Same sex relations in history and culture: an up-to-date synthesis

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2004 by Vern L. Bullough

Homosexuality, and Civilization. By Louis Crompton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, 623 pages. Cloth, $35.00.

Reviewed by Vern L. Bullough, Ph.D., R.N., SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus, 3305 West Sierra Dr., Westlake Village, CA 91362-3542; e-mail: vbullough@adelphia.net.

The publishing of historical studies of homosexuality, particularly in English, has exploded during the past 40 years. When I began writing on homosexuality in the 1960s and early 1970s, there were almost no serious historical studies in English. The best studies, written mostly in German in the early part of the 20th century, remained untranslated and unknown except to a few. Historical journals, in fact, were very reluctant to consider articles on homosexuality, so some of my early writing on the topic appeared in sociology journals, the editors of which were somewhat more receptive.

Book publishers, or at least some of them, were more willing to consider homosexuality, but I had two presses reluctantly turn down my book Sexual Variance in Society and History (Bullough, 1976) because of the topic. When it was finally published by a major press, the division in which it appeared closed shortly thereafter, the editor moved on, and the book more or less perished. Fortunately it was picked up by the University of Chicago Press (Bullough, 1978), which was beginning to venture into the sex field. I should add that it was not necessarily sexual topics publishers were fearful of since I had little trouble publishing on prostitution, but trouble came with attempts to publish objective historical studies on homosexuality and other forms of stigmatized sexual behavior.

What began as a trickle in the early 1970s has become a flood of historical studies. Most important, there was a reexamination of many of the primary sources (documents and works surviving from earlier periods of history). Most of the ancient Latin and Greek sources had been translated into English, but when it came to discussion of same-sex relations, the language was bowdlerized at best or sometimes left untranslated in the original Greek or Latin (most often it was simply deleted). Most of these translated sources--including the Loeb library, a scholarly collection of source materials--are now being republished and, if not retranslated, at least reedited to include previously expurgated passages. Source materials never translated or long neglected also began to be published.

The result has been a growing number of serious scholarly studies, many of them published by university presses. Some of the early books published during this historical revision have since been found by scholars to be misleading if not mistaken. This has been the case regarding John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980), which received tremendous publicity and opened the field to other historical writers because of its large sales. Since its publication, however, scholars (including Crompton, the author of the book reviewed here) have repeatedly shown where Boswell mistranslated or claimed more than was in the original sources. Boswell's work emphasized the opposite side of the historical coin, a change from neglecting or subverting sources and data about homosexuality to neglecting or drastically reinterpreting negative sources about homosexuality. Historians are not always as objective as we should be, and Boswell, a dedicated Catholic and a homosexual, was determined to show the error of the Catholic Church in its hostility toward homosexuality. Unfortunately, his missionary task overcame his objectivity.

If there has been so much research on the topic, some of which has been very controversial (e.g., Boswell, 1980), where can the nonhistorian specialist find the kind of historical data on homosexuality that he or she might want to rely upon? The best work I have read on this topic is the work by Louis Crompton, the subject of this review. Crompton, a retired gay English professor from the University of Nebraska and a pioneer in establishing gay and lesbian studies, has dispassionately brought together much of the recent scholarship on the history of homosexuality in a well-written book, easily read by both professional historians and interested readers whatever their field or level of expertise.

Crompton's is essentially an intellectual history, emphasizing the attitudes toward homosexuality of a number of societies at different historical periods. However, what makes it even more valuable and interesting to read are the brief and compelling biographies of individual gay and lesbian persons in history. Crompton often quotes the primary sources at some length, and the individuals become human beings, not just names. The book starts with a chapter on ancient Greece, where from 776 to 480 B.C.E. same-sex relationships began to play an important role in society. Crompton begins by examining some of the homoerotic illustrations on surviving pottery and the portrayal of same-sex interactions in statuary, then proceeds to literary figures such as Sappho and discussion of the controversies surrounding Greek homosexuality. As a contrast, the next chapter is devoted to the conflicting and contrary views of the Jews during the same time period. It was the Jewish view of this time that proved so influential upon the attitudes adopted by the later Christian church. Crompton then returns to classical Greece, discussing writers such as Pindar, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, various playwrights from Sophocles to Euripides, the sacred band of Thebes, and the life of Alexander the Great and others to demonstrate the importance of homoeroticism on Greek thinking. Next comes a comparison of Rome with Greece, in which Crompton finds what is called "Greek love" widespread in the literature and finds that same-sex relationships were a major element in the lives of poets, playwrights, emperors, and others, all of whom he surveys.