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homophobia |
| T h e r o o t s o f h o m o p h o b i a By Terry Boughner, Ph.d. Copyright 1989. All rights reserved |
| Slowly and insidiously it spread across
Europe. According to contemporary descriptions, it was a disease of epidemic proportions. It was not a thing of
a year or two or even of decades, but of centuries and nothing that anyone could do seemed able to stop it. In 541 A.D., the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian claimed that it was responsible for killing one third of the people of Constantinople and had decreed that all those who were infected with it, were to be killed. That had little effect and two hundred years later, Charlemagne said that it was tearing his kingdom apart. Three hundred years after that, the German monk, Peter Damian wrote to the Pope that "the disease is a cancer eating at the heart of Christendom. If it is not stopped, it will mean the end of us all." Certainly the Bubonic Plague or Black Death which periodically ravaged Europe was terrible. People died in the tens of thousands. But that plague wasn't what Justinian, Charlemagne, Peter Damian or numberless others were talking about. What panicked them and indeed all of Christendom with them was homosexuality. In their eyes, it was not only a disease, but the worst of all crimes. Damian was even willing to concede that bestiality was "more tolerable than for a man to lie with another man." But the roots of Western homophobia do not begin here. They are long and they strike deep, reaching down into a time well before the hysteria of the western Dark and Middle Ages. Many today blame St. Paul an only been badly translated and/or taken out of context. The real culprits are the Stoics and the early Fathers of the Church. Stoicism was a philosophy that arose in Greece in the 4th Century B.C. as a reaction to those, like Diogenes, who believed that the good life was to be found in the private individual's search for happiness. The Stoics maintained that true happiness was not possible because life was full of pain. The only thing one could do was to accept it and keep it to a minimum. Pleasure was to be avoided because it inevitably led to pain and was totally irrational as well. The philosophy swept the Mediterranean world and was quickly adopted by the Romans. Highest on the list of the pleasures to be avoided was sex. However, even the great Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca admitted that celibacy would have deleterious effects on the existence of the next generation. Therefore, sex was permissible--but only the heterosexual kind, only for procreation and, said Seneca, one must not do it too often, "lest it become pleasurable and habitual." The Christians picked all this up as a gift from God. To them, the body was the "temple of the spirit" and, while not evil in itself, the body could and often did tempt the soul to sin. Sin, therefore, was equated with bodily pleasure and hence the physical appetites must be kept in check. As far as sex was concerned, celibacy was best. But since sex was necessary as they, like the Stoics, had to admit, it could only be of the heterosexual variety and only for babies. Interestingly, not once did it cross anyone's mind that sex might be an expression of love. Neither the Stoics nor the Christians thought of that. By this logic, homosexuality was bad. Procreation wasn't involved and pleasure most definitely was. St. Augustine, who was known to have had homosexual tastes in his younger days, in later years, inveighed against the "follies of my youth when I sought nothing but sexual pleasure." The Church Father, Tertullian, damned Gay sex as "a frenzy of passion", a "monstrosity." St. John Chrysostom, who was very nearly paranoid on the subject, called it "the enormity of all vices." But in the damnation of homosexuality, there is one other point to be kept in mind. That is the Church's attitude toward women. As Chrysostom wrote, "by their nature, women are in a lower category than men." Tertullian, a through-going misogynist, agreed, thanking God that he had been born a man. Given this, part of their horror over homosexuality lay in what they thought of as fact; that homosexuals were simply twisted straight men acting as women. No more degrading or defiling thing could be imagined. With the triumph of Christianity in the 4th Century A.D. as the state religion of the empire, the Church's hysteria over homosexuality was translated into law. In 342 A.D., the Emperor Constantius decreed "exquisite punishment" for homosexuals. In 390 A.D., Emperor Theodosius proclaimed that all homosexuals were to be burned "because they [homosexuals] act the part of women." In the 6th Century, the Emperor Justinian ordered the codification of the Roman Law. This was done by committees made up of the clergy and high officials of state. The resulting Justinian Code on which many modern European law codes are based, condemned "sodomites" as men deserving of no mercy whatsoever. And lest there be any confusion about