The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on December 18, 2021, 12:48:20 pm ---Remember when somebody wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln suggesting he had a love affair with his (male) friend, but others objected saying that homosexuality wasn't even recognized as a thing back then? That can't be possible, can it?
--- End quote ---
As a separate sexual orientation, yes. I think credit for "inventing" the term frequently goes to Krafft-Ebbing in the late 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Krafft-Ebing
But of course there is dispute over that.
I think you could probably say that "homosexuality didn't exist" until the the whole concept of "sexual orientation" was developed--I haven't tried to find out when that was.
This isn't to say that men didn't fall in love with other men or didn't have sex together. Of course they did; there just wasn't a word for it, except sodomy, and I guess that was limited to sex.
Front-Ranger:
The Greeks recognized homosexuality didn't they? It was called paiderastia (pederasty).
And what about Alexander?
serious crayons:
Well, sodomy and pederasty have negative connotations (the latter at least partly because of age and gender).
So it's hard to imagine how they could recognize that yes, there are men and women who have sex or fall in love with people of their own gender -- even though doing that was widely seen as sinful or at least scandalous and in many cases was illegal -- without it stemming from some inner inherent drive or longing or whatever. How did they explain that in their own minds, I wonder?
Maybe they thought people were tempted in the way we think of people being tempted by things that aren't good for them -- drugs, excess gambling, etc.
serious crayons:
By the way, if you haven't already read that Dec. 13 article about Greta Garbo, it considers the possibility that she was trans.
Front-Ranger:
Yes, I read it on your recommendation and it was a good article.
There's a link to a Wikipedia article on paiderastia in ancient Greece and it did not have negative connotations. They say it was socially accepted and the many depictions on pottery and in literature back that up. The stigma came later.
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