious sexual prowess, with hundreds of wives and concubines. He also comes down through history as the earliest recorded Chinese man to take include other men in his bed. Founder of civilization indeed.

The nature of same-sex love in China is best illustrated by three colorful stories that give us the famous Chinese euphemisms for homosexual love:

First, a duke named Ling, loved a male court official named Mizi Xia. One day Mizi Xia offered Duke Ling half of his peach to eat. Ling responded, “How sincere is your love for me! You forget your own appetite and think only of giving me good things to eat!” For the next two thousand years homosexual love was “love of the shared peach.”

The second story is of Emperor Ai who ruled around the time of Christ. One day his lover Dong Xian fell asleep on his robe’s sleeve. Rather than wake him, the Emperor cut off his sleeve, and leaving their bed chambers appeared in public with his cut robe. The imperial court then adopted the cut sleeve style in honor of their love, and homosexual love across time became “love of the cut sleeve.”

The third story is named after the Lord Long Yang, who was lovers with the king of Wei. Fishing together, Long Yang caught an impressive fish, but then caught a bigger fish and wanted to throw the first one back. Suddenly Long Yang burst into tears. When the king asked why, Long Yang said he feared the king might do the same thing, finding someone else better and tossing him away. Moved, the king issued a law that “Whoever shall dare speak of beauties in my presence will have his whole clan extirpated [destroyed].” For the rest of history, homosexual love has been “Long Yang.”

The historian Louis Crompton points out how different these stories are from the Western tradition:

Clearly these normative tales, if we may so call them, show an unselfconscious acceptance of same-sex relations, an acceptance that was to persist in China for twenty-four centuries. They contrast strikingly with the myth that dominated the imagination of Western Christendom – the story of Sodom with its supernatural terrors. But they are also quite distinct from the traditions of ancient Greece. Instead of legends of heroic self-sacrifice in a warrior society, we have piquant tales of delicate consideration and tendernesss. Love for the Chinese was rarely the inspiration it was for the Greeks, the Arabs, and the troubadors. Rather than being enobling experiences, male love affairs in ancient China were elegant diversions, suffused with poetic sentiment.

The other dominant theme to stories of same-sex love in ancient China is how mundane they are. Rather than high-drama affairs that illustrate grand conclusions about gay love, the stories that come down to us through history are of typical relationships, often more focused on fighting mothers-in-law than anything between the same-sex partners. Of course, as is true throughout the world, the history of women’s relationships are often ignored.

As to why modern China is so homophobic… anti-homosexuality feelings developed throughout East Asia with the arrival of the Europeans and the teaching of Christian ethics. This negative effect of Christianity can be seen most powerfully in Japan where their respect for same-sex love rivaled that of the Greeks until the shaming of the Christian missionaries arrived, but I’ll cover that in another post.

[Update]

Slate.com has a great story about the situation in modern China: A Visit To A Shanghai Fake-Marriage Market, Where Chinese Lesbians And Gay Men Meet To Find A Husband Or Wife ]]>

The great world
spins forever
through the
ringing grooves
of change.
» Tennyson

Modern gay people are caught on the horns of the science versus religion debate. On one side is the modern sense of self, our respect for the individual, and acceptance of the validity of each person’s experience. On the other side is traditional Christian teaching that homosexuality is wrong and a sinful choice. Increasingly, scientific evidence comes down on the side of gay identity, with study after study linking biological factors like genetics and hormones to sexuality. Sadly, we’re back in the Medieval conundrum of whether to believe the facts or the “traditional” ways, which makes it a good time to review the story of Galileo.

Consider for a moment, the sea. If you didn’t know modern science, how would you explain the tides? We know that water stays level, so why do the oceans rise and fall? This phenomena was so baffling to ancient people they had few explanations, and the question of the tides was the central problem Galileo was trying to solve when he got into trouble.