what sodomy meant since heterosexuals could engage in it too, the word "sodomite" was very clearly defined as meaning only those males having sex with males whether anally or any other way. Sodomites were the "chief of all sinners'' said the law, but it was not sinners in the usual religious sense where one could be forgiven and received back into the bosom of the community. Homosexuals, as the Code made clear, could never be forgiven because their sin was that of a people with an identifiable lifestyle revolving around the choice of sexual partners of the same sex. This distinction marks the beginning of the treatment of Gays as a race apart, both as religious outcasts and as traitors to the state and also according to the law, as carriers of disease which, by the slightest contact, could be passed from one person to another. Our very existence was not to be tolerated. The punishment was castration and death--or worse as it turned out. In 542, one of the periodic outbreaks of plague ravaged Constantinople. In those days, as in centuries past, disease was looked upon as God's punishment for sin. In this case, after consultation with officials of the Church, Justinian announced that God's anger was caused by the presence of homosexuals in the city and decreed that they all should be killed for the salvation of the state. The result was an orgy of executions. Untold numbers of men, young and old, were rounded up and taken to the Hippodrome. There before frantic audiences of wildly screaming thousands, including the emperor and his wife, Theodora, they were burned at the stake. (See "Mandate>F1>, March, 1988) Despite all the moral diatribes, the decrees, the laws, the tortures and death, we continued to exist. In response, the Church redoubled its efforts against us. In 693, the Council of Toledo took note that sodomites had infiltrated the Church itself and ordered that "those clerics who lay with men" be "degraded, tortured, exiled and damned." All that solved nothing if we are to believe the great body of penitential literature that came into being to try and deal with "the problem." The penalties are interesting. For example, if you were a youth under 20 "simple kissing" of another man earned you six special fasts. What was called "licentious kissing" got you eight fasts--as long as you didn't cum in the process. If that happened, it was 10 fasts. However, if you were over 20 and any of the above happened, it was bread and water for life and exclusion from church services. Well, bread and water would have been a little hard to take anyway. This was just for kissing. If you got off between your lover's thighs (Coitus in femoribus), there was a three year penance. This involved the bread and water diet, but to it was added the requirement that you be whipped each day 20 strokes while lying on your stomach naked beneath a crucifix. If you and your lover got into ass fucking (Coitus in ano), the penance was the same except it lasted four years. It remained for St. Peter Damian (1007-1072) to bring the anti-homosexual frenzy to new heights by writing something called "The Book of Gomorrah"and sending it to the Pope. Authorities today call it the most notable medieval pronouncement on homosexuality ever written. Working himself up to a fever pitch, Damian who, as we've seen, believed that bestiality was preferable to homosexuality, inveighed against priests who were seducing young male penitents and choirboys. This, he writes, is not "uncommon'' and, in fact, so bad is it that "youths are being converted to shameful passion in untold numbers.'' "Priests are having sex with eight or ten sordid men a week." As if this weren't enough, these "debased creatures" [priests] who have tricked together then confess to each other and prescribe further sex as penance! Priests and monks were not only seducing the choirboys and screwing each other, they were keeping lovers and calling them "spiritual sons" and to compound the problem, they were writing poetry to "the objects of their lust." In this last, Damian was not wrong. In 1984 a book of these poems was published, translated by Thomas Stehling called, "Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship." For all of this, according to Damian, no punishment was too great. "Let he who lies with another man be publicly flogged. His hair is to be shorn, his face foully besmeared with spit and he is to be bound in iron chains." He warned his readers that only male virgins could expect to reach the highest realms of Heaven. Damian's book received wide circulation. Even those, such as the monarchs and the nobility most of whom couldn't read, learned what was in it and were horrified. Damian who, after his death would be made a saint of the Church, had defined homosexuality as a "cancer", a disease more deadly than any known. It was, said the future saint, highly contagious and, if allowed to continue, would mean the end of Christendom as well as consigning to Hell all those who contracted it. It was, he said, a plague that could only be stopped by killing those who had