Homophobia and the Politics of Biblical Translation

Christianity is rather unusual in the family of Abrahamic/Middle Eastern religions in the role of scripture and language. For Judaism and Islam, and I suspect traditionally for Zoroastrianism too, the language of scripture, i.e. the language in which it was written, is also the language in which it must always be read. So countless Jews and Muslims have grown up learning something of Hebrew and Arabic and not just any Hebrew and Arabic but the Hebrew of the Torah and Tanakh and the Arabic of the Qur'an, even if it means just memorising slabs of text (as a pre-Vatican 2 Catholic child I have a resonance with this because I remember being taught the responses of the old Latin Mass, which I regard nowadays as a valuable bit of rudimentary childhood second language teaching). For Jews and Muslims too any translation of scripture is counted as an interpretation, it does not share in the authority of the 'original' text. Christians, on the other hand, have always read their scriptures in translation.  Christian bibles are comprised of two parts: an Old Testament comprising texts originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek; and a New Testament comprising texts originally written in Greek. Early Christians used as their Old Testament the Greek translation/version of the Hebrew and Aramaic texts known as the Septuagint, together with those texts Protestants term apocryphal that were written in Greek. Just about all of the ancient Christian translations of the Old Testament were from this Greek text. Only the Syriac and Jerome's Latin Vulgate included translations from (some of) the Hebrew version shared with Rabbinic Judaism. So from the very beginning Christians have been involved in the project of translation. For many cultures too, ancient and contemporary, their first body of written literature  has been a translation of one canonical version or another of the Christian Bible.

So for Christians, unlike Jews and Muslims, linguistic questions of meaning, equivalence and translation, can become highly fraught theological and political questions. And with the rise of indentitarian fundamentalism, most prominently in  the US, it can even lead to bizarre contradictions between bigotry and faith. This story from the Christian Post shows how for US fundamentalist Protestants even their core doctrine of biblical inerrancy must submit to homophobic prejudice.  The story tells how debate about the 1984 edition NIV translation of various passages in the Christian (Protestant) scripture has caused a revision to the translation of those passages in the 2011 edition, which is designed to make them unambiguously homophobic in meaning. What I find disturbing as a gay man and morbidly fascinating both as a biblical scholar and as a Catholic Christian who does not believe in biblical inerrancy, let alone sola scriptura, is the way in which homophobic bigotry has won out over the central dogmatic tenet for many Evangelical Protestants of biblical inerrancy. Because these revisions have clearly and radically changed the meaning of the texts which hitherto could have been regarded as only ambiguous possible references to homo-eroticism.

In this post I'll address the most obvious, and probably the most egregious case, which concerns two related passages in the Pauline epistles and hinge on the meaning of two ancient Greek words, one of which is quite common and the other is pretty rare and first appears in Paul, who might even have invented it himself. I'm talking, of course, of the sinners lists 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10.  According to the Christian Post story

The latest version of the popular NIV Bible translation has had its verses on homosexuality reworded, making them clearer in denouncing the practice, a theologian who helped with the translation says. These clarifications include the verse in 1 Corinthians 6:9, where the 1984 NIV version uses the phrase “homosexual offenders,” while the 2011 translation changes the phrase to "men who have sex with men."

I'm not quite certain what the difference is here but for good measure the updated NIV translates both words with  "men who have sex with men" so that the reader would think the Greek used a similar clause. The Evangelical theologian, Dr. Douglas J. Moo, "who also serves as Wessner Chair of Biblical Studies at Wheaton College", goes on to explain why and what the 'problem' was

“The 1984 NIV rendering … did not make clear whether homosexual activity per se was being condemned or whether only certain kinds of ‘offensive’ homosexual activity was being condemned.,” said Moo.

“The updated NIV makes clear that the Greek words here indicate any kind of homosexual activity. The updated NIV also reflects the fact that the key Greek word here refers to males.”

He also observed that

“Debates among Christians about the teaching of the Bible on homosexuality over the last twenty years sparked considerable scholarly interest in relevant words and texts... This research showed that two Greek words in this verse referred, respectively, to the passive and active participants in male homosexual activity.”

However the fact of the matter is that this is not true. There has been a debate over the last 30 years when scholars including the late John Boswell highlighted the problems in understanding the two passages as a clear condemnation of homosexuality. Some conservative Evangelical scholars, most notably Robert Gagnon, have argued that these passages condemn male homosexuality and that the two words (which I'll come to shortly) refer to both the "passive and active participants" but there is by no means a consensus amongst scholars and in fact, Gagnon's argument relies strongly on a set of assumptions that these words must unequivocally refer to homosexuality, even though one of the words does not in ancient or even modern Greek and the other is a neologism, rarely used after Paul first wrote it and which, in its  usage in subsequent centuries, remains unclear in its meaning, much of its subsequent usage being simply quotations of the Pauline verses in question.

The two words I'm referring to are malakoi and arsenokoites. The first is a fairly common word which basically means 'soft' while the second appears for the first time in history in 1 Corinthians and then again in 1 Timothy - its meaning is really unclear. The words are used to denote two types of sinners in the long list that is 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10. Here's how the passage is translated in the King James:

(9) Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,

(10) Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

Here is the 1984 NIV translation:

(9) Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders

(10) nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

The new edition renders it thus

(9) Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men
(10) nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

And here's the equivalent passage in 1 Timothy:

(9) Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, (10) For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine;

And in the 1984 NIV

(10) for adulterers and perverts, for slave traders and liars and perjurers-- and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine

And in 2011

(10) for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine

I've italicised the the English translations of the two words and also underlined the translation of malakoi,  rendered in the KJV as 'effeminate' (and 'male prostitutes' in the 1984 NIV). As I said above, malakoi literally means soft and that's how the word is translated in the Latin Vulgate, 'molles'. So a literal translation of both Greek and Latin would be something like soft men or soft people (the Syriac translates it with a word meaning 'corrupt' or 'corrupter'). But malakoi had a range of meanings, not one, including gentle, weak (three 16th century English translations, the Tyndale, Coverdale and Bishop's Bibles translate it as 'weaklings') , sickly, cowardly; it also has the meaning  luxurious. That last meaning might come as a surprise to many people but I personally think it might be a clue as to how to translate the word and in a way that fits the other earlier English translations, such as the King James and the Douai-Rheims, both of which use 'effeminate' to translate malakoi. Dale Martin explains how this word functioned in the Greco-Roman world as a term of moral condemnation:

Evidence from the ancient sources is abundant and easily accessible. malakos can refer to many things: the softness of expensive clothes, the richness and delicacy of gourmet food, the gentleness of light winds and breezes. When used as a term of moral condemnation, the word still refers to something perceived as "soft": laziness, degeneracy, decadence, lack of courage, or, to sum up all these vices in one ancient category, the feminine. For the ancients, or at least for the men who produced almost all our ancient literature, the connection was commonsensical and natural. Women are weak, fearful, vulnerable, tender. They stay indoors and protect their soft skin and nature: their flesh is moister, more flaccid, and more porous than male flesh, which is why their bodies retain all that excess fluid that must be expelled every month. The female is quintessentially penetrable; their pores are looser than men's.

Does the word specifically refer to a man who takes the 'passive' role in sex with another man? Martin explains:

a man could, by submitting to penetration, leave himself open to charges of malakia. but in those cases, the term refers to the effeminacy of which the penetration is only a sign or proof; it does not refer to the sexual act itself. The category of effeminate men was much broader than that. In philosophical texts, for example, malakoi are those people who cannot put up with hard work. Xenophon uses the term for lazy men. For Epictetus and the Cynic Epistles, the term refers to men who take life easy rather than enduring the hardships of philosophy. In Dio Cassius, Plutarch, and Josephus, cowards are malakoi. Throughout ancient literature, malakoi are men who live lives of decadence and luxury. They drink too much wine, have too much sex, love gourmet food, and hire professional cooks. According to Josephus, a man may be accused of malakia if he is weak in battle, enjoys luxury, or is reluctant to commit suicide (War 7.338; Antiquities 5.246; 10.194). Dio Chrysostom says that the common crowd might stupidly call a man malakos just because he studies a lot —that is, a bookworm might be called a sissy (66.25)

So rather than a specifically homosexual meaning, the word instead has the meaning of a person who is self-indulgent (which is how New Jerusalem Bible translates it) or too much devoted to pleasure or who is dominated by their own desires. Thus a womanising, heterosexual man is just as much malakos as a man who gets fucked. And of course in the gendered way of thinking of that era such a man, by avidly pursuing  his desires for sex with women, might well be considered effeminate too because he has surrendered his self-control. Self-control signifies manliness and virility, not being a Lothario. Such thinking continued in the Christian medieval period and into the Renaissance. Consequently the 17th century English translations use effeminate for malakoi. Some aspects of this thinking even continue to this day. In Australia, a bookworm might still be considered a sissy or at least a nerd, which might be understood as a kind of modern toned-down sissy.

