Bill Weintraub

Re: The defamation of male love

7-26-2006

Thank you Jon.

You're a true Warrior.

Jon says:

The defamation of male love is one of the most horrifying white-out jobs in history. It MAKES NO SENSE.

It has probably hurt more people touched by "Western Culture" (which, ironically, traces its roots to the Greeks and Romans and Ibero-Celtic peoples, all of whom deeply felt the power of male love) than any war or plague. My question, one I have not received an answer for .. WHY?

That's a difficult question.

And I don't know that there's any one explanation.

John Boswell, who was the openly gay chair of the history department at Yale, wrote a book titled Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, and he couldn't come up with a good reason for that defamation.

Homosexuality per se is harmless; and warrior cultures have always seen homosex as a force for good.

Also, there's debate about the extent of homophobia in Western culture over the past 2000 years.

At one time, it was believed that homophobia and persecution of homosexuals had been a constant of Western history.

But more recently, scholars have taken the view that such persecution was sporadic and episodic.

That was Boswell's view too, in his book Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.

He argued that the Church celebrated some form of same-sex unions for about its first 1000 years.

There was a lot of debate about Boswell's book when it was first published.

He was very erudite -- but, unfortunately, he died of AIDS in 1995, so he wasn't around to defend it.

In any case, a group of scholars filed a "friend of the court" brief when the US Supreme Court was hearing the 2003 sodomy case, and they argued that persecution of homosexuals was NOT part of the warp and woof of Western civ.

The justices said that, that was an important argument in favor of repeal of the sodomy laws.

Where does all that leave us?

Well, the suggestion is that persecution of homosexuals has probably been most severe and widespread globally during the 20th century and now into the 21st.

Which suggests in turn that such persecution is related to changes which occurred as a result of the industrial revolution.

Among those changes was a gradual end to the extended family and more and more people living in nuclear families.

In that sense, society became what my foreign correspondent, whom I quoted at length in THE POWER OF THE MASCULINE, calls "heterosexualized."

If there is no heterosexual society there would be no homosexuals. And no heterosexuals either. Male-male sex is isolated only because in the western society, its spaces and its customs are completely heterosexualised (i.e. made mixed gender with pressures to be heterosexual). But heterosexual spaces are themselves unnatural --- and it was only through financial and technological power brought by industrialisation that the western society could create such an artificial unnatural heterosexual environment.

Does that make sense?

He's saying that where before, men and women did not often mix socially, and where the emphasis was on all-male associations such as the military, now society emphasized the male-female dyad.

And that though some of this was in train for centuries, what we see today all happened pretty recently.

Prior to 1869, after all, there wasn't even a word "homosexual."

There were just sex acts.

Remember what my foreign friend said:

If there is no heterosexual society there would be no homosexuals. And no heterosexuals either.

But the 19th century, with its passion for science, both invented the word "homosexual" and medicalized "homosexuality."

And it became associated with "inversion" -- effeminacy and, to some degree, anal sex.

Probably because the most obvious "homosexuals" for doctors to study were "inverts" -- effeminate males into anal.

Masculine-identified men who loved men could easily pass as "straight."

And many times these men were married.

Which is what my foreign correspondent argues.

That masculine-identified men who loved other men simply went unnoticed.

In addition, society tolerated what was called the "confirmed bachelor."

Who, so long as he was masculine, was not regarded as "gay."

Again, anal was not a major player in the lives of gay men prior to 1975.

But even in the 19th century, those who were medicalizing homosexuality were going after anal.

That's part of the problem.

"Homosexuality" became identified with anal and effeminacy.

The fact of the matter is that 'straight' actually means 'masculine'. It is only that the west has for long propagated 'heterosexuality' as masculine, so that today it is seen as being synonymous with 'straight'.

Again, the real meaning of 'queer' is feminine, although it is used interchangeably for 'gay'.

You should also know that the word 'homosexual' and later 'gay' was originally used for feminine identified males who were believed to be feminine on account of their desire for men.

Again, Jon, we've looked more closely at the problem of heterosexualization and the creation of a separate "gay space" in the message thread titled THE POWER OF THE MASCULINE.

It's important to look at that post because it makes a start at trying to explain how Masculine-identified Men were cut off from the love of other Masculine-identified Men.

Which has to be one of the great human tragedies of our era:

The destruction of the love of MAN for MAN.

Another part of the problem, in my view, is that same-sex love aka homosexuality got caught up in the wars between capitalism, communism, liberal democracy, and fascism.

Toward the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, campaigns for "homophile liberation" emerged in Germany, which was probably the most advanced country in Europe at the time, and England, and to some extent in the US.

The campaign in Germany was in some ways an offshoot of the German Youth Movement, which celebrated nature and natural masculinity.

WW I and its aftermath wiped those campaigns off the map.

The world became sharply polarized between right and left, and homophiles were generally associated with the left.

What that meant as a practical matter varied from country to country.

In Germany, homosexuals were protected under Weimar, and then brutally persecuted under Hitler.

In Russia, Lenin was tolerant, Stalin a monster.

In America and the UK, persecution became most severe AFTER WW II, when the Red Scare hit and homosexuality was lumped in with communism.

So the 50s and 60s were a particularly virulently anti-homosex era.

You can also see how a martial concept of homosex would have been destroyed by these forces.

For example, homophile sentiments and homosex were said to have been fairly common in the pre-WW I German officer corps.

And in Germany in general there was a lot of interest in Sparta and ancient Greece.

However, in the post WW I years, the officer corps became very right wing.

Also, many of the old guard were associated with the defeat, and had been discredited.

The new people regarded homosex as a communist / Jewish issue.

And not without some reason.

The leader of the post-WW I German homophile movement was Magnus Hirschfeld, who can be thought of as a cross between a sex researcher like Kinsey and an activist like Harvey Milk or Larry Kramer.

Hirschfeld was both a Jew and a leftist.

Of course there were right-wing homosexuals like Ernst Roehm of the Nazi Party.

But he wasn't exactly a positive role model -- he was essentially a thug and a vicious anti-Semite -- and he was executed at the behest of the German officer corps, who did not want his brownshirts constituting a force which could rival the army.

So homosexuality became forbidden.

Here in the States, puritanism has always been powerful.

But in the 19th century, Whitman and his admirers had begun softening up the culture to be more tolerant.

Again, that was wiped out by first by WW I, and then WW II and the Red Scares, etc.

Fact is though, that the US military completely tolerated homosexuals until after WW II.

Prior to that, so far as I know -- and I may be wrong about this Jon -- there wasn't even a screening for homosexuality.

If there was, no one took it seriously.

Indeed, the reason NYC and SF took off as "gay centers" is that they were the ports of debarkation for the European and Pacific theaters in WW II.

So the history is complex, but we need to understand that history if we're ever to dig our way out of this mess.

Who did this to us, why, and what can we do to make the world right? I salute you, for trying to answer, at least, the third question, and I hope that my support helps in - some - way.

Thank you Jon.

What we can do to make the world right is understand that the love of Masculine Man for Masculine Man is completely Natural and normal.

While the division of Men into gay and straight is UNnatural and false.

And we have to make those points over and over again.

Thank you again Jon.

You're a true Warrior.

© All material Copyright 2006 by Bill Weintraub. All rights reserved.