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aurumae t1_j6d3hau wrote

Reply to comment by Icy-Ad2082 in Dickens' David Copperfield: Were men more affectionate with each other in the 18th century? by angelojann

While you paint a somewhat convincing narrative I’m not sure it holds up. For one thing it wasn’t just Ancient Greece that had this different view on sexuality, it was present throughout Rome as well and seems to have been the dominant perspective for hundreds of years (until after the spread of Christianity).

The idea really seems to have been rooted in concepts of masculinity. We see in Roman culture that a free man is expected to dominate his wife and his slaves (and that would involve sex) and not to be dominated himself. No one in Roman society seems to have considered it odd for a man to have sex with his male slaves, and we even see cases where Roman emperors are notably distraught when a favoured male slave dies and build memorials for them. We would certainly understand these relationships as being in love, and the Romans don’t seem to have considered them odd.

What we do see constantly though is Roman men being shamed for being the “bottom” in a relationship. Julius Caesar for example was rumoured to have had such a relationship with Nicomedes of Bithynia, and though he denied it, the rumours dogged him all his life, with his political enemies calling him “Queen of Bithynia”.

I think the real takeaway from the Roman situation is that human sexuality is very complex, and while defining people by the gender they prefer is one way to define sexuality, it is not the only way. While there were undoubtedly plenty of people in the Roman world who we would identify as straight or gay, equally there were many people who wouldn’t fit neatly into our modern categories for sexuality, and who instead adhered to the ideas of dominance/passivity that were prevalent in their own culture. If you took a Roman from the Imperial period forward to the modern world, they would probably understand a lot of the questions we are dealing with around immigration and economic inequality. However they would probably find our modern ideas of sexual identity quite puzzling.

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Icy-Ad2082 t1_j6e2qvk wrote

I don’t really see a contradiction with what I said and what you’ve laid out here. What I’m trying to get at is that there is always an incongruence between societally accepted and recognized relationships, so we should take interpretations that rely on law or philosophy from the time with a grain of salt, especially when they seem to contradict primary sources from day to day life.

I’m aware of the Roman’s high levels of bottom shame, and, as I said above, it persist in modern culture. As you said, it would be a source of shame to be the bottom, and I will admit to a bit of purposeful omission regarding sex between soldiers. Most of the depictions we have of that are soldiers engaged in frottage, no one is “playing Juliet”, so to speak. But that’s the official party line, if we went off official attitudes in the military from the 70s in the same way we would have to say there were no gay military relationships at the time, and we know that’s just not true.

But to expand out on what you are saying, yeah it does seem to be a common theme in other cultures too, with variations, many of which also persist today. Some cultures it was seen as childish for a man to enjoy receptive sex, some controls conflated it with transsexuality and would only accept gay men who presented as women (usually in areas where the population has less sexual dimorphism). One of the big problems in my opinion is that we see just in recent times how quickly attitudes can change and fluctuate, and we know that cultures that rely heavily on persecution of out groups are more likely to destroy media and historical records, and given that homosexuality is a persistent out group, there is probably a lot of queer history that’s been destroyed. Like the works of sapho have been lost and found 3 times, and I think it’s telling that her work deals with love and lust outside of social institutions.

Just by the by, this is also why I think that the women’s liberation movement really kicked off the gay rights movement. The last 100 years have seen tons of pushback from subalterns of one sort or another, and I see that as being the “moral arc of history” and all that Jazz. But we see pockets of it throughout history. Like I had a professor get mad at me once for writing an essay arguing that Diogenes was the “ earliest recorded punk rocker” lol, but I really do think it has some merit. And there is a weird connection between being the receptive partner and rebelliousness, the term punk originally had an association with being a male receptive partner.

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aurumae t1_j6fk5no wrote

I think the point I'm most trying to argue against is casting these relationships using our modern conceptions of sexuality. I don't think it's right to talk about gay or straight people, or to cast their relationships in these terms, in a society that did not think about sexuality in these terms

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Icy-Ad2082 t1_j6g2ay3 wrote

Which is why I didn’t use the term straight or gay in either of my comments. The reason I responded to the initial comment was because I think that people often say this because it deletes male/male compassion from the equation, which I think straight American men are really more uncomfortable with than the sexual aspect. I’m not saying that two Spartans bustin’ a nut together makes them gay, like you said the term doesn’t apply to those people. But it does paint a different picture of how homosexual activity fit into there life and culture. The main thing I’m trying to get at is there consistent and significant incongruities in every cultures values around sex and how people actually behave, and a general impulse to “prudify” the past. I’m not saying this applies to you, you clearly know your history, but I feel the need to correct the record when people imply that Greek and Roman homosexual activities were compassion-less expressions of power. It’s not accurate, and people sometimes use it to claim that modern homosexual activity is somehow new.

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aurumae t1_j6gmsw1 wrote

I apologise, I mistook the meaning of your original comment

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DeepExplore t1_j6dmzq5 wrote

I found your point interesting.

Achilles is still gay then? Or no? Like canonically I guess what would be your guess?

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