The problem started in 1543, when Nicolaus Copernicus published Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs while working at the University of Padua. Copernicus theorized that the sun was the center of the universe, that the earth rotated on an axis, and that the earth circled the sun once a year. This was a direct assault on ancient teaching back to Aristotle, and most importantly, it contradicted the church. Tradition and religion were clear that the sun and stars moved around a stationary earth, and supporters of tradition had a strong argument on their side – common sense. Go outside. Do you see the earth moving around the sun? (This mindset continues to this day. These are the people who mock global warming because they see snow on their lawn.)

Galileo Galilei was born in 1564, studied Copernicus, came to agree with him, and proved him right in 1609 when he looked through the newly invented telescope and saw the moon and stars with all new detail. The proof of Copernicus’s theory came when Galileo stood in his nighttime garden, looking through his simple glass technology, and saw four moons circling Jupiter, proof of a miniature planetary system. A deeply religious man, Galileo gave, “infinite thanks to God for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries.”

Galileo demonstrating his telescope (painter unknown)

Galileo believed that seeing facts would change opinion. He was wrong. Just as people do today, Galileo’s peers did not let facts stand in their way. They even refused to look into the telescope, their commitment to not knowing was so strong.

Galileo expressed his frustration to a friend: “My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp [a viper], have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?”

The church didn’t need a telescope to see what was true as God’s timeless truth is laid out clearly in the Bible:

• The earth does not spin or move: “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.” [Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, 1 Chronicles 16:30]

…and: “He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.” [Psalm 104:5]

• The Bible is clear that the sun moves, not the earth: “The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.” [Ecclesiastes 1:5]
• In addition, the skies are a covering over the earth, not a space the through which the earth moves. “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth…He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.” [Isaiah 40:22]

I love this last one. The ancients often described the sky as a tent thrown over the world at night, and the pinpricks of light are sunlight coming through the gaps in the tent’s fabric. Look up for yourself, try to forget what you know, and then look again. The stars really do look like pinpricks in the dome of the sky where light shines through from behind. Terrible science, beautiful poetry.

To Christians of Galileo’s time the earth had to be the center of the universe. The Son of God came to earth, therefore earth must be the center of the universe. To put the sun at the center of the universe was to demote the centrality of Christ.

Galileo's Inquisition Trial, 1633.

In a cruel twist of fate, it was a new Pope’s encouragement that lead him to write his decisive book, the 500 page Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, originally titled Dialogue on the Tides, as it those perplexing tides remained the central focus of inquiry.

Galileo’s work was poorly received by the powerful, even the Pope turning against him. Now old and sick, Galileo was hauled before the Inquisition in Rome and convicted of heresy. The tribunal stated:

The proposition that the sun is the center of the world and does not move from its place is absurd and false philosophically and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to the Holy Scripture.

The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world and immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false philosophically, and theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith.

To save himself from life in prison, Galileo confessed to heresy and declared he had never believed all that he had believed and taught in his life. In consideration of his confessing, the sentence was commuted to house arrest, and Galileo died nine years later in the farmhouse of his confinement. The church won.

The trial of Galileo was a pivotal moment when truth was breaking through and the power structure quaked. Galileo was himself a believer. He tried to argue that one could believe the Bible as metaphorical truth while still seeing the truths of our planet. But the church said no, the Bible’s cosmology is literal truth. Truth was God’s word, not observable facts, and better not to look through the telescope.

For modern people, facts can stand for themselves, no matter what the church teaches. We call this science, and many date the beginning of science, and therefore modernity, with Galileo and the Copernican revolution. As Stephen Hawking said, “Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.”

There are modern people who will not look at the science of homosexuality. They already know the truth, as the church has told it to them. But as Galileo is reported to have muttered after submitting to the church’s truth: “Eppur si muove.” And yet it moves.

Moralists love to claim that it did. I don’t know why Christians hold the fall of pagan Rome as a bad thing, given it was Christianity that triumphed, but they certainly do. They see the fall of Rome as historical proof that homosexuality undermines civilizations.

