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A love that cannot speak its name -- and why not?

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Jun 27, 2004, Page 18

Publication Notes Homosexuality and Civilization By Luis Crompton 623 pages Belknap Press

When Europeans first arrived in the Americas they found men engaged in erotic entanglements virtually on the quayside. They responded with the horror their religion had implanted in them, holding out their bibles and shouting "Abomination! Devilry! Wichcraft!" The problem was they found the same thing almost everywhere they set foot in East Asia. China and Japan both looked on this kind of activity with a cool shrug of the shoulders. But as the Europeans' colonizing push gathered force the hangings, disembowelment by mastiffs and burnings alive (especially popular) began to appear in these regions as well.

Luis Crompton is a veteran of the scholarly program to research gay history in ever greater detail. Because it was for so long looked on in the West as the "unmentionable" vice, it all too often remained just that -- unmentioned. Crompton's Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th Century England (1985) became celebrated for lifting the curtain on such things as the English poet's enthusiastic bisexuality, and on horrors such as the pillory -- not an Olde Worlde comic institution as many had assumed, but a lethal ritual in which men, tied to stakes on the back of a cart, were pelted with dogs' excrement specially sold at the roadside and implanted with rocks that could and did blind and sometimes kill.

All over Europe for 2,000 years the story was the same, an orgy of hatred and vilification ostensibly justified by a small number of biblical quotations, but in reality probably the result of the generalized sexual repression the same religion was imposing on all of its adherents.

China and Japan stand out as shining lights of philosophic sanity in this narrative. In the first act of the 18th century puppet play Love Suicides on the Eve of the Koshin Festival by Japan's greatest dramatist, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, three men compete for possession of a beautiful youth. Yet this was no coterie drama for a jaded elite but a piece of public theater, clearly reflecting general attitudes. In China, too, the missionizing Europeans encountered an amused public toleration. So long as sons eventually married and continued the family line, no great harm was done by such youthful escapades. It was part of human nature, after all.

Crompton is at pains not to exaggerate the picture. India was to some extent different, and Africa (where things were probably very different) barely gets a mention. Even so, his drift is abundantly clear. The source of anti-gay hysteria was Christianity, as it still is in, for instance, much of the US. And Christianity imbibed it from ancient Israel. Where did the Israelites get in from? Probably their being in religious competition with shamanistic transvestite cults then flourishing in the Middle East, Crompton concludes.

This is a major work from the Emeritus (i.e. retired) Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. It will be the the first book future researchers in the topic will turn to, and what they will find is a magisterial survey that delivers the fruits of a lifetime's study. Everything in the field is touched on and weighed in the balance.

Crompton is careful to give Christianity its due. It has been the inspiration over the centuries for much compassion, education and art, he writes, and many modern Christians have been able to put the concommitant hatreds behind them. Even so, gays have suffered terribly, even routinely, from its strictures.

In East Asia the situation has been nothing if not paradoxical. Before the arrival of the Europeans there was little concern either way. Then Western models of repression began to be followed (Japan copied Prussia and instituted an anti-gay law in 1873), and when decriminalization eventually ensued it was after the pattern of changes in the US and Europe. What a tragic farce! Countries such as Thailand, blissfully free from colonial influence, continued on their own sweet way without interruption.

In China, however, Communist Party orthodoxy followed the lines of 19th century Western Marxism. Homosexuality was unmentionable in 19th century Europe (though everywhere practiced more extensively than in the frenetically homophobic Anglo-Saxon countries), and so in revolutionary China it was deemed not to exist. Things may be easing up somewhat today, but in essence, to use Crompton's words, "a rich historical tradition has been lost."

How did such a state of affairs come about? Read Homosexuality and Civilization, a sobering survey if ever there was one, and find out. But at least Harvard University's Belknap Press has seen fit to publish all 623 pages of it.

Lay thy hand on a woman (only one, mind you) and you'll maybe go to heaven. But let it stray elsewhere, and woe betide you! So taught St Paul, though not, be it noted, Jesus Christ. And so Western males were exhorted over the centuries, while their Chinese counterparts relaxed in a relatively easy-going worldly wisdom, judged idolatory by the rapacious foreigner.

Westerners have a lot to learn from Asia, wiser and infinitely more adult all along, by and large. So -- are we at last learning our lesson? Possibly.
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