Cypros said:
Nova, I find this statement interesting. Are you saying that homosexuality was not a part of the repertoire of human behavior in antiquity...?
Again, there's that troubling word "sexuality." No doubt there has been homosexual behavior throughout history; since homosexual behavior occurs among all primates, there's no reason to wonder whether it was a pastime of our earliest ancestors.
But when we talk about homosexuality as a sexual orientation, the record gets murkier, largely because the concept as we understand was originally a medical term coined in the 1800s. (Lots of contemporary scholars simply refuse to use the "h" word because of problems like these. But that simply raises other linguistic problems and I figure this is a popular discussion board and nobody wants to read my distinction between the various academic terms (which have probably changed since I began this post).)
The norm in most cultures historically was to focus on love and desire between a man and a (usually adolescent) boy. But these participants weren't considered lifelong "homosexuals" in our sense: it was assumed the man would also sire children with his wife, as would the "boy" of the couple once he reach maturity. The boy (now a man) might then take other boys as his partners. As you know this was the "norm" among the ancient Greeks, early Germans and medieval Japanese.
Most pre-modern cultures did not have a concept of a homosexual orientation whereby one man desires another. (I once argued in a grad school paper that even if Medieval Europeans had had such a notion, they would have lacked the language to express it in writing. The Latin words for beauty, sexually desirable, etc., only applied to females and males young enough to be considered effeminate. Adult males were praised for qualities such as "gravitas," which really didn't have connotations of sexual desirability.)
There are hints here and there that some men (all of this is very different for women) may have remained partnered even after both became adults. Aristophanes mocks "effeminate men" for still playing the role of "beloved boy" after they grow up. A 16th century Japanese writer wrote a very moving short story about two men who maintained their man/boy love into old age (but the younger partner of the pair continued to dress as a teenage boy until they died; such is the Japanese concern with form).
And then there is Plato in the
Symposium. As I'm sure you recall, the myth presented therein posits that all people once had two heads, four hands, four legs, etc. Some were male/female in their halves, some male/male, some female/female. An angry god split everyone in two and doomed each individual to an eternal search for his/her "other half."
It's easy to see this as a concept of heterosexual (the male/female pair), gay (male/male) and lesbian (female/female), but scholars have a lot of problem with this. For one thing, they can't seem to find any other iteration of this notion. For another, the other surviving references in Plato seem to refer to the more common man/boy couple.
So long story short (too late!) although there is plenty of male on male eroticism in pre-modern cultures, these almost always involve an adult male with an adolescent male. What is lacking is the context of an innate sexuality that drives one man to love and desire another.
Did homosexuals such as myself exist without being commonly recorded? Your answer to that will depend on whether you think homosexuality is genetic (in which case, it has probably long been with us), psychological (origin may depend on what you believe to be the causes) or primarily social. (In the case of the latter, the argument is that whoever they loved, men couldn't be "homosexual" until the concept was invented. And anyway, the most important reality for a gay man is his relationship with a hostile society, so gay-ancient-Greek - even if it existed - didn't count.)
