DONIZETI@VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU (02/06/90)
Here is the writing I mentioned last week--scanning caused some
of the errors you will encounter. I won't say "enjoy" and
I hope to get off this "horror" kick soon--it takes too much
out of a person----Merle
EILE: PHOBIA HISTORY A UIUC/CSO CMSL 4.17
[This file came from the Human Right.~ Campaign Fund Net BBS in
Washington, DC. It is a serious news & feature oriented system
with a heavy political emphasi8. Call and check it out: 202-639-8735.
With the recent religious and church debates, I thought it would be
interesting to read an account of what happened to homosexuals in the
sordid history of the Church. Wonderful people, those Christians. -rh
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 waB 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 paniced 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
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FILE: PHOBIA HISTORY A UIUC/CSO CMSL 4.17
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 appitites 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
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FILE: PHOBIA HISTORY A UIUC/CSO CMSL 4.17
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 analy 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 distinctlon 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~Fl~, 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 sodomists 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
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FILE: PHOBIA HISTORY A UIUC/CSO CMSL 4.17
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 allow~ to conti-ue,
would mean the end of Christendom as well as cons ~ing to H 1
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.
ILE: PHOBIA HISTORY A UIUC/CSO CMSL 4.17
The philosopher Albertus Magnus followed suit, adding to the
growing furor. 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
likenth 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
w-ith witchcraft. Future Popes would follow suit.
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According to what pas9ed as the thinking of the day, witches,
gay men and women, assembled in the forests in the dead of night
there to consort with demonB and/or the Devil himself. According
to one account of the proceedings (and there were many) the gays
in attendance engaged in the ""osculum infame1', the infamous
kiss whereby each man kissed the asshole 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 -~as only
one problem. Demons weren't supposed to have bodies or ~rm, 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
lew in and took the cum. With some of this he made himself a
~ody and used the rest to fuck his partner's ass or face.
All of this and more was sincerely believed al ~aught 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 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). d~ Molay
never admitted the charge, but many of the rest did an -he Gr~nd
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.''
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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 Saville, his arms bound behind him
and wearing a miter covered with feathers which, in Spain was the
symbol of sodomists. 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 sodomist's miters 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!
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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.