Halperin’s History of Homosexuality – Chapter 4

In this chapter Halperin differentiates four distinct catagories in the modern day notion of homosexuality that can be historically traced (since our present idea of homosexuality is effectively complex enough that no single historical catagory can justify or trace back its history). In order to effective do a genealogy (as is Halperin’s intent), he must “disaggragate those notions by tracing their separate histories as well as the process of their interrelations, their crossings, and, eventually, their unstable convergence in the present day” (107). Those catagories are: effeminacy, paederasty or ‘active’ sodomy, friendship or male love, and passivity or inversion.

Effeminacy – This trait deserves special attention as it has, in regard to sexual-object choice, completely reversed in meaning. While today it is a marker of particularly flamboyant gay men, the history of effeminacy links it to men who were womanizers. These men preferred to spend their time loving women rather than sharpening their battle skills, or, “mak[ing] love, not war.” In order to please women, these effeminate men would attempt to appear smooth, graceful, and youthful rather than hardened or rugged as traditionally masculine men. In fact, a preference for boys rather than women tended to add to a man’s virility and masculinity rather than take away.

Paederasty or “active” sodomy – This category has to do with a man’s role in the sex act, rather than his choice of object. In order to be normative, a man only had to be the penatrator, rather than the penetrated. Along with this came issues of class and status (so in some ways tied up in object choice, but indirectly), such that a man cannot penetrate his equals, only those lower in status such as women and boys. A true man would not allow himself to be penetrated (he would then fall into the inverted classification), but it did not matter the sex of his object choice, only the status. This leads Halperin to claim that “hierarchy is hot” because it was the determining factor in whether someone was “acceptable” to use for sex (118). This point is important because it suggests a variant operating system that functioned somewhat like our current notion of sexuality, thus historically they functioned with this paradigm, rather than one of sexuality.

Male friendship or Love – Male friendship and love happened outside of the sexual paradigm of hierarchy, focusing instead on equality and sameness. Love happened between men of equal rank and respect. Writings that relate to this form of friendship/love talk about ‘other selves, the fusion of souls into one, the identical-ness of their sentiments. It is important to note that while love between men in history is divorced from sexual acts, it is a component of how we define male homosexuality today and should be included in the genealogy.

The final category under examination is that of inversion, a reversal of sexual or gender role/identity. It refers to “a wholesale surrender of masculinity in favor of femininity, a transgendered condition expressed in everything from personal comportment and style to physical appearance, manner of feeling, sexual attraction to ‘normal’ men, and preference for a receptive or ‘passive’ role in sexual intercourse with such men” (121-2). The focus here is more on the “violation of the protocols of manhood” and a subordination of the self rather than on the desire for men. Men who were passives or inverts were seen as wanting to be like women (as opposed to effeminates who liked women and wanted women to like them). The descriptions of ‘passives’ is very like someone today would negatively describe a drag queen: twittering voice, plucked body, mincing steps, female attire.

This last category was redefined in 1869 by Westphal, a German expert on the nervous system, as “contrary sexual feeling” and again by Tamassia (Italian) in 1878 as “inversion of the sexual instinct” (127). However, the focus here was still on issues of gender deviance, rather than sexual-object choice, as desire for someone of the same sex was only one of the characteristics of these inversion theories. Westfal described it as being “simply the feeling of being alienated, with one’s entire inner being, from one’s own sex” – which sounds more like our current label of transgender rather than homosexual (129).

The word homosexuality was first printed in 1869 by a politician attempting to prevent homosexual sex from being criminalized. He defined homosexuality as “sexual drive directed toward persons of the same sex as the sex of the person who was driven by it” (131). Halperin believes that the very minimalism of this definition has resulted in the many and diverse conceptual models that exist today of what homosexuality is.

I’m not sure that I totally agree with Halperin’s conclusion however. He claims that, because homosexuality has formed via the intertwining of all four of these various catagories, “neither a notion of orientation, nor a notion of object-choice, nor a notion of behavior alone is sufficient to generate the modern definition of ‘homosexuality’; rather, the notion seems to depend on the unstable conjunction of all three. ‘Homosexuality’ is at once a psychological condition, and erotic desire, and a sexual practice” (131). His conclusion seems to take away the idea of agency and naming as a key part of our identities. If I have erotic desire towards someone of the same sex, but I never act on it (for instance, if I was a Catholic priest [see Ingebretson's "When the Cave is a Closet: Pedagogies of the (Re)Pressed"]), would that disqualify me from being homosexual?

Other characteristics of modern notions of homosexuality include: application to both partners, regardless of sexual position, a fading of the significance of gender or gender roles (a homosexual can perform a normative gender role and still be “gay”), homosexuality is seen as being about sameness rather than difference, homosexuality is thrown into binary opposition to heterosexuality and seen as mutually exclusive, and sexual object choice becomes the predominate factor in determining sexuality.

Halperin asks a question towards the end of his chapter that I find to be a good guiding feature for studies in sexuality – “How do we now understand the role that perceived differences in age, gender style, sexual role, body type, social class, ethnicity, race, religion, and/or nationality play in structuring, however partially, the relations of some lesbian and gay male couples?” In essence, how can we look beyond the “sameness” of same-sex couples to understand how difference operates within them?

Other questions to consider:

The practices of ancient Greece, when men could have sex with women or boys, where a product of inherent privilege and established social hierarchies. How do these other factors influence the operations of sexual orientation (including object-choice)? The Greek system would obviously not work in our current society, but what other ways are there to envision sexual paradigms within the constrains of our society?

Likewise, how might the influences of puritanical notion of monogamy (and current marriage laws, customs, etc) have influenced the current notions of sexual orientation? Does the idea of monogamy force a fusion of the multiple strands of history which form our current notion of homosexuality?

What are the implications, effects, ideologies inherent in doing a history like this (reminds me a bit of Mailloux’s rhetorical hermeneutics actually)?  Why this type of history?