Appearance
Homosexuality and Civilization
Crompton's "Homosexuality and Civilization" seems destined to become the definitive one-volume history of same-sex relations--and it comes at a critical period. Essential to the suppression of gay people in the West was the denial that they contributed positively to history; that history came very close to being effaced altogether. Just as the first gay historians after Stonewall began to reclaim that history, gay French philosopher Michel Foucault mischievously denied that homosexuality existed at all before the term was coined in the 1890s. This academic fashion caused many to refuse to consider fascinating new same-sex testimony from the past just as it appeared--a skepticism heteros would never dream of applying to their own sexual history. Crompton is post-theory, post-faction: instead of denying gay men had a history, he says, just read the first-person accounts from different times and places and respect what they plainly say. He does just that in this elegant, readable journey through Christian, Islamic, and Asian same-sex history.But Crompton also makes two landmark contributions well beyond the requirements of survey. First, he fingers the one person who actually invented Western homophobia: Philo Judeus. Jewish philosopher in Alexandria and contemporary of Christ, this titanic figure is at least as important to history as St. Augustine, and like Augustine, presents both light and dark sides. On the good side, he created the template for Christianity. Responding to the mounting fashion for monotheism in the ancient world, and to the deep respect Romans had for the Jewish equation of law with divinity, Philo sought to reinvent Judaism as a Gentile-friendly universal religion released from its tribal particularity. He was blocked in this effort by purists in Jerusalem who insisted on circumcision (meaning, for the convert, adult circumcision without anaesthetic) and obeisance to the Temple, which on high holy days turned into the largest assembly-line slaughterhouse in the world. Both requirements were deal-breakers for pagans. But Philo's student St. Paul successfully applied this template to the new cult of Christianity. On the negative side, it was Philo who first interpreted the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah as punishing homosexuality, which no one else, including Jesus, thought it was. His interpretation became, to this day, the key rationale for the persecution of gay people in Christendom. Thanks to Crompton, now we know who did it.Crompton's second great contribution is to extend same-sex history, virtually for the first time, to China and Japan. Gay men often ask, what kind of society would result if there were no taboos, if men could love whomever they want? For two thousand years, until the 19th century, this answer could be found in China and Japan. As long as a man did his dynastic duty siring children, he could do anything else he wanted sexually. The result was a broad middle area of opportunistic bisexuality flanked by strong purist traditions of hetero and homo sex. All three had their own philosophy and literature, and Crompton quotes extensively from an enormous, unsuppressed gay literature which the West has yet to sample.This book is the single finest one-volume survey of same-sex history on the market and deserves a wide audience.
Homosexuality and Civilization
Homosexuality has always been a natural variation of human nature: this has been aacknowledged universally, till a misjudged analogy (homosexuality equals idolatry of foreign gods) has been transfonded in a monstruously erroneous condemnation. This history shows that no moral one can rationally propound can be advance to condemn something that doesnt'do anyone any harm, so paranoid haters had to fabricate those reasons, basing them in entirely erroneous readings of biblical hepisodes. After the religion that Our Saviour founded, a religion He intended based on Love and Understanding, not on hatred, the montrous lies against homosexuals resulted in horrendous hate crimes justified by religious motives and sacred zeal. So sad are the chapter where homophobic racism, like antisemithic racism, was unleashed wit demonic gusto un innocent people.Then came Enlightenment, and homophobia began to be questioned, legislations began to be reformed.A book I recommend!
Homosexuality and Civilization
Louis Crompton has set out to provide us with an overview of homosexuality through history, no small task, but an admirable one, for homosexuality has typically been excluded from discussion, particularly in Western culture. Crompton basically covers from the time of the ancient Greeks, who revered male-male relationships, through the end of the 18th century, by which time Judeo-Christian beliefs had subjected homosexuals to centuries of persecutions. In addition, chapters on homosexuality in China and Japan help to provide a counterpoint to European traditions. This book, along with Graham Robb's Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century, brings us up to the 20th century, when the historical record is more complete.Crompton is a good writer, and good at pulling information together. His critiques of other writers, like John Boswell, are always supported by facts. And if I wish the book did more than simply allude to the presence of positive same-sex relationships in Africa, amid Native Americans, and in parts of Southern Asia, you can't have everything. I do, however, note that failure to discuss the importance of Filippo Brunelleschi in the chapter on the Italian Renaissance seems to me an unfortunate omission. By simply beginning with Donatello (who was, by most accounts, Brunelleschi's "boyfriend" and apprentice), we miss the chance to see that homosexuality was a major personality trait in the man perhaps most responsible for sparking the Italian Renaissance as a whole. Perhaps Crompton could have left out one or the other account of servants being jailed or burned to note that. But overall, this book provides a solid, readable overview of homosexuals over the course of the last 2500 years, and I'm grateful to have read it.