contracted it. As a result, Henry I of England decreed death for sodomites "especially those who take pleasure in their sin." Benedictine monks were forbidden to sleep two to a bed and required to have a light burning "during the night hours when demons tempt." Bishop Iro of Chartes decreed that if two men were discovered in sodomy, death by burning was the penalty if the crime was "perfectus." If "imperfectus", then banishment. The philosopher Albertus Magnus followed suit, adding to the growing furore. Noting that gay sex was a sin against the dignity of males, he listed four more reasons why God hated it. It came from a burning frenzy, it was a vice of the rich, it was addictive and it was contagious. It remained however, for St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) to put the capstone on what was leading to an inevitable explosion. Aquinas was not too keen on sex of any kind since "every form liketh a man to a beast", but the gay variety was "especially wrong." The reason was, he said, was that it was "Irrational, unnatural, proceeded from lust and was only for pleasure." He did allow that two men might touch each other--shake hands, probably,--but he advised against even that. One might too easily slip into "enjoying forbidden pleasures" so it was better to keep your distance. If, however, one was tempted by some deliciously beautiful young man, the cure he advised for this "enormity of all vices'' was to "contemplate the rewards of chastity.'' Thomas went on in much the same way as had Western churchmen, theologians and philosophers for over the past 1000 years, lashing out against homosexuals as the lowest and worst of human beings--if we were even human to begin with upon which Peter Damian voiced doubts. But Thomas and his contemporaries had introduced yet a new argument against us; that of natural law. The idea was that everything had its function decreed by nature through its design and that function was obvious to any reasonable person. For example, the penis was "obviously" made to fit the vagina and the function was procreation. Anything else such as homosexual activity was, by definition, unnatural. On the surface the argument worked. A closer look and it made little sense at all. But no one looked inasmuch as it so well reinforced all of the old prejudices. The result of all this was that by the end of the 13th Century, we Gays had been defined as a group, separated out condemned everywhere by the laws of church and state and now were thought to be alien by nature. From this point on, in all the Christian West, we would find no refuge nor tolerance. No one anywhere at anytime admitted that two men or two women might love each other and that sex was or would be a natural expression of this love. By the very fact of our being, we here heretics and heresy had to be rooted out with no mercy shown. The way had been prepared for the Inquisition and the witchcraft trials. Heresy had, since the earliest days, been considered among worst of crimes and the Inquisition had been established by the Church to deal with it. In 1284, Pope Martin IV issued a bull which equated homosexuality with heresy and both were equated with witchcraft. Future Popes would follow suit. According to what passed as the thinking of the day, witches, gay men and women, assembled in the forests in the dead of night there to consort with demons and/or the Devil himself. According to one account of the proceedings (and there were many) the gays in attendance engaged in the "osculum infame'', the infamous kiss whereby each man kissed the ass hole of the Devil who was described as "pale, exceeding muscular with black, shining eyes.'' Other reports said that after kissing the Devil's ass, one stuck a silver spoon up his hole and, after withdrawing it, licked it. Then the bonfire went out and it was "masculi in masculo et feminae in feminas'', or, in other words, men with men, women with women in one grand orgy with the demons joining in. But, while the woods at night were favorite locations to place all these goings on, the demons, said the Church, weren't about to confine their activities to the forest. Often, it was said, a man, as he lay in his bed, would "fall prey to evil thoughts.'' Then, in answer, a demon in the guise of a beautifully sensuous youth would appear in the man's bedroom where they would engage in "the terrible vice.'' There was only one problem. Demons weren't supposed to have bodies or sperm, so how could sex happen? The Medieval mind worked this over for awhile and finally came up with the answer. Every time a man masturbated, a demon flew in and took the cum. With some of this he made himself a body and used the rest to fuck his partner's ass or face. All of this and more was sincerely believed and taught as accepted truth at the universities throughout Europe and by the Church. It was through "demented'' women and all homosexual men that the Devil gained entree to earth. The authorities were not slow to take action. One famous example was the case of the Knights Templers, one of the