Over the last two to three hundred years our understanding of gender has changed from the older hierarchical, multi-layered continuum of masculine and feminine to a more dualistic, heterosexually-complementarist, sexual binary of female and male. Thus gender categories have taken on a much more sexualised meaning so that effeminacy is now and increasingly associated with homosexuality, the deviant sexuality. And so some more modern translations used catamite to translate malakoi, while others counted it together with arsenokoites and translated both with the single word sodomite. Most recent Protestant translations from the US, including the 1984 NIV, however, now translate malakoi as male prostitute, .  And yet for so many Christians raised on the King James and thus familiar with reading 'effeminate' here I'm surprised that no one has raised questions about that semantic shift. Well, not really because they're already used to associating effeminacy with homosexuality. To them a male prostitute is simply a commercial homosexual.

I think that to associate malakoi with any sort of specific homosexual (or even sexual)  meaning is actually a seriously misleading translation.  I wonder even just how much the emphasis on gender and effeminacy itself might derive from much later impositions on Paul's use of the word which might still best be rendered luxurious or self-indulgent (after all the ancient translations didn't use such explicitly gendered terms). Perhaps the King James and Douai-Rheims are themselves evidence of a gendered semantic shift in 16th/17th century England itself. But based on the ancient semantic gestalt for the word, I think the New Jerusalem is correct to translate with self-indulgent; other possibilities could be pursuers of luxury or selfish/narcissistic hedonists. Perhaps even a Buddhist take on the word might be appropriate, too, as it really is about being a slave to desire, not sexual desire as such, but desire more broadly. As the Buddha taught, desire or craving is behind the attachment to transitory existence that gives rise to suffering. I suspect there may well be an aspect of that here (there is a rich Christian literature dealing with the problem of such broad based desire from the days of the early Church onwards) but it's been hidden by Christian homophobic sex obsessions.

I have devoted so much space to the meaning of malakoi and its varying translations through time because in these contemporary debates the meaning of malakoi has been used to help determine what the other word, arsenokoites, actually means; this is the word whose 1984 translation as "homosexual offenders" and "perverts" caused so much  difficulty for not being sufficiently anti-homosexual. The problem with this word is that we don't really know what it means. Paul is the first writer to use it and he nowhere gives an explanation of its meaning; presumably he expects his audience to know its meaning. The word is a  compound of two Greek words 'arsen' man and 'coites' bed so literally it might mean 'man-bed' (the Latin translation breaks it up again into the two component words 'masculorum concubitoribus') but does that designate a man who beds or a man who beds men? Neither of the two passages give us anything more to go by as to what Paul might mean. A number of scholars have pointed out that the word does not sit unambiguously in a list of sexual sinners. In 1 Corinthians it could even be said that malakoi meaning luxurious or self-indulgent marks a shift from sexual sins of adultery etc to other sins including robbery, drunkenness, slander, greed, fraud etc. In 1 Timothy the word sits amongst a list of sins primarily of violence, abuse and injustice. Granted it does sit beside 'pornois' which in 1 Corinthians is part of the sexual sin list. But it's curious that the King James translates that word here as 'whoremonger'. I'd like to know why but in the meantime that does give a more 'professional' or commercial meaning to it. It's not someone just having sex or even personal sex work but trading other people's bodies, pimping.

As I said above many of the subsequent usages of arsenokoites in later centuries are simply quotes by later writers of one or other of these two passages. (You can see a listing of these here.) But there are a couple of instances in the second century where the word is used in a new context and again it sits amid a list of crimes to do with abuse and violence. In the Sibylline Oracles 2.77-78 we find

Strike not the scales oneside, but draw them equal. Forswear not ignorantly nor willingly; God hates the perjured man in that he swore. A gift proceeding out of unjust deeds Never receive in hand. Do not steal seed; Accursed through many generations he Who took it unto scattering of life.Do not arsenokoitein, slander not, nor kill.Give the toilworn his hire; do not afflict The poor man. Unto orphans help afford And to widows and the needy. Talk with sense; Hold fast in heart a secret. Be unwilling To act unjustly nor yet tolerateUnrighteous men. Give to the poor at once And say not, "Come to-morrow." Of thy grain Give to the needy with perspiring hand.

The online source I'm quoting uses the clause 'Indulge not vile lusts' to translate arsenokoitein but that clearly reflects a long history of Christian reading of the word. However the context here is not a sexual one at all but rather one of justice and injustice. The same sort of pattern is found with the other instance in  Acts of John 36 which also uses a form of malakoi and clearly without any sexual meaning at all

36 Thou that rejoicest in gold and delightest thyself with ivory and jewels, when night falleth, canst thou behold what thou lovest? thou that art vanquished by soft (malakai) raiment, and then leavest life, will those things profit thee in the place whither thou goest? And let the murderer know that the condign punishment is laid up for him twofold after his departure hence. Likewise also thou poisoner, sorcerer, robber, defrauder, arsenokoitai, thief, and as many as are of that band, ye shall come at last, as your works do lead you, unto unquenchable fire, and utter darkness, and the pit of punishment, and eternal threatenings. Wherefore, ye men of Ephesus, turn yourselves, knowing this also, that kings, rulers, tyrants, boasters, and they that have conquered in wars, stripped of all things when they depart hence, do suffer pain, lodged in eternal misery.

The English text I'm quoting from translates the word with 'sodomite' but two thousand years ago any form of 'sodomite' would simply mean resident of Sodom, just as Jerusalemite mean a person of Jerusalem and there is, in fact no reference to Sodom in this passage and so again the translation of arsenokoitai here is dependent on much later Christian history of reading and tells us nothing about what the word, arsenokoitai, actually means. The word appears twice in Theophilus' book, To Autolychus

(1.2) As a burnished mirror, so ought man to have his soul pure. When there is rust on the mirror, it is not possible that a man's face be seen in the mirror; so also when there is sin in a man, such a man cannot behold God. Do you, therefore, show me yourself, whether you are not an adulterer, or a fornicator, or a thief, or a robber, or a purloiner; whether you do not arsenokoitei; whether you are not insolent, or a slanderer, or passionate, or envious, or proud, or supercilious; whether you are not a brawler, or covetous, or disobedient to parents; and whether you do not sell your children; for to those who do these things God is not manifest, unless they have first cleansed themselves from all impurity.

(1.14) But to the unbelieving and despisers, who obey not the truth, but are obedient to unrighteousness, when they shall have been filled with adulteries and fornications, and arsenokoitaii, and covetousness, and unlawful idolatries, there shall be anger and wrath, tribulation and anguish,and at the last everlasting fire shall possess such men. Since you said, Show me your God, this is my God, and I counsel you to fear Him and to trust Him.

The English translation I'm quoting translates the word as '(do not) corrupt boys' and 'filthiness' respectively. But the actual passages it occurs in don't give a clear sexual association with the word. In the first case it is not included in a list of sexual sins while in the second it could be argued to mark a shift from sexual to non-sexual and even violent offences. Another second century text, Aristides Apology uses the word in a possibly sexual context but also in association with theft

For behold! When the Greeks made laws they did not perceive that by their laws they condemn their gods. For if their laws are righteous, their gods are unrighteous, since they transgressed the law in killing one another, and practising sorcery, and committing adultery, and in robbing and stealing, and arsenokoitiai, and by their other practises as well. For if their gods were right in doing all these things as they are described, then the laws of the Greeks are unrighteous in not being made according to the will of their gods. And in that case the whole world is gone astray.

The English translation renders it as 'lying with males' and it's likely a reference to Zeus' abduction of Ganymede. But at the same time, Zeus is not alone in his abduction of males. The goddess of dawn, Eos, has been described as a serial rapist, carrying off Cephalus and Tithonius amongst others, the latter himself an older brother of Ganymede. So the context here does not allow for a simple sexual meaning, let alone a homosexual one!

Origen uses the word in his Expositions on Proverbs (7.74), no full online text available but cited here):

On the other hand some were roaming widely--adulterers, temple prostitues and thieves will receive judgment; some wander outside--the ones who pursue lusts contrary to nature, who arsenokoitein  and any other parade of forbidden things they can receive; see that there is no accusation against an holy man. Anyone who can't keep still but roams, shares in the accusation of the shameless woman. (Patrologiae Cursus Completus, ed. JP Migne, Patrologiae Graecae Tomus XVII, Origenes, 1857; p. 181-182)

Jeremy Townsley translates it as 'who seek non-procreative sexual intercourse' and points out that early Christians took a strongly procreative view of sex (I'll say more on this below) and so any form of non-procreative sex, oral or anal, between men and women or between men was likely denoted here. Certainly  Townsley's brief excerpt gives nothing specifically or exclusively homoerotic to the context of the word. Nevertheless Origen's use opens up a trajectory of a specifically sexual meaning to the word without any connotations of violence. Thus Porphry, in his Against the Christians, uses the word when critiquing Paul:

For we are surprised and truly perplexed in mind at such things, if a man, when once he is washed from so many defilements and pollutions, shows himself to be pure ; if by wiping off the stains of so much weakness in his life, fornication, adultery, drunkenness, theft, arsenokoitiai, poisoning, and countless base and disgusting things, and simply by being baptised and calling on the name of Christ, he is quite easily freed from them, and puts off the whole of his guilt just as a snake puts off his old slough (023 88.13).