Emperor Caligula

The truth is Rome fell over 300 years after its peak when Christian emperors forced their new religion on the Roman citizens. Emperor Constantine implemented anti-religious laws banning the Roman people’s traditional beliefs, along with Christian anti-sexuality laws. Denied the right to worship their traditional Gods and persecuted for being sexual, the citizens of Rome grew increasingly disenfranchised from their moralistic government. It is no exaggeration to say that homophobia was a greater cause of the fall of Rome than the gay.

With the fall of Rome, Christianity triumphed over the pagan Roman gods, and so began 1,000 years of Dark Ages, where the power of the church suppressed human knowledge, arts, and understanding. Only with the rise of a different kind of thinking, lead by Martin Luther, did the possibility of humanity grounding itself in secular knowledge begin to reassert itself in the West, opening the doors for a renaissance in human thought most prominently by the ultimate Renaissance men, both profoundly gay, Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo!

Not only was Renaissance Florence a hotbed of homosexuality, so was ancient Greece. And Paris. And Berlin. And London. And New York. And of course, Rome. And that is just the West. With so many examples to choose from, its obvious that gay people are the source of cultural thriving, not decline, although that won’t stop the homophobes from repeating this tired canard.

Michelangelo’s David

Under the hands of Michelangelo, David became the most famous naked man in the world. It seems a fitting tribute to the most passionate man in the Bible that we view him, naked and proud, as the pinnacle of Renaissance art. Let me tell you the story of David, and his very, very close friend, Jonathan. (Saving the story of Michelangelo for later…)

1,000 years before Jesus there was a king of Israel named Saul, who was troubled by evil spirits, and sought a musician to help find some peace. Someone suggested one of the king’s warriors, David, and from that time, “when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.” [1 Samuel 16:23] So David was a warrior, with a soft, sensitive side. As if that wasn’t enough, the Bible makes clear he was a hunk. “He was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to.” [1 Samuel 16:12] (I can just hear the giggles of King James’s translators figuring out how to render that into English in 1611.)

Young David portrayed in Goliath by Gustave Doré

The Israelites were at war with the Philistines, and the Philistine giant Goliath taunted the Israelites, daring them to send out their best for a one-on-one battle. David took the challenge and slew Goliath with one stone from his slingshot. In victory he cut of Goliath’s head and took it to King Saul.

The king’s son, Jonathan, saw David and it was love at first sight, or as the Bible puts it even more clearly, “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as with his own soul.” [I Samuel 18:1] Jonathan then “stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.” [I Samuel 18:3] Certainly a man who gives another man his girdle means business, although I think they mean belt. Considering that this was long before the invention of underwear, that story leaves Jonathan naked. David became part of the household from that day, and Jonathan was so smitten with his hunky buddy that he ends up offering David the inheritance of his throne. (ahem. So…Jonathan didn’t plan on the usual route of having sons to give his kingdom to?)

Something in the relationship really bothered King Saul, we can only imagine what, and it was so serious that Saul decided to kill David. Jonathon tells David of Saul’s plan, “and they kissed one another, and wept one with another – until David exceeded.” [1 Samuel 20:41] That last phrase generates some debate. It could mean David exceed Jonathon in his crying, but some evidence indicates that in the slang of the day it had a sexual connotation.

When King Saul and Jonathan are killed in a battle, David is heartbroken. “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been to me: thy love to me is wonderful, passing the love of women.” [2 Samuel 1: 25-26] Oh my. We don’t know the details, but this is way more than an a clap-on-the-back kind of friendship.

The anointing of David (wood panel from a synagogue in Dura Europos, Syria)

David went on to became King of a unified Israel, placed the capital in Jerusalem, wrote the poetry of the Psalms, had many wives and concubines (a biblical concept of a woman you own and have sex with without giving her the status of wife), and had a torrid affair with the hottie Bathsheba. She got pregnant, so David had her husband killed so that he could marry her. Adultery and murder didn’t diminish his legacy as God promised David that the Messiah would come from his line. Jesus was “of the House of David.” On his mother’s side. Obviously.

