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[H]omosexuals are … widely consigned to the same category of things as drugs, the category of illicit dirty things that people have to be protected from … since the homosexual is continually taught by the world around him that his natural home is the sewer, the homosexual is uniquely equipped to discover what truly belongs and doesn’t belong in the sewer … Gary Indiana, Three-Month Fever
Wilde’s utopian vision of love between men remains, in Britain and beyond, a creation myth of the public male homosexual identity. Speaking at his trial Wilde launched a passionate defence of homosexual desire: It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.2
Even the idea that people have a specific ‘sexuality’ is remarkably recent – perhaps only 150 years old, emerging out of the rapidly industrializing colonial metropolises of Europe.12 The rigid segmentation of time into separated zones of work and leisure, along with moral panics about ‘backwards’ people intended to justify colonial expansion and incursions into the supposedly immoral private lives of the working classes, inculcated the idea that who you fucked made you who you were.
Often, after the fact, the queer elite will belatedly acknowledge these people, movements, moments, and struggles in an attempt to incorporate them into the dominant story of what it means to be gay or lesbian or trans, as though the working-class gays and sex workers, drag queens, and trans women of colour at the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s West Village threw bricks at cops in order to win marriage equality for the gay and lesbian donor class.17
This binary model of thinking about homosexuality is so deeply internalised that to suggest that one might choose homosexuality as a positive choice, or even be able to have some control over the shaping of your own desires, is regarded as hate speech. Within liberal circles, even when homosexuality is okay, even when it comes with pension rights and military service and a lovely flat with a balcony and a little dog, it’s still an affliction.
If there is anything of homosexuality to be saved, it is its reconstruction of the concept of the family. Not born into fixed kin, we get to choose ours. This can be a project of socialization but also of politicization, of understanding to which kind of political ‘we’ we wish to belong. Understanding how we became a ‘we’ in the first place – and interrogating the extent to which that ‘we’ even makes sense, given how different ‘we’ have been from one another and how terribly ‘we’ have often been treated by one another – might help more of us choose better. Then the real work begins.
This Roman ambivalence, that the Greeks were both wise and decadent, worthy of study but worth being wary of, rang down through history, and has had a significant impact on the history of homosexuality.
The Sacred Band of Thebes was a military unit made up of 150 pairs of male lovers and was regarded as the most elite unit in the Theban army, its soldiers being of unusual bravery and moral character.
To be the receptive partner in anal sex was regarded as being kinaidos, or effeminate: there’s no escaping it, bottom-shaming is as old as European civilization itself, baked into the deep misogyny of patriarchal societies.