The English translation here renders it 'unnatural vice' but the context of theft and poisoning doesn't immediately suggest that, especially given that this is a pagan author. Clearly something nasty is intended, but what? In contrast, the Christian author, Hippolytus, in the same century uses the word in the context of a story about a Satan-like entity, Naas (from the Hebrew for serpent), having sex with both Adam and Eve and would appear to be a quite straightforward reference to sex between men:

Now the meaning is, that he should obey the rest of the eleven angels of Edem, for the eleven possess passions, but are not guilty of transgression. Naas, however, has committed sin, for he went in unto Eve, deceiving her, and debauched her; and (such an act as) this is a violation of law. He, however, likewise went in unto Adam, and had unnatural intercourse with him; and this is itself also a piece of turpitude, whence have arisen adultery and arsenokoitia (Refutation of All Heresies V.21).

This translation uses 'sodomy' for arsenokoitia and while sodomy was invented as a word many centuries after Hippolytus perhaps its use here is justified. But it's interesting to contrast Townsley's translation of this passage

[Naas] deceived [Eve] and committed adultery with her, violating the Law. Then he went to Adam and had him like a boy, again violating the Law. In such a way adultery and homosexual rape (arsenokoitia) came to exist and from that point evil ruled over humans and goodness withdrew, which had come from a single source, from the Father.

This is one of the few occasions when Townsley allows a more sexual meaning to arsenokoit* - his usual translation is 'the traders in homosexual slaves' but clearly that doesn't work here. The story that Hippolytus relates is a Sethian origin myth and it clearly echoes the story of the Watchers in Genesis 6 and 1 Enoch not to mention later Jewish stories of the bad angel Samael seducing Eve and fathering Cain. In this account, Naas deceives Eve so as to have sex with her. Does he also deceive Adam? If so, it would be an appropriate parallelism. Like the Watchers, Naas is also an angelic being; how much choice does Adam have in this encounter? Certainly in the story of the Watchers all agency is theirs and not the human women they take as wives (although some later misogynist retellings had the women enticing and seducing the Watchers down from heaven). I'm not certain that Adam here is fully consenting but I wonder whether he, and Eve. have been bewitched into sex with Naas (and sorcery/black magic is something included in some of the lists in which we find arsenokoit*). The other parallelism here, too, concerns breaches of a patriarchal procreative order. Adultery is a property crime, breaching of another man's ownership of a woman's womb. Thus adultery can only take place with another's woman, in this case Eve. The other crime is non-procreative sex, the most obvious being anal sex whether with a man or a woman. I think in this case, and allowing for an odd gender egalitarianism of attributed responsibility, Adam's lot is non-procreative sex, through him being sexually subjected by the angelic being, Naas. This is the sexual equivalent of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of God and Evil in the Genesis account. And so while we see two male beings having anal sex, the important thing here is the act not the gender of the participants. There is an ambiguity here both as to issues of consent as much as to what is signified by the sex with Adam. But I think the ambiguity is part of the gestalt around arsenokoit*. When most explicitly sexual  it seems to refer to anal sex, not necessarily with the full consent of the person who is fucked, and not necessarily only between men. Thus in the 4th century, Eusebius can use it to refer to nonprocreative sex in his Demonstration of the Gospel 1, 6.23, while in Preparation of the Gospel 6.10, I think Eusebius intends a more clearly homoerotic meaning (although Townsley wouldn't agree). After Eusebius, Pseudo-Macarius uses the word in his 49th Sermon to describe the attempted rape of the angels in Sodom. Then in the 6th century, the Penitential of John the Faster discusses a variety of sexual sins in which arsenokoitia is used in both discussion of sex between men and also of anal sex between a man and wife -  "In the same way, some [do this] to their own foster son and some offer it to their daughter. Also, many even achieve the defilement of non-procreative (anal) sex (arsenokoitia) with their wives"  (Townsley's translation). This statement concludes the penitential and comes after a discussion of incest which follows a paragraph about sex between men. Interestingly this text also uses malakia with the specific meaning of masturbation (I believe malaka is the modern Greek equivalent to the English 'wanker')  but I really don't think that would make sense in 1 Corinthians 6.9-10. So we also have evidence of  a possible semantic shift in this penitential too.

While I think Paul's use of malakoi is probably a straightforward 'self-indulgent' and/or 'luxurious' it seems that  arsenokoit*, like sodomy, is to us a thoroughly confused category and perhaps was even then, with a range of meanings that might even be contradictory. Certainly in its earliest appearances it is usually associated with words referring to violence and dishonest dealings, as well as sorcery. It also has some sexual association and one that becomes more pronounced over the centuries so that in the 6th century it clearly refers to anal sex whether with a man or a woman. In the Christian Post article Dr Moo was quoted saying that scholarly "research showed that two Greek words in this verse referred, respectively, to the passive and active participants in male homosexual activity.” This 'research' is based on two or three associative steps. First of all, arsenokoites is composed from the two words used in the Greek Septuagint translation of the two Leviticus passages condemning anal sex between men. The sinners lists in which it is found in both 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy echo the types of sins described in the larger Holiness Code of Leviticus and so "clearly" Paul has Leviticus in mind. The second Levitical proscription of male male anal sex condemns both the active and passive partner to death (20.13). Consequently Paul links arsenokoitai with malakoi to re-affirm the Levitical condemnation of both the active/insertive partner and the passive/insertee.

I think these steps are highly speculative and based on very vague connections. The word may well have a semantic link with the Septuagint Greek words in Leviticus but it tells us nothing of its meaning (and those proscriptions in Leviticus are not all that simple and clear either). It's also not clear that what ever Paul meant was the same as what the word meant several centuries later either but at that later period it clearly refers to anal sex and not to what we might call homosexuality. And to try and pair it with malakoi, a common word with a range of meanings that don't require any connection to arsenokoit* is really a step too far and one not made in the subsequent usage of arsenokoit* even in texts that use forms of malakoi as well. I think Christian homophobia has seriously misled people, distracting them from a serious matter of sexual ethics to expend great quantities of ink fantasising about what we poofters do in bed together. And curiously I think malakoi might even give a clue as to what this man-bed business is all about.

It struck me several years ago, when teaching a class about the debates surrounding homosexuality and scripture that what might be behind arsenokoit* is some kind of phallic aggressive behaviour. The more I accepted malakoi as meaning self-indulgent or luxurious, the more it made sense of it serving as a transition point to crimes of violence, the first being arsenokoitai, which I believe denotes a kind of sexual violence which can be considered a kind of self-indulgent form of living. The self indulgent person puts their needs first paying no attention to the other. Hence the connections between desire/cravings and attachment and suffering in Buddhism, say (but also Hinduism, Christianity etc; James Alison suggests that desire in this broader sense is a key issue for Paul). And while one can be poor and self indulgent, by taking a class perspective malakoi takes on a whole new perspective; it takes aim at the upper classes, the wealthy, the rich householders and patricians of the Roman imperial state (and of the older Hellenic imperial realms in the East under/collaborating with/profiting from Roman rule). It's easy to forget too that the Roman state was a slave economy. One figure I saw for ancient Corinth, that out of a population of 400,000, 250,000 were slaves. In the Greco-Roman world, the patriarch of the household had the right of sexual access to all who lived under his roof. What this effectively meant was that your slaves were fair game, whether they were male or female. Being a slave meant being liable to be fucked by your owner, especially if you were young and pretty, male or female. Obviously the males would be fucked anally and possibly the females too  - it's the most secure form of contraception after all.  And given that Christianity was a religion popular among slaves (and women too) I suspect that this might be the context for divining the meaning of arsenokoites/ai. It is related to malakoi/self indulgence being a quite specific form of it, as well as being a form of rape - the slave has no  right to give or withhold consent. Furthermore how many ancient brothels made use of sex slaves? Even in our (Australia's) semi-regulated sex industry, sex trafficking and sex slavery are common. So, as Townsley insists, an arsenokoites could also be a sex slave trader (but not just of male or homosexual slaves) or the owner of a brothel staffed with slaves or even the customer of such slave-staffed brothels. It's a semantic gestalt which involves power, violence, self-indulgence, as well as anal sex, and ranges from the private domestic sphere to the public sphere of commerce and consumption. And, of course, this reading does not condemn the slaves subjected to this regime, unlike that of conservative Christians for whom such questions of power and consent are immaterial when it comes to homosexuality. My reading makes much more sense of the context plus the subsequent use of the word over the next 6 centuries during which I think there was a shift in meaning so that it became much more about anal sex per se.

