WAS SHAKESPEARE GAY? More from Dave Bianco


Full essay in Planet Out here, excerpts below:


The typical pantheon of "famous gays in history" includes Sappho, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo and William Shakespeare. Many gays and lesbians believe with certitude that we are a minority group that has existed throughout time and across cultures. The ubiquity -- and by extension, inevitability -- of gay and lesbian identity is a common building block in arguments that homosexuality is natural, unchosen and good. As such, it's often presented in brochures and handbooks aimed at helping young people come out.

For example, according to the official "Straight Talk About Homosexuality" brochure from the University of California-San Diego, being gay is normal because "historians have determined that homosexuality has existed since the beginning of humanity. Anthropologists report that lesbians and gay men have been part of every culture." The "Is It Natural?" section of the University of Connecticut women's center Web site similarly boasts that "Lesbians and gays have existed since the earliest of human societies. Anthropological studies have shown that gay men and lesbians have been part of every culture."

But those studies are imaginary. The coming-out literature presents the "eternal and everywhere" view as unquestioned and irrefutable, but it's not even held by a scholarly minority. No reputable historian or anthropologist (at those universities or any other) believes that lesbians and gay men have existed in every culture throughout history. Indeed, the most eloquent critics of this idea have been gay and lesbian scholars.

All serious gay history is rooted in the assumptions and techniques of what's called "social constructionism." This school of thought sees gay identity as a constructed response to a set of economic, social and political conditions that first appeared in Western Europe in the late 19th century. Social constructionism doesn't deny same-sex desire, love, or sex in other eras, but neither does it understand their meanings to be essentially anything like those of present-day homosexuality. Thus, only same-sex behavior in the last century or so can be called "gay" if the term is to be at all useful.

It's not just that no earlier society used certain words to describe its gay minority -- there were no such minorities. Thoughtful gay and lesbian scholars like anthropologists Walter Williams and Esther Newton, and historians George Chauncey and Jonathan Ned Katz (whose "The Invention of Heterosexuality" explores this subject especially well) have gone to great lengths to describe the experiences and delineate the identities of people who had same-sex liaisons in various time periods and cultures. They have been unanimous in finding no evidence of what we know as homosexuality and heterosexuality except in recent Western culture.

Any serious look at the people from other cultures who've been put forth as "gay" shows the impotence of that anachronism outside the contemporary context. Same-sex "eros" (romantic love) among men in ancient Greece, for example, usually involved men of different generations who also paired with women. The Native American individuals known as "two-spirits" or "berdaches" differed from fellow tribesmen primarily in their feminine expressivity and social function, not in the sex of the people they turned to for intimacy. In some contemporary Latin American cultures, categories of male sexuality are much more closely shaped by passive/active role-playing than the gender of the other person.

We shouldn't call Shakespeare "gay" even as a shortcut for suggesting he had sex with men, because there's no evidence he identified with any category of men-oriented men. It's like calling Pocahontas an American or Moses a Jew. The labels might sound right at first, but they would have meant nothing to the figures in question, as they require a set of experiences, categories and identifications such people could never have encountered. Even saying Shakespeare was "gay but didn't know it" is arrogant. Our system of classifying people into sexual orientations may work for us, but forcing it onto everyone who ever lived is simply bad history.


posted by maggie at 4:58 PM VOTE

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