Sex, Hardcore, Rough Homo Sex.

Reflecting on the title of Louis Crompton's magisterialHomosexuality & Civilization, one might see that this is an artful andwell-planned work of scholarship, for its multiple ironies sum up many of thethemes and polemical issues pertinent to the book. On a fundamental level,the ampersand of the title points to the bitter irony that those who practicesame-sex relations have often been excluded from "civilization" inthe Christian West. Frankly relating the virulent homophobia of westernsociety and its dire consequences to the Hebrew Scriptures and early Churchhistory (a move to which I shall return), Crompton argues that "from thevery birth of Christianity, a hatred [of same-sex relations] existed fullycomparable to the hatred directed at pagans and Jews in the first millenniumand at heretics, Jews, and witches in the first seven centuries of thesecond" (xi). This is Crompton's most important thesis, and hetraces in painstaking detail the Christian othering of same-sex love anddesire that, he contends, caused them to be persecuted from the earlyChristian era through the Enlightenment when, by and large, executions forsodomy ceased in Europe and the Americas.

But the ampersand of Crompton's title also linkshomosexuality to civilization. Indeed, Crompton's book may reflectanother idea altogether, one recalled in the old stereotype (dating back atleast to the 19th century and the work of men such as John Ruskin, JohnAddington Symmonds, and Havelock Ellis) that same-sex desire was intimatelyconnected to advancements in art and culture in the West and especially theEuropean "Renaissance." Although Crompton goes out of his way toreveal the lives of ordinary people as he recovers a history of same-sexdesire, no small part of the encyclopedic achievement in Homosexuality &Civilization is that it rehearses anew the manifold accomplishments ofwestern civilization deriving from men and women who most likely felt desirefor people of the same sex. Rather than merely replay the old stereotype,however, Crompton enhances its polemical and political valence by showing(again exhaustively) that the achievements of such men and women are notlimited to the plastic and intellectual arts but extend into the political,military, and sometimes religious realms. In this sense, the title,Homosexuality & Civilization, intimates an added irony that withoutpeople who practice same-sex relations there would be no civilization--atleast not as we know it.

Sex, hardcore, rough homo sex.

Download Zip

Unlike many histories of same-sex relations in the recent past,Homosexuality & Civilization is unabashedly humanist in orientation. Itseeks to establish a liberal identification among those who have practicedand been persecuted for same-sex relations throughout history. Cromptonrecognizes how "differently" what he calls "homosexuality hasbeen perceived and judged at different times in different cultures"(xiii), but he insists as well that "behind these varied and conflictingviews was a commonality" obscured by semantics: "Whatever thevocabulary, two elements are present [throughout history]--the sexual factand the possibility of love and devotion" (xiv). On this level, ofcourse, the book attempts to repudiate Michel Foucault's thesis that themedicalization of same-sex desire in the late nineteenth century rendered themodern homosexual a different species from anything that had come before(History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction [New York: Vintage, 1978],43). Foucault's work suggests that sexual subjectivity and hencehomosexuality--in other words, the idea that one's sexual object choicedetermined a significant or defining aspect of one's personalidentity--did not come into being until the late nineteenth century. AlthoughCrompton recognizes that before the modern age "homosexuality"would have been understood more in terms of the specific acts thatconstituted the crime of sodomy and less in terms of identity, henevertheless argues for a type of transhistorical identity when he writesthat '"sodomites' were human beings with whom the modern gayman may claim brotherhood" (xiv).

Still, the whole is not an unhappy achievement. Even as itsuniversalizing limits the validity of some of its conclusions, the sheer massof evidence Crompton collects in one place makes this book a truly valuablework of scholarship in the history of (homo)sexuality. And, to be fair,Crompton's essentializing bias enables a focus on continuities sometimesoverlooked by those of us eager to see difference. Most significant, it givesthe author scope to reveal the long-compounded horror of people--men, women,and children--exiled, imprisoned, and burned throughout Christian history, atleast (by Crompton's account) since 390 C.E., when Theodosius issued anedict condemning same-sex acts. Crompton's argument underplays othersocial factors and cultural conditions that may have worked against thenormalizing of same-sex relations in various societies, but it is hard toread Homosexuality & Civilization and not be swayed by its overwhelmingevidence of the role the Church has played in persecuting same-sex relations.And it is harder still not to sympathize with its insistent emotionalimplication that the continuity of theological persecution has, after all,tended to essentialize same-sex desire by helping reduce it to a unitarydiscourse of unnatural threat and affront to the Christian God Himself.

However, what we were describing what cannot but appear as two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to bare life, to homo sacer as the dispensable object of the expert caretaking knowledge; and that of the respect for the vulnerable Other brought to extreme, of the attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences itself as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential "harassments." Is there a stronger contrast than the one between the respect for the Other's vulnerability and the reduction of the Other to "mere life" regulated by the administrative knowledge?

This crime deserves its own section not least because of the unbelievable proliferation of works of this nature. There are a lot more - by a factor of at least ten - stories on the net about Picard and Riker having sex then there are about Troi and Riker having sex, and in fact, also far more than there are about Troi and Crusher having sex. So while male trekkies are lusting over fake nudes of Roxanna Biggs-Dawson, female trekkies are writing novels about Chakotay taking Tom from behind. You decide which is more pathetic. 2ff7e9595c