As I was preparing this post I stumbled across Andrew Wallace's Blog  Theo Geek and was pleased to discover that he had been thinking along similar lines  although with a slightly different emphasis. In a post on this very issue he has this to say:

The second of Paul's difficult words is "arsenokoites" (literally "man-bed") which has the opposite problem - this word does not occur enough times in surviving documents for us to tell clearly what it means. The evidence provided by these occurrences is confusing. It appears in some listings of economic sins. Elsewhere it is said to be something mainly done by men with men but which can even be done to a woman. A meaning that explains a lot of the evidence (but not all) is "anal rape" or "having sex with someone in order to prove dominance over them" (bear in mind that in the ancient world this was a somewhat common practice for heterosexuals to engage in)

At the end of the bracketed clause he embedded a link to a comment he had made in an earlier discussion about Sodom and Gomorrah regarding male rape in honour-shame cultures such as those of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East. He quotes from various studies on male on male sexual violence in the ancient world and male rape in general and here are two excerpts:

“The idea of phallic aggression as a manifestation of male dominance is well known in the ancient world (as it is in contemporary prisons and ethnic warfare). Indeed it is not unknown to occur among the gods, as the Egyptian tale of Seth and Horus makes clear. In that tale too, Seth seeks to demonstrate his dominance of Horus through anal rape and nearly succeeds, save for a trick played by Horus. His defense includes dismemberment (his own hand, which had caught the semen), and he winds up getting his semen into Seth, who then appears to be feminized (made pregnant indeed) by Horus.” (Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative In The Literature Of Ancient Israel by Theodore W. Jennings pg 49)

It therefore appears that the existence of male rape is evident across a wide variety of cultures. Jones (1992) maintains that within these cultures, these acts are more likely to manifest themselves within the realm of power relations rather than sexual ones. This notion can be correlated with more modern thinking around male rape, particularly around homosexual rape in institutions, where the acts are best seen as acts of dominance and power.” (From ch2 of this thesis on "Describing Non-Institutionalised Male Rape")

- the author of the thesis in question is Richard Hull

In my own work on Sodom and Gomorrah, I read most of the available literature on male rape and I agree with these observations and think they are very pertinent to the possible context for arsenokoit*. Male rape is a feature of the honour-shame societies of the Mediterranean and usually is expressed across lines of dominance/power such as class and age and also outsider status. In these societies, too, female virginity is highly prized and so these societies tend to be strongly homosocial. Women are sequestered or strongly controlled to minimise interactions with unrelated men to ensure their commodity/exchange value on the marriage market.  Add to this the sexual power dynamics of a slave economy and then I think we have a  very suitable context to make sense of arsenokoit*. It describes well the phallic aggressive behaviour of some masters to their slaves, of sex traffickers with their human wares, of the customers of sexual slavery businesses and also of men who rape other men or take advantage of the lower age or class status of other males to force sex upon them. And I would add too that in many parts of the Greco-Roman world, Jews would also have had outsider or foreigner status, so poorer and younger Jewish males might also have been targets of such phallic aggression. Arsenokoitai, then, is linked to malakoi, not as gay tops and bottoms, but as a distinctive type of nasty and violent sexual self-indulgence, that might be more commonly expressed towards other males, but targetted females too when they were available, and hence the associations with anal sex.

Over the centuries, the semantic gestalt changed so that the associations with anal sex became the dominant context. In that time, too, both Christianity and Roman society had changed. John the Faster was Patriarch of Constantinople, capital of the Greek Byzantine/Roman empire (he's counted as a saint in the Orthodox Church). He is in fact the first of the bishops of Constantinople to claim the title Ecumenical Patriarch, which definitely upset the Patriarch of Rome. The Western Latin Empire was long gone and replaced by a number of barbarian Germanic kingdoms, most holding some form of Arian or Orthodox Christianity but some were also pagan. Old Rome itself was in fief to Constantinople. Christianity, Orthodox, 'Monophysite', Nestorian, Arian, was the dominant religion of the Mediterranean and Middle East and much of Europe and also of the kingdoms of the upper Nile/Ethiopia and in the Caucasus. This shift in the social status of Christianity was reflected in changes in Christian sexual ethics. 

It's fair to say that early Christianity was none too impressed with sex, let alone marriage and the patriarchal family. The Christian ideal was a world without marriage and without the phallic hierarchy of men over women made manifest every time they had sex together. Reading early Christian literature, there is definitely a preferential option to celibacy and there was a strong and continuing radical celibacy trajectory in which the equality of women with men as brothers and sisters was a major vision. At least in the literature, it seems that some women took on quite radical roles challenging the patriarchal confinements they were expected to submit to. Nevertheless as Christianity spread it had to make compromises with existing marriage/family structures. We can see that process unfolding in the New Testament literature itself. The origins for this option for celibacy were complex and not solely out of some form of 'feminist' or gender egalitarian concern. I think part might  be due to the Christian conviction that they were a new priesthood and that they comprised a new Temple that was replacing the old and corrupted one in Jerusalem. So I think some type of Temple esoteric traditions might also lie behind the Christian impulse to celibacy (c.f. the Qumran 'community'). Nevertheless, the Christian community comprised both men and women (the men only religion of Mithraism shows that ancient religious movements did not have to open to both sexes)

Margaret Barker has argued, based on her reading of Plato's Timaeus, that Pythagorean philosophy likely originated in the esoteric Temple traditions of the Middle East acquired perhaps when Pythagoras sojourned in the Levant, Egypt and Babylon. The Temples of Jewish and Samaritan Israel shared in that tradition too, but with their own monotheistic or, at least, henotheistic twist. And it's from these Jewish/Samaritan traditions, too, that Christianity is born. Certainly, and hence perhaps unsurprisingly, early Christianity demonstrates strong Pythagorean affinities. And so it's no surprise, then, that early Christians adopted a Pythagorean solution to the conflict of celibacy and marriage/sexuality. The Pythagoreans were procreationists, sex was only permissible for procreation, for having children. By the 2nd century this was becoming the dominant Christian position, although always in tension with radical celibacy groups and, to a much lesser extent, radical 'libertine' groups too. Anal sex is clearly not procreative; as I said above, it is an absolutely guaranteed form of contraception used by generations of heterosexuals. Early Christianity also gave a strong value to human life; according to the dominant biological thinking of the time, the male semen was seed, the woman through her womb provided the field in which the seed would grow (this is a pretty common agricultural analogy found through much of the ancient world across into ancient India). So if the seed was understood  as a kind of human in miniature, then  the combination of procreationist sexual ethics with respect for human life ruled out any sort of sexual expression except for vaginal sex in marriage. And even then the impulse to celibacy cast such procreational sexual activity in a dubious light so that for a married person to initiate sex with their partner was considered sinful (these ideological conflicts and bad biology lie behind  the ongoing conundrums and contradictions in Roman Catholic sexual ethics). At the same time, the impulse to celibacy itself got institutionalised in the monastic movement, which flourished throughout the Christian realms and beyond even into Persia and the Silk Road even into China. As Christianity moved from the fringe to the centre it also lost/repressed its fringe perspectives and hence the semantic shift for arsenokoit* over the centuries to signify anal sex primarily, without the older associations of violence and exploitation. (It would also be interesting to examine how the  economics of slavery changed in that period with the rise of feudalism in the West and in much of the Byzantine realm as well).

As I said earlier, I came to the conclusion that malakoi and arsenokoitai in the Pauline epistles did not refer to homosexuality, let alone tops and bottoms in hot anal action, several years ago. My thinking was in large part shaped by my own reading of early Christian texts as part of my work on Sodom and Gomorrah. It was then that I became really aware of how much luxury/self indulgence  was an ethico-spiritual issue for early Christians and continued to be so in medieval Christianity, especially in the monastic movement. (And I should add it was not only an issue for Christians; luxury/self indulgence was also an issue for Stoics and other philosophical schools of the time). Even with malakoi removed from the 'phobic homoerotic field, arsenokoitai could still, I suppose, come to stand for all us gay boys, tops, bottoms, versatiles and not into anal at all. But I think the homophobic lens actually serves to dismiss, even trivialise, a serious question  of sexual ethics, the violent use of sex to assert dominance or otherwise exploit people. I think it likely to have been very pertinent to the lives of those first Christians, something some of them might well have had to endure.

Of course, my argument is speculative but then so too is that of conservative homophobes and I think theirs is the more speculative argument in that it relies very much on applying modern categories to ancient texts. I, on the other hand, am at least trying to imagine myself back into the conceptual world of those ancient texts. And, unlike those homophobic Evangelical Christians, I don't believe in biblical inerrancy or the primacy of scripture, let alone sola scriptura. If an ancient text turned up that proved the conservative interpretation of these passages was correct, well I'd simply say Paul was wrong. But nothing of the sort does exist and I think the balance of the textual evidence better supports the non/anti-homophobic position. All interpretation (and translation) is a subjective exercise of some sort; what is most important in such exercises, especially when dealing with texts of terror such as these are and have been, is the moral dimension a person brings to their reading of the text. One can, like Robert Gagnon and other homophobes, bring a narrow and blinkered perspective, a morality of reinforcing a cruel status quo no matter what. Or one can bring a broad moral vision that seeks to enrich and enhance human lives, to promote justice and a more humane way of living. And as my argument shows not only have I resisted the homophobia long brought to these texts but I have given them a new ethical dimension, one also fully pertinent to their time, and one that still has, I would say urgent, relevance to our own, as well as exposing the almost pornographic triviality and vacuousness of the homophobic interpretation of these two texts.

POSTSCRIPT

No doubt some will object, what about Romans 1.26-28? I had hoped to include some discussion on this passage and might well do so in future. In the meantime, I'd recommend  James Alison's discussion of the passage here. What's really notable about his discussion is that he shows how the reading of this passage as a reference to lesbianism is a late development in Christianity coming several centuries after Paul and would not become the dominant way of reading for several more centuries. As far as Augustine and Clement of Alexandria were concerned,  Romans 1.26 interpreted straightforwardly meant women having anal sex with men. So there is no reason for anyone to believe that this is a reference to, let alone condemnation of, lesbianism. James also defines what he terms a Catholic method of interpretation based on an official document issued by the Pontifical Biblical Commission itself and its condemnation of 'actualisation' to interpret scripture "in a direction contrary to evangelical justice and charity, such as, for example, the use of the Bible to justify racial segregation, anti-Semitism or sexism whether on the part of men or of women” (The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, IV.3). He then gives an interpretation of Romans 1.27 in such a Catholic way using as his guide this principle deduced from the Pontifical Biblical Commission cited above: "given the possibility of a restricted ancient meaning in a text which does not transfer readily into modern categories, or the possibility of one which leaps straight and expansively into modern categories and has had effects contrary to charity on the modern people so categorized, one should prefer the ancient reading to the actualized one."