Straight out of the Bible we have David, ruggedly handsome warrior, giant-slayer, tender in song and poetry, lover of Jonathan and Bathsheba, adulterer, cold-blooded murderer, and God’s chosen. What to make of such a man? The story’s moral problems aside, David doesn’t sound particularly gay to me. He sounds passionate. There is a Hollywood quality about him, all dashing and brave, while tender and flawed, but triumphing in the end, and the audience leaves happy as long as they don’t think about the implications too closely.

Going on the morsels the scriptures give us, Jonathan sounds gay, and David receptive to Jonathan’s affections—not to imply that David benefitted or anything. (ahem, again.) David sounds like a man’s man, the kind of person many of us aspire to be, embodying deeply and energetically both the feminine and the masculine, both the strong and the soft, while living a life of gusto.

I don’t really care whether David and Jonathon were sexually intimate or had a deep platonic friendship. I do care that the Bible has preserved this ancient story of its greatest king loving another man passionately and without apology. It is a powerful image for God’s anointed to point to another man and say, “thy love to me is wonderful, passing the love of women.” Beautiful.

God hates fags.
» Westboro Baptist Church

A faggot is a bundle of sticks used to fuel a fire. How faggot became the term for a gay man is unknown. It may have been a derogatory term for an old women that got applied to gay men, but another derivation suggests that we throw the faggots on the fire. From Constantine, the first Christian Emperor of Rome, and for the next 1,500 years, Christians burned the gay. We think of the Inquisition as burning heretics, but according to records of the trials, more gay people were killed than religious heretics. Joan of Arc, for example was burned alive by the church for the sin of wearing pants, in defiance of the Bible. Who were all those witches but spiritually feisty women in a patriarchal world? The central question in Christendom was not whether it was just to burn gay people or not, but whether it was better to kill them first or to burn them alive.

Venice is beautiful. Modern visitors to Venice arriving from land cross over causeways to the island city, and then make their way down the Grand Canal to the one great open space, the Piazza San Marco, or St. Mark’s Square. The view from that square is immortalized in countless postcards and snapshots, the lagoon framed by two monumental columns, gondolas bobbing in the waves. On one of those columns stands the city’s original patron, Saint Theodore with his crocodile, and on the other a bronze lion with wings, the symbol of Venice itself. More gay people were killed between those two columns than anywhere else in Europe until the holocaust.

Venice was able to build such an opulent city because it was rich, wealth gained through its fleet’s control of the Adriatic. From there they built a trading empire that sent emissaries like Marco Polo as far as China in search of opportunities. But Venice is vulnerable to the sea. Inundated by annual floods, the Venetians lived in constant fear of worse climatic disasters.

Being Christian, the Venetians believed that the primary story of God destroying a city is the tale of Sodom, where God rained down fire and brimstone because the Sodomites allowed homosexuality to thrive. So the citizens of Venice decided to protect their city and their wealth by killing the gay people, burning them alive between those magnificent pillars. Over the years the screams of gay people burning in Saint Mark’s Square became too much for the bureaucrats working in the surrounding palaces, so in a humanitarian gesture towards those working nearby, the city decided to behead the accused gay person before the burnings. For hundreds of years Venetians pursued and killed gay people to ensure the city’s prosperity and God’s blessings.

Hard as it is to believe, there are modern American Christians who continue to preach the killing of gay people. There are American evangelicals who are unable to kill gays in America, and so are backing “death for gays” legislation across Africa. This legislation got dangerously close to passing in Uganda in 2010, and Christian American money promoting these bills continues to flow. Even here in the States Christians attend rallies with signs advocating death for the gay. Gay people are blamed for 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and pretty much every earthquake or wildfire in California. The medieval views of the Venetians are alive and well to this day.

Of course that is not the norm. Most Christians in America do not believe we should kill gay people. They believe tormenting us is enough. In the name of God, morals, families, righteousness, country, national security, civilization, and the human race, many Americans believe hurting the gay is a Christian duty. Gay people are bad and must be punished for their wrongness, and the pain inflicted must be horrible enough to serve as a message to others who might choose this deviant path. So we end up with what my friend Jathan Gurr calls the “If we just hurt them enough they won’t be gay” attitudes that dominate our political and religious discourse.

