Bad Gays: A Homosexual History
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Read between February 29 - May 19, 2024
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‘the best possible organisation [for a] battalion would be for it to consist of lovers and their boyfriends … A handful of such men, fighting side by side, could conquer the whole world’.
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bottom-shaming is as old as European civilization itself, baked into the deep misogyny of patriarchal societies.
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early modern Europe many same-sex relationships were structured around hierarchical relationships which were seen to have an educational function, and it was this pedagogical relationship which may have created space for the toleration of sodomy.
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especially about what snobs call the fork of his trousers where evidently he was favoured by nature by a very extraordinary development of the male appendages;
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Cruising’s codes are often quite strict even though they are learned socially; Uriarte writes that cruising, ‘looking and reading the body, the gaze, the gestures, and the movements of others … are precisely the activities that lay at the centre of Casement’s investigative travels’.
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There was, as the historian Andrew Wackerfuss has argued, a powerful collective association between male sexual and male military power.11 Stormtrooper bands exploited this association by promising and delivering homoerotic and homosocial experiences to their members (collective life, collective battle, collective showers, and so on) even as they violently denounced and murdered queer-identifying people.
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Esther Newton, whose 1968 study of drag queens helped inaugurate gay and lesbian studies in the American academy,
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‘there was no room for women’s sexual deviance in an increasingly masculinized struggle for racial equality and full citizenship’.
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James Baldwin, a Black, gay New York writer whose powerful prose and oratory made him a moral backbone for the movement, had a file almost half the size of that of Malcolm X – but also the leadership of the nonviolent civil rights movement itself.
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Yet, without guilt, rumour, and gossip, most of history’s homosexuals would go unnoticed in the torrent of assumed heterosexuality that culture imposes.
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One such activist, Harry Hay, went on to become a founding member of one of the United States’ first gay activist groups that emerged at this time, the Mattachine Society, and adopted
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the Popular Front model of a minority group agitating for social and political recognition as a social group with a distinct culture, whose legacy endures today in the idea of the ‘LGBTQ community’.
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Anyone applying to work for the federal government had their details cross-checked with the State Department’s list of known or alleged homosexuals.
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joyful child, unknowingly overstepped the barriers of gender presentation, and were greeted without mercy by the regime that enforces them with its most potent weapon, shame.
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St Sebastian was a Roman soldier martyred by being beaten to death, but only after having survived an attempted execution by being shot full of arrows; some suggest his role as a homosexual icon relates to his having symbolically survived repeated penetration, but what is clear is that his figure, usually represented by a beautiful young man bound to a tree, his flesh penetrated although rarely bleeding, has fascinated queer artists from Il Sodoma to Derek Jarman.
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The history of homosexuality is a long history of failure – failure to understand ourselves, failure to understand how we relate to society, and the failures of racism and exclusion.
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It is not just an issue of shifting language, from ‘sodomite’ to ‘urning’, from ‘invert’ to ‘queer’: the changing words emerge out of a recognition that what it means to be gay has shifted, and new words are needed to understand it.