I would like to think that my reading of 1 Corinthians 6.9-10 and 1 Timothy 1.9-10 likewise fulfills such a Catholic interpretation of scripture too and I look forward to the day when the Vatican and Orthodox Church leaderships will themselves read scripture in such a Catholic way.

The Power of Insult and the Politics of Sexuality

"The insult lets me know that I am not like others, not normal. I am queer: strange, bizarre, sick, abnormal."

I have been reading a truly riveting book Insult and the Making of the Gay Self by Didier Eribon. I haven't finished it yet but so far it's one of those rare books which almost seems to be telling my life. Eribon is a prominent French gay theorist and social commentator whi has also written two biographies of Michel Foucault. In this book he critiques, Foucault's proposition that the modern homosexual identity was a creation of late 19th century medical/psychiatric discourse. Interestingly, Eribon will highlight the way this argument by Foucault contradicts aspects of Foucault's earlier work. But I have yet to read Eribon's critique of Foucault because Foucault is very much the focus of the third section of the book but I'm still in the second section, "Spectres of Wilde". In this section Eribon explores the work of Wilde, Gide, Proust and others and locates it within earlier patterns of homosexual discourse, especially, for Wilde, the work of Pater and Symonds. Ulrichs is also quite important for the Continent, but Eribon also introduces the work of earlier figures in 19th century and 18th century Europe as well.

I was also fascinated to read Eribon's account of the impact of the emerging visible lesbian and gay (sub)cultures in contemporary France in the 1990s (the timeframe of the writing of this book). We in Australia and other Anglosphere countries are used to the multi-cultural pluralist nation state. In comtrast, for France and much of Europe, they work on a universalist model nation state. In other words, the nation/state provides all the main points of identity and community in which all the citizens share to build a commonality. This includes marriage too. In France the only legitimate form of marriage is that performed by the State. You can supplement it with a religious marriage, but a religious marriage on its own does not suffice. In the 1990s the emerging lesbain gay communities were denounced in French media (from both right and left) as a threat to this universal national model. Queer folks represented a particularity which disrupted the universal aspirations of the French state, la patrie. Oddly what Eribon describes seems to anticipate recent cultural panics in France about Muslim identity as a threat to the national ideal and the resulting moves to suppress expression of that particularity i.e. wearing of religious/Muslim dress, such as the headscarf and other symbols, especially in such prime spaces of the universalist state as schools and other educational institutions.

But it is the first section, in which Eribon describes insult and gay socialisation, what he terms the practices of "subjection and subjectivication", which are typified by the language of insult. Reading his analysis was like a kind of revelation for me. He was describing social facts that I knew all too well. He points out that the language of insult, of derogation of homosexuality, of the abjection of same sex love pre-exists each and everyone of us. The language helps to create the social space of marginalisation to which we are consigned by our sexuality. It's important to note here that he is not interested in an etiology of homosexuality. The futile and arid debates constructionism vs essentialism are quite irrelevant to Eribon's analysis.

Instead he makes his starting point te fact that there is a sexual hierarchy in our society and quite an ancient one too which place the homosexual, same sex love and passion and attachment, below those attachments of heterosexual household, procreation and biological family. 'Below' is probably too weak a term the homo-erotic is abjected, scorned, vilified. And for the greater majority of us who are queer we will first learn of our difference through the discourses of insult vilification scorn and abjection. Thus is homophobia internalised in both queer and straight. The mechanisms of the closet are pretty much inbuilt into this discursive process. Not every insult that we hear will be directed at us personally, we will overhear or be made spectators to such discourses of vilification and we will learn the strategies of hiding, of deflecting the sharp barb of insult, the arts of passing, the relief that once more I escaped being made a spectacle under the sharp spotlight of insult. But even if we do escape, such discourse of insult and vilification still serve to define, to explain our already perceived difference, to name it for ourselves even if (at first) we hide it, pretend that we are like the norm even though we know in our hearts that we are not. We are one of those. And Eribon points out that so often for so many of us that knowledge of who we are is compounded by the sense that we are such a rare breed, we might even be the only one of our type in the world (forget the myopic vista of the only one in the village). Eribon describes repeated accounts of queer folks who in their youth, really beleived that they were alone in the world, the only one in the world. And this would certainly be the case for people of my generation who grew up in times when public discussion of homsexuality was minimal and same sex love was rarely if ever portrayed in film or other media.

One thing I knew from very early on was my strong sense of difference. I knew there was somethng different about me. I didn't know what. I'm not certain at what age, maybe 5, definitely 6. Already at age 6 and 7, I was being targeted at school and I was starting to gravitate towards other kids who were in some sense different, such as the newly arriving Italians. I had another friend who was somewhat effeminate and who I would meet up with again as an adult, like me he was gay. He died beginning of 1985 from AIDS. Another boy in convent school was very asthmatic. His family eventually left our neighbourhood and moved out to Kedron. I remember he told me about the boys school he would be going to there. I have a memory of asking my parents if I could go to that school. The local convent school was only a primary school and so I would have to leave at high school anyway. And this particular boys school inlcuded the upper three or four years of primary school. It was at that time evolving out of a local parish school . Now how much my entreaties to let me go to that school influenced my parents. But I wanted to follow my friend, I did get to that school but tragically my friend didn't. And so I started there on my own. As was my way I befriended the odd ones out. But this was an all male/boy environment and the outsiders there were targets of serious brutality. My final two year of primary school were a horror story of hatred and violence, both verbal and physical.

I didn't intend to write about that aspect though and I'm surprised at how the autobiography of violence disrupted my flow. Maybe it didn't disrupt. It was somewhere around that time that my parent's got a Jerusalem Bible. In those days, bibles weren't a normal part of a Catholic home. Lives of the saints, perhaps, missals definitely. But I certainly remember at maybe age 12 or 13, checking out those bits in Leviticus. How I knew where to look, I can't remember now. We wouldn't have been taught that in school. But we had a dictionary and I also remember looking up words such as pervert and sodomite, maybe even homosexual. Many years later reading Well of Loneliness I could immediately identify with Stephen Gordon exploring her father's large library to find out more about herself, about what she was. For me though it wasn't my father's library ( a small book case in the lounge room ) but the public library that was the place of my researches (furtive of course). How did I find the words? I can only assume the words were available in the language of vilification and insult to which I had been subjected

But my earliest memory not so much of insult but of being made aware that I had crossed a line was in grade 1 or 2. I was friends with a boy then, Gary I think his name was, and I have the distinct memory of sitting or maybe standing beside him as he was sitting eating lunch in the school yard. I was playing with his hair, running my hands through it, twisting it around my fingers. I remember being called on that, perhaps by one of the nuns, or maybe by one of the boys, or maybe even by Gary himself. It's so vague. But I remember the sense of shame associated with it. I don't think Gary and stayed friends after that either. He certainly doesn't figure in later memories. That might have been the year. too, an older boy tried to hang me by the neck from the bag racks after school - a vague memory of a, thankfully, rare occasion of physical violence I expereinced in the convent school.

I've wandered far away from Insult, my memory seems to have become somewhat Proustian this weekend, all manner of things surfacing. There's a marvellous chapter in this book on gay melancholy, which Eribon describes as mourning for things that are lost or maybe disavowed through the project/discovery of one's different sexuality. As far back as I can remember I've had a strong sense of melancholy. I've always liked autumn for the melancholy nature of the light. And I've always had a thing for places after hours. In my school days, I got a strange nostalgic/melancholic thrill of being around the school buildings late in the evening when just about everyone else had gone. All that was left were the traces, the ghostly echoes of the days bustling. This after hours apreciation has continued into my adult life. I would enjoy working back on overtime (in the days when I had a regular job) on my own into the night because again the workplace become a place of traces and ghosts framed with a sense of yearning for something. Did they want me to set them alive again? And I spent so much of the PhD at University of Qld in the after hours especailly in the later years. Writing the dissertation woke up a lot of old ghosts as it was but they would find plenty of company in the corridors of the Forgan Smith Bldg

Melancholy, the project of mourning, it's been a regular companion. There is all the mourning for the possibilities that could not be. The mourning for the inevitable separations of space and person. The mourning for the grief that you know you will bring to others, in particular parents. I have a friend whose grandfather thinks that the penalties laid down in Leviticus should be law of the land i.e. us queers, including his grandson, should be stoned to death. How much sorrow does that represent?

Eribon points out that the project of queer emancipation, of lesbian and gay liberation, of acceptance and affirmation will always be incomplete. The sexual hierarchy still remains, albeit moderated through law reform and so forth over the last few years. But we can never be sure that we will get there, wherever there is, because we will always be on the margins. The closet remains exerting its power. I have met people in recent months who are still living lives mostly in the closet. And all of us have to decide every day just how out we will be on that day. I wish we could get rid of the silly notion that once you come out that's it. That's not true. We will keep coming out all the way to our graves. And it is the mechanisms of insult and caricature that keep it so.