Here is my attempt to lay out this conservative view:

According to our most common religious teachings, homosexuals are committing a grievous sin. By choosing to follow their same-sex attraction, those who live the homosexual lifestyle are making a choice that snips a thread from the fabric of society. If too many individuals chose to live the gay lifestyle, society would unravel in an orgy of selfish indulgence, procreation would cease, and human life would come to an abrupt end.

Because this view declares homosexuality to be a choice, the ethics of that choice become central. Societies encourage positive behavior and discourage the detrimental. Because homosexuality damages society and the family, and threatens the human race, we must be against it. As families, and as God-fearing people, we must not allow gay people in our midst, or any discussion of homosexuality outside of condemnation. Whether by taunting the effeminate in the schoolyard, preaching against them from the pulpit, firing them from workplace, or outlawing their relationships in our laws, they must be stopped. Our continued health and very existence are at stake.

Homosexuality is a lifestyle that is, at its base, unnatural, going against everything from the design of our genitalia to our need to reproduce. God made male and female to fit together a certain way. As Anita Bryant said while fighting gay rights in the 1970s, “even barnyard animals don’t do what homosexuals do.”

Scientists have never found a gay gene. No one is born gay, no more than one is born a thief or a liar. God has given us free will to choose a righteous path and not give in to sin. It is absurd to think someone could be born with such unnatural desires.

Even with the obvious harm, bad people still live the gay lifestyle. They act out in this detrimental way because they are sick and damaged, and they end up stuck in this deviant lifestyle because of poor parenting, weak moral character, or valuing decadence over propriety. Homosexuals, having strayed, become hooked in the practice through addiction and psychological maladaptation.

Having made sin into a persistent lifestyle, homosexuals are now implementing a direct assault on the foundations of social order. They now seek to join the most exclusive of heterosexual clubs by gaining the right to marry, against all tradition and religious teaching. The purpose of marriage is for a man and a woman to bond and produce children. That is what it means to be human, and the homosexuals would rob us even of that.

In an unraveling modern society, where our social ties are breaking down before our eyes, the last bastion of human connection is the nuclear family. Multigenerational family living is gone. Ties with our neighbors are gone. The idea that “it takes a village” is mocked for being so far from our actual lives. Only the family, the nuclear family of a mother and a father and children, survives to hold society together. By choosing to not fulfill my manly duties and marry a woman, generate a nuclear family, and create children, I am personally a threat to all civilization.

Fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah, by Charles Foster, 1860

The clearest message that homosexuality is wrong comes from the Bible. Homosexual acts are prohibited by scripture. The Old Testament, in particular, has strict prohibitions on homosexual acts, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah shows God’s anger at sexual decadence. As a predominantly Christian society we must follow the clear commands of the Bible and enforce moral behavior, or else we too shall be destroyed in a rain of fire and brimstone like the people of Sodom.

But it is not just the Bible. A quick glance at the historical record shows the folly of the homosexual lifestyle. Look at the fall of Rome, brought down by the decadence of their homosexual perversions. Centers of sin throughout history have allowed homosexuality to flourish causing the collapse of civilizations.

Finally, the true sickness of homosexuality is seen in the scourge of AIDS. By having unnatural sex, and so much of it, gay men spread a horrific disease. Many innocent victims died because of the irresponsible decadence of gay sexuality. AIDS provides tangible proof of the consequences of sin and God’s punishment for the sick and immoral lifestyles of the gay.

The sickness that pervades modern society is exemplified by the prevalence of homosexuality. Gay people personify a society that is narcissistic, sexualized, sinful, and amoral.

** Remember, this is not anything I agree with. This is my attempt to elucidate the anti-gay position.

And now, some palate-cleansing humor. God’s truth:

God hates figs.
» Jeremiah 29:17

“Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Behold, I will send upon them the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, and will make them like vile figs, that cannot be eaten, they are so evil.”