Germany until 1969 (Haggerty, p.451). Kertbeny had his own specific views on human sexuality. Although there may never have been a coherent theory of homosexuality for him, he did divide homosexuals into specific categories: those who are “active,” “passive,” and “Platonists,” or those who love the company of their own sex without wanting to have sex with them. The designation “homosexuality,” then, started out as a term of sympathy and political activism to change a repressive law. However, over the years the word evolved into a concept that came to describe an individual’s sexual preference. The word and its evolving concept took some time to enter into European languages and thought patterns.
In the 1880s, Kertbeny’s catchy new term attracted the attention of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a noted sexologist who used the word in his vastly popular 1886–87 Psychopathia Sexualis, a massive encyclopaedia of sexual deviance. It was through this and subsequent works by noted sexologists of the late nineteenth century that the term “homosexuality” acquired its medical and clinical connotations. Sexology refers to the study of human sexual behaviour before the codifications of modern psychology and psychoanalysis generated by the thoughts and writings of Sigmund Freud (see Gregory W. Bredbeck, “Sexology,” in Haggerty, p.794). It was not until the 1950s that “homosexuality” entered popular English and American usage, largely as a result of the Kinsey reports of 1948. Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) was an American sex researcher whose scientific data on human sexuality challenged the prevailing notion that homosexuality was a mental illness.
As a concept, “homosexuality” encompasses a variety of conflicting ideas about gender and same-sex sexual attraction. Its broad range of possible meanings is what makes it such an irresistible, powerful, and ambiguous term nowadays. In its modern sense, “homosexuality is at once a psychological condition, an erotic desire, and a sexual practice” (David Halperin, “Homosexuality,” in Haggerty, p.452). All three senses can and are expressed in artistic or aestheticised form. Homosexuality or, to employ a term of more recent invention, the “homoerotic,” can be understood as an actual or potential element in everyone’s experience, whatever the sexual orientation of the individual. The homosexual and the homoerotic frequently overlap but are not necessarily the same. Many of the images in this book might be classified as homoerotic rather than homosexual. “Homosexual” and “homoerotic” differ only in the root meanings of the terms “sexual” and “erotic”. Whereas “sexual” encompasses the physical act of sex, “erotic” is a concept that incorporates a range of ideas and feelings around same-sex wants, needs, and desires. It does not always culminate in the sexual act. The homoerotic, unlike the homosexual, legitimates erotic desire between members of the same sex by placing that sentiment in a context which rationalises it – such as in classicism, military battle, or athletic activities. Thus, in many situations the homoerotic is veiled and perceived as non-transgressive behaviour. Whereas all homosexuals experience homoerotic desire, not all who experience and, indeed, appreciate homoerotic desire are necessarily homosexuals. The homoerotic can sometimes be a frightening prospect for some heterosexuals to such a degree that it sometimes incites virulent homophobic responses. The “homoerotic” is also linked to the more recent idea of the “homosocial”. Male homosociality refers to all-male groups or environments, and is a means by which men construct their identities and consolidate their privilege and social power as males usually through and at the expense of women (see Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985). Indeed, female homosociality also exists, but the dynamics of it in relation to patriarchal culture are quite different.
Although male and female homosexuality are often treated separately, both are considered in this book. Throughout, the term “homosexuality” refers to male homosexuality unless “female” is specified. This is so because most societies are male-dominated and male-oriented, giving primacy to the sexual activities and development of men over women. In relationship to art about and by homosexual men, the “scarcity of art about or by lesbians reflects male domination of the cultural record” (Saslow, p.7). All of the art and literary evidence we have was the work of males and bear mostly on male activities.
The definition of homosexuality is further complicated by the differences between modern and pre-modern notions of the concept. There is considerable disagreement in contemporary literature on homosexuality over use of the word “homosexual” for same-sex relationships in non-Western, pre-modern and ancient periods. The word “homosexuality” is relatively young. Like the word “sexuality” itself, it describes a culturally determined and culturally constructed concept born of recent Western society. Thus, applying the concept “homosexuality” to history is bound to force modern and Western concepts of self and other onto the ancient and pre-modern world. In most pre-modern and ancient cultures, there is no word to denote a state of being homosexual or to describe a homosexual act.
02. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait or Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle, 1493.
Oil on parchment mounted on canvas, 56.5 × 44.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
03. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Ecstasy of Saint Francis, c. 1594–1595.
Oil on canvas, 92.5 × 128 cm. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford (Connecticut).
Any attempt to fit male representations in ancient art or texts with the status or practices of modern-day homosexuals would be anachronistic. Also, the modern notion of “homosexuality” is loaded with a negative moral stigma that clouds any positive or pleasurable appreciation of male-male or female-female sexual culture in pre-modern societies. However, even though the ancients may not have had in mind the modern concept of “homosexual” and “homosexuality,” this does not negate the fact that homosexuality and indeed homophobia did exist.
In the modern West, homosexuality is often thought about in binary notions of sex and gender. The very notion of homosexuality in the West implies that same-sex feeling and expression, in all the many different sexual and erotic forms they take, constitute a single thing, an integrated phenomenon called ‘homosexuality’, which is distinct and separate from heterosexuality. However, in the ancient, pre-modern, and non-Western societies presented in this book, the sameness or difference of the sexes of the persons who engaged in a sexual act was less important than the extent to which sexual acts either violated or conformed to the rules of religion or to the norms of conduct or tradition deemed appropriate to an individual’s gender, age, and social status. For this reason, discourses of pederasty (from the Greek meaning “love of boys”) and sodomy (anal sex) as these related to class, age, and social status were more significant than the fact that the two partners were of the same sex. Concerns over the morality of homosexuality or sexual inversion are typical of modern rather than pre-modern approaches. What we call homosexual behaviour was not frowned upon, for example, in ancient Greece. However, there were strict social rules that governed such behaviour. In ancient Athens, a homosexual relationship between a teenage boy and a mature man was generally regarded as a positive phase of a young man’s educational and social development. Indeed, such relationships were celebrated in the various dialogues of Plato, in vase and wall paintings, and in lyric poetry. At a certain point in his development, however, the adolescent was expected to marry and father children. What was frowned upon in such intergenerational sexual relationships was passivity and eager compliance in anal copulation. It should be stressed, however, that for the ancient Greeks, there was no underlying moral, religious, or social basis for censuring the erotic relationship between males that conformed to the expected hierarchical arrangement involving an adult male and an adolescent boy.
Homosexuality in the art of the non-Western world operated along the same lines as in ancient Western cultures. However, it was due to territorial expansion and campaigns of conquest beginning in the sixteenth century that Westerners forged contacts with previously unknown peoples and cultures in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Arab world. The moral values of the West were soon imposed upon those who were conquered. Cultures