Thus is not a review of Eribon's book. I'm certainly not doing it justice. Rather as with most of the stuff of blogs it is reflections and responses. But I strongly recommend this book. It tells much of my life. How many other lives does it tell? Plenty, I reckon. Plus his analysis of Proust and Ulrichs is definitely worth it. And I haven't finished it yet. And now I have more paid work for a few weeks I might even lash out and add it to my library.

All Saints Day Reflections - hospitality, queer folks, the kingdom of heaven and the communion of saints

It's All Saints Day today, a day almost over now. It's also known as All Hallows, hence Halloween, yesterday, the eve of All Hallows. The feast does coincide with the old Celtic New Year, Samhain, Halloween being the time when, as one year dies and a new one is about to be born, the barriers between this world and the spirit world is most permeable. The dead and other spirits were beleived to walk close among the living. I don't know how widespread in old pagan Europe this date was shared with the Celtic so I don't know what prompted this date being chosen for the celebration of all the saints, not to mention the following day, 2 November, the feast of All Souls, the day of general commemoration of the dead. In most of Catholic Europe, All Souls has been a time for visiting the graves of the dead. In Mexico, the tradition seems to have fused with local indigenous traditions giving rise to the Day of the Dead, which has a more festive air than the European All Souls. I must admit to being quite partial to the Mexican festival. There's been a lot of death in my life over the years, not all of it AIDS related, and given the widespread practice of cremation, there aren't any graves to visit either. I rather like the idea of an All Saints/All Souls festival incorporating Mass prayers and parties/feasting so that we can talk about our dead, celebrate our dead, pray for them, remember them.

I'm the Convenor of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender History Action Group in QAHC and yesterday I held a gathering of queer folks past and present who had been part of the various Queer/LGBT groups at University of Qld over the years since the first, Campus Camp, was formed back in 1973. I'm happy to say that we had between 20 and 24 people there and it was a time for telling stories. And there were a lot of stories, personal stories to tell. But in opening the gathering I also had to acknowledge two who were no longer with us, two young guys who I can still remember coming down to the old queer room, the Rona Room, back in the 90s. With one, Jason, I can still remember when he first entered the Rona Room back in 1994. That was the year when we had the (first) big influx of first years in first semester. That year was a very magical year and there were some very wonderful people I got to know in the Rona Room and still care for very much.

Indeed, with just about everyone I've gotten to know through the Rona Room and its successor, the Carden Room (yes, for some silly reason they wanted to name it after me back in 2000 - it's been rather strange hearing queer folks self-describing as Cardenites over the last few years), I feel privileged to have known them. I keep thinking what remarkable and wonderful people they all have been and remain.

I count myself very lucky when I reflect on my life. I have known and worked and played and lived with and loved and still love some very amazing people. Most of them, of course, dykes and poofs and bis and trannies. I've known and still know some real heroes. There are many people I've known since they first came out. It's been one of life's rare gifts to befreind someone coming out, to share and help and support. That was one of the beauties of the queer space at UQ, we were able to experience that over and over again. The Rona and Carden Rooms have been places of remarkable grace for so many lives and crucial to them both has been that they are places of hospitality.

I think it was in Taking a Chance on God that John McNeill named hospitality as one of the key queer (he probably would have said gay) virtues and talents. It is one of our gifts and has become so because we are required to create communities from scratch, just about, because we are not born into one already as is the case with most other oppressed and marginalised groups. We are the ugly ducklings, the odd ones out, the ones who don't belong and we know from very early on that we don't fit, we don't necessarily know why, at least not until puberty hits. So our quest is to find not so much ourselves but our own, other like us; to not be the only gay in the village/suburb/city. For many of us, it felt like being the only queer in the world. Hospitality is thus a survival virtue and places like the Rona/Carden rooms skill us in that hospitality.

When I look at all the truly beautiful people I know and have known I often have to shake my head in puzzlement. I can't help but contrast them to the homophobic slurs, vituperation I was exposed to growing up and the incredibly vile and demented homophobic stuff I see on so many websites, that I pick up on the media, that you still hear, in casual conversations overheard in buses, trains, shopping centres. Then, in my mind's eye, I look at all the very many wonderful people I've known throughout my life since coming out. I really can't understand the homophobic stuff at all. I can't see how these homophobes could really want to defame such beautiful people. I can't get my head around it. You see, if I was to be given a choice to rerun my life as straight, I would reject it because it would mean I would never have the opportunity to know such amazing and beautiful people as I have known. If this is depravity, give me more of it. The world needs more such depravity.

And you, my queer sisters and brothers, are all such amazing and beautiful people. Yeah we all fuck up at times, some of us quite spectacularly. That's life. But that doesn't change the fact that you are all so amazingly beautiful. In my farewell speech the day I finished at the old Qld AIDS Council back in 1991, I described all that community of people I'd been privileged to work with for the previous few years as a communion of saints. And they were. Hospitality was key to what QuAC did. And all the queer folks I've known are a communion of saints.

Hospitality is what makes God divine. Creation, the universe, is the supreme act of hospitality, an act of hospitality that, for Catholics, is celebrated, instantiated in every Eucharist/Mass. We queer folks have been given the charism of hospitality, well maybe it's been forced upon us but we take to it like ducks - or swans - to water. Hospitality is what makes the Kingdom of Heaven and I like to think that if you wanted to get a sense of what the Kingdom of Heaven must be like, the old Rona Room (especially the parties) and the current Carden Room are little fragments of Heaven on earth. And you are all a communion of saints.

On Same Sex Love

There's something personal in the air at the moment. Maybe it's to do with today's eclipse in Cancer (in my third house, that of communication). Roland Boer has been documenting his father's dying in a series of posts over at Stalin's Moustache for some time. And my friend, Nicotina the Fag, not only put up a rather personal piece on gay love over at Hamiltonian Decomposition last week but also emailed his friends to check it out and respond to it. I had been wanting to write about a number of topics biblical, and also maybe something on St Mary's, and certainly something on prayer but maybe it was today's eclipse and maybe because I spent this afternoon with someone that I love that has prompted me to take up Nic's offer and respond to his thoughts. I do so with considerable trepidation because it will no doubt entail me getting very personal; I tend to be very protective, cautious of things very personal, close to my heart (I am a casebook Cancer). I find it hard to talk about such things and yet here I am about to write it all on a blog for all and sundry to see, including my friend who I love.

So Nic begins:

Gay love, by its very definition of sameness, and from the bi-modal gendered society we live in, often manifests itself in different ways to straight love. Straight love is often constructed around ideas of difference which reflect the stereotypes and differences of male and female. For the gay person, a lover might not only be an object of desire but a competitor, a role model, a reflection of ourselves or a validation. Such aspects may play a role in straight relationships, but only in gay love are the acts of wanting someone and wanting to be someone so cryptically intertwined. Sometimes the two desires are difficult or impossible to separate.

I would probably not use the term gay love but rather same sex love, but that's just a semantic quibble on my part. Otherwise I would probably pretty much agree with most of what he says here. I would probably augment by saying that straight love works on stereotypes and gender differences that are constructed in patriarchal terms; it's hierarchical and to do with ownership of the womb and its products. And then there is the Oedipal dimension that Freud documents and Irigaray deconstructs. The woman is as much mother as lover to the man, who himself traditionally takes the role of the woman's father (hence the giving the bride away in traditional weddings). The woman's role is determined by male projections onto her which Irigaray refers to as the Father's law of the Same and why my friend Julie Kelso says that heterosexuality does not exist yet, only heteronormativity.

Homosexual love does not operate on such a paradigm, in part, because it exists outside the norms, has in the past been excoriated and condemned, abjected. It's also not reproductive and so has no value in the the property dynamics of patriarchy and progeny. That's not to say that same sex love is not impacted by heteronormativity. We are all conditioned by the heteronormative and it remains our prime model of what it means to love and be in intimate relation. But as Nic points out, there are differences, differences of mode and energy between same sex love and straight love (one of the reasons marriage is a completely inappropriate institution for same sex relationships). I strongly agree with Nic when he says about same sex love "a lover might not only be an object of desire but a competitor, a role model, a reflection of ourselves or a validation." I'm not certain about competitor, I've never quite felt that myself but I'm Cancer and Nic is Aries, very much a competitive sign. But certainly role model, reflection and validation. When I love a man it's because I see something estimable in him, and often because I see an aspect of myself in him. Validation? Actually I want to validate him, more than anything else sometimes and that's certainly the case with my friend today.

I think Nic left out one other important aspect of same sex love and that is the mentoring aspect, but then he was looking at validation of self from other. Mentoring works the other way round and it's most commonly associated with age variant relationships but I don't think they have a monopoly on it. The thing is mentoring works best when it's mutual. The danger of the age variant relationship is that it becomes a one way process, the older moulding the younger Pygmalionesque. But all true pedagogy is reciprocal, it's the basis of the pedagogic eros, and there is an eros to pedagogy. Homosexual love has a long association with pedagogy, teaching, apprenticeships, mentoring (and why I think My Fair Lady is very rich with queer reading potential). Perhaps the self validation that Nic refers to comes from the feedback loop of mutual mentoring.