Homosexuality and Civilization
I read the original hard cover edition of 2003. It has 640 pages, some 100 color pictures and some 450 regular text pages.It covers Greece, Judea, the Roman Empire, Western Europe (mainly Italy, Spain [Christian and Muslim], France, England, the Netherlands and Prussia [historic part of Germany]), as well as China and Japan. That seems to be Crompton's (or the publisher's) definition of civilization. Considering that once the biggest cities were located in (sub-Saharan) Africa, that there were urban societies in the pre-Columbian Americas and that civilization's early roots are located in countries such as Babylon, Persia and Egypt, virtually all of which with known homosexualities, this book is not as exhaustive as its page number suggests. Did I mention EASTERN Europe? Maybe it's just an ill-advised title.The book sheds light on the various forms of persecutions and shares one and the other surprise. For example the most deadly persecution before Hitler having occurred in today's model country, the Netherlands. Today's most homophobic state of Germany, Bavaria, adopting Prussia's anti-homosexual laws not before the German unification of 1871 and Japan of all the places (i.e. the somewhat un-colonized ones) across the globe doing the same two years later. Of course, more positive episodes of the last some 25 hundred years are covered also. It would have been much more positive, if earlier times would have been included, such as ancient Egypt. Please be aware that Greek-Egyptian Cleopatra is closer to the Space Shuttle than the erection of the pyramids, i.e. that a lot of civilization isn't only lost in this book geographically, but also on the timeline.Overall, this book is a very good introduction into the issue. Just don't think it's exhaustive, just because you can outweigh your local phone book with it. You may be interested inColonialism and Homosexuality,Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature,Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities, and "leaving civilization", in the myriad concepts of love life inRitualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (Studies in Melanesian Anthropology). Louis Crompton criticizes John Boswell's classicChristianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, yet in principle, I find it worth to read nevertheless. You may attempt to outweigh Crompton's book withBiological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (Stonewall Inn Editions).
Homosexuality and Civilization
Louis Crompton has written a magisterial, eloquent, and exhaustive history of gay and lesbian history in his 2003 book, "Homosexuality and Civilization." The book traces the history of attitudes towards gay men and women from antiquity to the Enlightenment (its only shortcoming was the lack of anything past the nineteenth century). This book is a real toud d'force, covering literature, philosophy, history, and artefacts throughout the ages. Crompton is at complete odds with Boswell's two tomes on homosexuality, clearly laying the blame for most homophobia on the doorsteps of Christianity. Not until Augustine of Hippo, Clement of Alexandria, and John Chrysostom does homosexuality become a perversion that is meeted with some harsh, even lethal, opposition -- all because of the Story of Sodom and Gommorah, which ironically has nothing to do with homosexuality, but which the early Church Fathers decided was the lynchpin of God's wrath toward the unrighteous homosexual -- indeed, not just the homosexual, but any society that countenanced it. The Catholic Inquisition was matched only by the Protestant Reformation in its zeal to liquidate any form of same-sex love by a misreading of the Sodom story, and by a single verse from Leviticus -- a Code which most Christians reject or ignore categorically, yet from a single verse comes some of the most perverse reprisals against the gay community.Crompton's book is more like a textbook of all things homosexual prior to the 20th century than it is a thesis about a particular worldview of homosexuality. Homosexuals in almost all societies have enjoyed some of the most insightful and keen minds, beginning with ancient Greece and persisting throughout the modern era. But for all the accomplishments of gay men and women, the gay person has always been at the forefront of progroms to purge society of God's ire. Gays have always been blamed for anything that has gone wrong in almost every society -- except in ancient Greece, where same sex love facilitated military heroism. Retracing same-sex love from the "Iliad" through Plutarch, one sees a tolerant attitude convert to antipathy in the writings of the Christian Church Fathers -- almost always citing Leviticus 20:13, and starting with the adoption of the Christian faith as the national religion of medieval Rome in A.D. 390.There have been many an outstanding book on the topic of homosexuality, including John Boswell's two tomes, Dover's "Greek Homosexuality," and David Greenberg's "The Construction of Homosexuality." But none of these other works compares in eloqution, spectrum, or detail of Crompton's excellent survey. This is a book for every gay person's and historican's library; an exellent reference point for many of the people who have borne reproach for same-sex affinity; and a world view largely of Christianity's hostility. For all its wealth of information and eloquence, this book is highly recommended.
Homosexuality and Civilization
Published in 2003, "Homosexuality and Civilization" has become the standard text on homosexuality through the ages.The author, Louis Crompton, professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of Nebraska, offers an exhaustive list and description of homosexuality from early Greece to the end of the 19th century when homosexual behavior in Europe ceased to be a capital offense. Unfortunately, many anti-sodomy laws remain on the books today although rarely if ever enforced.As I wrote in my own book on the subject, "Invisible People: History's Homosexuals Unhidden," too many historians seem squeamish or embarrassed to write about famous people of the past who happened to have been gay or lesbian.In Robert K. Massie's Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Peter the Great, the author (in a footnote!) briefly mentions that the Russian tsar promoted his stable boy, Peter Menshikov, to governor of Moscow and made him a prince of the empire. The tsar also took naps with his friend, often laying his head on the youth's belly while they slept.And yet Massie seems to be in denial when he writes that the tsar's unusual sleeping arrangements, so reminiscent of Michael Jackson's sleepovers with prepubescent children, did not make Peter the Great homosexual or bisexual. (The Russian emperor had two wives and fathered several children.)Other historians shove important historical figures into a closet they never occupied in their lifetime. In Nancy Mitford's biography of Frederick the Great, she barely mentions the King of Prussia's overt homosexuality and his court, which consisted mostly of gay men and no women. Frederick kept his wife in a separate palace and only visited her once a year. The couple never had children.Frank Sanelloauthor of "Victims and Victimizers: Gays and Lesbians in the Third Reich"