wealthiest and most powerful military orders in Europe. On October 13, 1307, the French King Philip IV ordered the arrest of the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay and hundreds of others on charges of sodomy/witchcraft/heresy. The Templers were accused of having initiates rim the Grand Master or other of his knights after which the young man was forced to suck the cock of either the Grand Master or everyone present (reports vary). de Molay never admitted the charge, but many of the rest did and the Grand Master was consigned to the flames. In Treviso, a town near Venice it was decreed that in the case of sodomy, "a male must be stripped of all his clothes and fastened to a stake in the Street of the Locusts with a nail or rivet driven through his male member, and shall remain there all day and all night and the following day be burned.'' In Geneva, Switzerland, sodomy trials resulted in the killing of 75 men for "lascivious actions in sex with French boys.'' Boys and men were all drowned in the nearby lake. In Spain one Jose Peralta, Friar of the Order of St. Jerome admitted to the Inquisition to having committed sodomy "many times'' with Juan Romero, an 18 year-old youth. In an outburst of uncharacteristic mercy, the ecclesiastical court sentenced the monk to spend a year in his monastery contemplating his sin. Juan, however, got different treatment. He was stripped naked and led through the streets of Seville, his arms bound behind him and wearing a mitre covered with feathers which, in Spain was the symbol of sodomites. At each corner he was whipped five times. There were a lot of corners. The youth died under the lash. And Br. Peralta, well, he served his penance and when released, returned to his gay ways. He was caught four times more, each time being sent back to the monastery while the young man was killed. As the years passed, the fury of the Inquisition only mounted and it was automatically assumed that any male who fell into their hands was a homosexual. For them was reserved the worst cells in the deepest dungeons of the prisons of the Holy Office. Homosexuals were heretics, heretics were witches and once accused, there was no way to prove the contrary. In Spain particularly, the holocaust was terrible. There the tortures exceeded anything that modern imagination can conceive all to get the "wretched sinner'' to confess his "crime.'' That having been done, then came the "Auto da Fe'', the Act of Faith. Gays dressed in the robes of penitents with the sodomite's mitres upon their heads were marched, attended by priests to the city square often under the eyes of the royal family. There the miserable creatures had heaps of sticks called "fagots'' piled about their legs and the fires were set, their cries echoing far beyond the city walls. As the Church hated homosexuals, it also hated the Jews who had for centuries suffered every kind of persecution. Now, the Inquisition added a new crime to their shoulders, that of being homosexuals. It was the joining by the majority of the two most despised minorities in Europe in an attempt to obliterate them both. Ritual murder of Christian boys had long been a libel directed against the Jews. Now, in the 1400's a new variant appeared in Spain. According to the canard, some Jews had seized a beautiful youth of 18. They took him to a cave, raped him and then whipped him 5000 times. Though it all, the story went, the young man was silent, but on the 5001 stroke of the lash, he cried out. When asked why, he replied that they had beaten him one time more than Christ had been scourged. Amazed by this, his captors took a knife to cut out his heart. When they professed not to know where that organ was, he helped them to find it! The story would not be worth repeating except that it was believed at the time. Throughout Spain Jews were hunted down and accused of sodomy. Finally, in 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ordered them expelled from the kingdom. Most left. Some by land, others by sea and it was a flotilla of ships bearing Jews accused of being homosexuals that delayed Columbus's departure for the New World from Palos, Spain. For nearly 100 years longer the so-called "Witchcraft Craze'' went on. Finally, with the decline of Church power and the coming of the Enlightenment, the trials and burnings ceased. But by that time, untold numbers of women and Gay men had lost their lives in an orgy of blood not to be seen until Nazi Germany. Yet, though gays were no longer hunted down and burned, the old attitudes ingrained in the Western mind by over a 1500 years of homophobic propaganda remained. Everywhere in the Western World, homosexuality was the love that dared not speak its name and would remain so. In 1933 when Hitler came to power in Germany, his decision to exterminate gays root and branch fed on all the old hatreds and calumnies that stretched back to the Fathers of the Church. It has been said by some that Gay Liberation has not moved fast enough. But remember, it and we have nearly 2000 years of homophobia to overcome. |