In my case, I am someone who is attracted to younger guys. Love, falling in love for me involves some kind of recognition of something in the other, something beautiful, precious, and something that must be nurtured. Desire, of course, is there but I can desire guys without necessarily falling for them and while there is a particular look that really turns me on - dark hair, dark features (I have a particular thing for South Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean/Latino guys) amongst other things - the guys I've loved or had crushes on are all types. Marc who died three years ago and who was the great love disaster of my younger years was a redhead! And certainly the friend I love does not fit my standard turn on at all. Astrologically, I can see the various points of connection between our charts. Oddly I had a go at his chart for him many years ago when we first met and I never recognised the connections then. And yet on reflection I think I've loved or felt a strong affection for him in some way for a very long time. At the same time I only really became aware of it in the last few months when amongst other things we began engaging intellectually with each other.

It's really odd to think of falling in love through the intellect, and writing that I realise it's the first time I've used the term falling in love in his context. Because I suppose I have, but at the same time it doesn't feel like the other times I've fallen in love and it certainly doesn't feel like those old crushes. I've told him that I feel a very deep love for him. And what I really want to do is affirm him, validate him. And I suppose if I recognise something of me in him then it's a form of validating myself. But is what I termed recognition of something beautiful and precious to be nurtured seeing something of me in him? Or maybe it represents something I would like to be - by the way I don't know what this something is in my friend's case I only know it is beautiful and precious - and that's another pattern of love for me. I have a very strong admiration for the guys I love - they become my heroes, even if they/we fuck up and it turns disastrous. I never lose that admiration.

This has probably gone further than a simple response to Nic's musings. But then Nic goes on to talk about his own infatuations and attractions in terms of jealousy of people who have something that he doesn't. That's probably an Aries thing too because I can't recognise that feeling at all. Nurturing is probably the stronger drive with me (yeah, yeah I'm a Cancer). I'm not jealous of my friend. I love him because there is something beautiful about him and I'm not talking physical beauty here but a beauty of soul and heart. I've learnt a lot from him - he's a good teacher. And what's also really interesting is the unexpected dimensions of myself that I've discovered through our friendship. I've told him that he's had the most amazing impact on my prayer life. I wont go into details as to why but suffice to say he's been through a rough patch and he indicated to me that he saw value in prayer, intercessionary prayer. So I've been praying for him, including Mass on an almost daily basis. When I was in Newcastle I was staying just around the corner from the Anglican Cathdral where they had a daily Eucharist so in Newcastle I did daily Eucharist each morning before the Bible and Critical Theory Seminar.

I realise I will have to follow up this post now with one on prayer but for the purposes of this post I should qualify that he's not the only recipient of my prayer intentions. But on top of my other prayer commitments I have added a whole additional layer for him alone. And he is probably the main motivation for the near daily Mass/Eucharist practice now. Prayer is an important act of solidarity regardless of whether one believes it has other benefits (which I do) and so my prayer is an act of solidarity with him, an expression of support and an attempt at spiritual nurturing. He wants to go to Mass with me soon and I want that very much too (and maybe I need to write about the Mass sometime too). The Mass, the Eucharist has always been important to me. It's probably the one thing that has kept me not only connected to Christianity but Catholic Christianity. While I can see its parallels and background in other religions, still no other religion has the Mass. It's a profound rite of communion and healing.

So I seem to have wandered away from love and my love. I wrote a while ago that coming out is a journey without maps. I think homosexual love is a journey without maps. All our culture offers is marriage and its variants as models of love and relationship. They don't really work for straights. They certainly can't work for us. And with my friend there is no model, not even my past loves. As I said above I'm only realising that I have probably fallen in love with him except that it doesn't feel like those other times when I fell in love. Maybe because I'm older now. Does age change things that much? Maybe because we engaged on such an intellectual level and also there has been such a mutual engaging in matters spiritual. I've always wanted that in any sort of loving friendship. But I have no guidelines which is scary because I don't want to damage the friendship. And of course I can't get too neurotic about that either. I might not have any guidelines but I know what my flaws are. And my prime commitment is to the friendship. I don't want to do anything that would jeapordise that. His friendship is too important.

Elizabeth Stuart has argued that friendship should be a model for our most intimate and committed relationships. I'm inclined to agree. The people I love will always be my friends and I will always love them. And I don't necessarily restrict intimacy to sexual intimacy alone. And at my age I don't really have any expectations physically. That would be delusional and I'm making sure I keep such delusions under close control. They can't be gotten rid of but just let them fool around in the backyard and, above all, don't let them in the house. Because there's more to intimacy than sex. Mind you it's curious that Nic never spoke about intimacy in his post.

I've just read through what I've written. I've pretty much come to the end and it's late. There's still a lot left unsaid I realise and that's the problem with writing. It follows its own course and thus determines what will get included and excluded and now I'm just going around in circles deciding whether to publish because once I do it's out there for all, for him to see. Ah well, a leap of faith shouldn't be a problem now.


UPDATE: From Astrodienst, my stars today

Something transcendental
This influence deepens the emotions and creates a greater need to belong to an individual or to a group. Friendships are extremely important to you today, and they may change your life. Love relationships are more intense, and physical sexuality is experienced as something transcendental. This is a good time to try to understand your emotions and how they affect your relationships. Today you can enrich and enhance a relationship as you realize the strength of your feelings, in a moment when you experience the full force of your emotion. Certainly any emotion that you feel today will have extraordinary force and vigor. No experience under this influence is superficial, nor would you be satisfied with any that was.
The interpretation above is for your transit selected for today: Venus Sextile Pluto, , exact at 17:24 activity period from 22 July 2009 to 24 July 2009

It began yesterday, so no surpise I'm thinking about love, transcendence and so forth.

Some Thoughts on a Homosexual Tradition

I began this piece Saturday night and have been adding to it progressively. At the time I'm writing this intro I have decided to not pretend a continuity but just add bits. as I go along.

As is often the way with things, I have been sidetracked tonight. I had intended to write something on various New Testament issues which were getting my attention over the last few days but I might come back to that in the next couple of days. Instead what's on my mind right now is a jumble of thoughts around the notion of a homosexual tradition. I have been wanting to re-read some Plato but instead am at last reading Luce Irigary's Speculum of the Other Woman. Just superb! But I'm still on her on Freud and while I love how she deconstructs and exposes Freud I'm itching for her to get into Plato. Why? Because I want to re-read Plato, in particular the Symposium and the Phaedrus. It's all part of my concern about the European Homosexual Tradition.

A couple of years ago, I attended (and presented at) a one day LGBT community forum here in Brisbane. During the course of the day the notion came up that homosexuality was somehow invented in the late 19th century - a very crude constructionism that seems to constantly recur over the last few years and might even be a form of orthodoxy in some quarters. Now I am neither a constructionist nor an essentialist in any strict form but I certainly do not accept the simplistic constructionism that posits the homosexual as an invention, generally by establishment sexologists, of the 19th century. In fact those sexologists were actually appropriating the discourse of early homosexual activists working for a change in social attitudes to homosexuality, in particular, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Ulrichs was both the first public gay activist and the first theorist of sexuality. He was prompted to action by the impending unification of Germany under Prussia. Thanks to the Code Napoleon many of the German states had no legal sanctions against homosexuality. However, as Prussia had not been conquered by France it retained its own legal code which criminalised homosexuality.

Ulrichs campaigned to change these laws because a Prussian led Germany would mean that German LGB people outside Prussia would face recriminalisation. As part of his campaigning Ulrichs wrote and theorised about homosexuality and used a notion of a third sex as his model. He developed an entire taxonomy of sexuality which pretty much underpins our contemporary models. His system included not only gay men and lesbians as types but also bisexual men and bisexual women and MtF transgender women and FtM transgender men. It was quite a comprehensive system which would be subsequently appropriated by the sexologists and subsequent psychologists and other clinicians as a way of classifying and dealing with the 'problem' of non-heterosexuality. In many respects it was a tragic turnaround or subversion of Ulrichs' work.

For Ulrichs' goal was to transform social attitudes to homosexuality so that rather than it being something to be dealt with (or even worse cured) it would be accepted and acknowleged rather than stigmatised, criminalised and suppressed. As I said Ulrichs took as his model the notion of third sex or intermediate type. In part this model drew on European exposures to third gender people in colonial contexts (Rudi Bleys documents some of this history in The Geography of Perversion) although Ulrichs could no doubt draw on Hermaphrodite motifs from ancient mythology. Ironically Ulrich's model could be said to be an inversion of Aristophanes' three sexes as found in Plato's Symposium. Here the hermaphrodite as a male female unit ironically represents what we might term the heterosexual as opposed to the man-male-couple and the woman-female-couple. That's how Dante uses the term in his Purgatory Canto 26 when he encounters a group of repentant hermaphrodites guilty of heterosexual sins of lust. As he speaks with one such sinner, they are interrupted by another column of repentant sinners, this time sodomites and it is clear that in their case their sins are those of same sex desire. But they are never allowed to address the poet or even identify themselves to him unlike his hermaphrodite speaker or the sodomites he meets in Hell. It would appear that for Dante the only good sodomite is a closeted one.

In Dante's Purgatory, two diferent elements of the homosexual tradition meet, perhaps for the first time, one old, one new. The first is the Platonic tradition, of which the hermaphrodite is but one example and the other is the sodomite, newly invented in the 11th century by the monk, Peter Damian. In his Book of Gomorrah, Peter Damian draws together a variety of threads of Christian homophobia to create the sodomite as a species with a distinct lineage and history and sacred site, i.e. the Cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrah. The model for his classification is that of the Jew, so there is a Sodomite society and a Sodomite covenant just like Judaism but unlike Judaism, whose adherents are identifiable and set apart from the body of Christendom, sodomites have thoroughly ensconced themselves within the Christian body, most alarmingly for Peter Damian, within the clergy and the communities of monastics themselves.

In some respects Peter Damian's book is the opening salvo of a religious struggle that would lead to the Protestant Reformation. His book is addressed to the Pope of the day and it's a call for a thorough purge and cleansing reform of the Church, especially the orders of priests, bishops and monks, of the sodomite infection. Unhappily for Peter Damian, but no doubt happily for everyone else, the Pope of the day was not all that interested in his paranoid clarion call and after sending a thank you note filed the text away.


(Sunday night)
But the category that Peter Damian created was based on sexual activity. Prior to his day there was only one sex act that seems to be clearly denoted with the tag of Sodom: anal sex between men. All the other things that men can do with each other, as well as all the things that women can do with each other, in contrast were not tagged with Sodom's downfall. Peter Damian, however, took everything that men can do with each, oral sex, inter-femoral sex, mutual masturbation, and even added solitary masturbation for good measure, and rolled them up with anal sex to call them sodomy (sodomia in his Latin). His text is the first instance of that word in any European language (a word that can be translated as sodomy appeared in a Syriac Christian text two centuries earlier but it's context does not give it the same meaning that Peter Damian conveys with sodomia, although post-sodomy, the Syriac word, sedoomayootha, becomes assimilated to Peter Damian's neologism). Peter Damian's world is very much a man's world and so there is no mention of lesbians here although subsequently in the later medieval period the idea developed that while the sodomite's ancestral home was Sodom the lesbian was a daughter of Gomorrah.

Peter Damian might have invented sodomy and the category of the sodomite but it would take time for his invention to catch on. Foucault could famously observe that in the texts he read sodomy was a completely confused category but there was no such confusion for Peted Damian. For him Sodom and sodomy signified a species of males marked by same sex desire. His invention however had to contend with older homphobic models based on the fear of the penetrated/feminised male. The feminised male was monstrous and anal sex could be made equivalent to bestiality, an expression of bestial lust, and eventually sodomy would come to bear the the added burden of signifying bestiality as well (and really there was none too bad that could not be imputed to Sodom). And in time the lesbian would likewise come under Sodom's shadow rolling up all same sex desire together with the bestial as examples of monstrous bestial lust. Peter Damian's sodomy could be blurred/confused a bit to take up a variety of monstrous sins but its potency lay in the ability to denote a whole category of humanity by monstrous (same-sex) desire (lust) and associated sexual practices.

When I first read the Book of Gomorrah I was struck by the level of paranoia in the text. Thinking back on it now it seems most equivalent to contemporary homophobic products of the Christian Right (e.g Jack Chick's Doom Town). These are likewise paranoid texts and they work by exagerating, distorting, misrepresenting LGBT people and our lives. But behind the distortions, there is something real, our existence. Even in Doom Town I can recognise something real that has been twisted out of all reality by Chick's text (and check out another such distorted representation text here). And so I wonder, does Peter Damian's Book of Gomorrah similarly misrepresent a world of real people. In the century after his time there is an extraodinary flowering of celebratory discourses on same sex love and friendship most noticeably within the monastic environments themselves. The most outstanding example is St Aelred of Rievaulx who celebrated and encouraged particular friendships and love amongst his monks. The consesnus today is that Aelred was what we would now term gay. And so after reading Plato I want to read Aelred's writings on friendship and love. And rememebr that monasteries and convents are great places for those who are same sex attracted and thus for whom marriage and its supposed joys would have no appeal.

And if the world of Plato, Sappho and Greek mythology (not to mention Hadrian and Antinous) could stand as a dangerous memory from which to cultivate a homosexual tradition, the Christian mythos could likewise be called on to put its own weight behind it too. The Old Testament contains two remarkable stories of same sex love, David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi (not to mention all those eunuchs). Furthermore, Ruth Vanita has highlighted that the fragmentary Sappho can be reinforced by the model of the Virgin Mary herself. Mary in medieval times was not your compliant woman submissive in wifely roles but instead Queen of Heaven, a Mother without a husband, a patron of and model for priests, and, while Ever-Virgin, Mary showed a special favour for those who were always falling by the way of rigid sexual mores. It's no wonder the oh so heteronormative Reformers attacked her cult with persistent ferocity and why even today, conservative Protestants regard Mary as almost equivalent to Satan. And those same Reformers attacked with due heteronormative vigilance all those same-sex households of monastery, abbey and convent.

However, as Mary of Agreda used to say 'those who know the Mother know the Son' and Jesus himself is also deeply implicated in homosexual associations. His love for his Beloved Disciple, John (by tradition), has not only been long celebrated from the days of the early church but is a model for Christian discipleship. It is also a most uncomfortable memory. At his trial, Oscar Wilde cited Jesus and John together with David and Jonathan, Socrates and Alcibiades, and Achilles and Patroclus as models of his relationship with his beloved Bosie, of that special love, the love that binds an older man and a younger. Not for Oscar the notion of being an intermediate type, a third sex but instead the beauty and nobility of love between men. And Aelred of Rievaulx, himself celebrated the love of Jesus and John as a heavenly marriage and model for his monks.

But the mention of heavenly love brings me back to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs although he drew on the notion of the intermediate type, the third sex, the invert, his classification system drew on the Platonic model that ironically, his would displace. Ulrichs might have spoken of inverts but he never spoke of homosexuals. Instead he coined the terms urning for gay man, urnind for lesbian and uranodioning for bisexual. This final term gives away the source for his classification. Urning/urnind is a form of Uranian and Ulrichs is here citing Plato's Symposium, in particualr Pausanias' tale of the two loves, the two types of love: that of heavenly Uranian Aphrodite, which repsented the love of the older man for a younger, and the more earthly love of man and woman represented by Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus and Dione. So even though he was abandoning the Platonic pattern of age variant love between men (and between men and youths), he set up a taxonomy based on love, heavenly Uranian (same sex) love and earthly Dionian (opposite sex) love.

The sexologists (some of whom wanted to advance Ulrichs's cause of liberation) ironically dropped the love based nomenclature and, like Peter Damian before them, based theirs on sex as well as inversion, a psychological rendering of the intermediate type. In my opinion the homosexual is not so much a new thing but rather a scientific positivist version of that old monk's sodomite. They are both classified by sex and sex alone. Consequently both intermediate types and uranians resisted the term homosexual. Edward Carpenter used the term homogenic love and for him love and friendship, often involving gender variance, were the basis of definition of what we now call LGBT or Queer folks. Later in the 20th century many preferred the term homophile as a descriptor to homosexual. Carpenter himself would publish his Iolaus - An Anthology of Friendship, a collection of texts form ancient, medieval, renaissance and modern sources representing varieties of same sex love and sacral gender variance (an early edition of which I found in the University of Qld Library had originally been part of the Brisbane Trades Hall workers' library in the 1920' and 30s before being donated to the university in the late 1940s. Who, I wonder, was responsible for getting that book into the Trades Hall library and make it available for ordinary workers. It's the sort of book that may well have saved lives).


The notion that the homosexual and homosexuality were 'invented' in the late 19th century is especially problematic because the implication is that ours is a very recent movement without connections to any past. But the homosexual could only be invented through a rejigging, a reworking of pre-existing traditions, and in part by drawing on homosexual traditions from elsewhere on the planet. And there are homosexual traditions in other cultures. The blitzkrieg of European colonialism and imperialism has had a devastating impact on many of them (Africa especially) but they mostly still continue. Even to speak of a European Homosexual Tradition in a singular form would be too simplistic. In Europe, the tradition draws on the Greco-Roman past, Sappho, Plato and Christianity. All contain dangerous memories and models which can be appropriated and reworked and, most importantly, have been periodically, and employed to imagine alternatives to the homophobic and heteronormative.


And I wanted to draw on Adrienne Rich and highlight the age variant lesbian relationship that was the poet Michael Field. That is why I'm reading Irigaray before I return to Plato. Unsurprisingly, being refracted through a patriarchal society, the homosexual tradition in Europe mostly manifests as a male tradition. However there are female traditions, too, but more fractured, fragmentary like Sappho's poetry. I know that Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus can be extraordinarily affirming and empowering for a gay man. And also for lesbian women... at first. But Plato is talking about love between males. Does Plato even care about love between women? Does he care about women at all? Irigaray's critique is a necessary corrective.

I'll end here for now but I'll probably return to add more thoughts at a later stage. Or maybe pick up these themes in a subsequent post. But on reviewing what I have written I am struck by how central love is to the homosexual tradition, love and desire, but love first of all.