An odd thing, really: according to popular lore, lesbians and gays are an accepted, even celebrated, part of the artistic community. If you wear clothes, odds are, we designed them. If you listen to music, we probably wrote and certainly marketed it. If you live under a roof, more than likely, your surroundings, the essence of yourself, bear gay fingerprints, leaching inward from the coasts to the deepest heartland in a constant struggle against Elvis paintings on black velvet.
Equally, if you turn on your television, you'll see us. Glee, obviously, Modern Family, even the homoerotic subtexts of South Park and Family Guy: all really, really gay. The most popular recording artist in the country, one Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta - you may know her as Lady Gaga - champions our causes. At this writing, on the home page of the New York Times, you can find a fascinating feature on Coming Out. More relevantly, the issues of our civil rights struggle, the basic right to get married, to serve our country in uniform, to keep our jobs, that our children not be bullied, all are front and center on the national agenda.
It was not always thus.
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκεν
Sing to me, Goddess, of the rage of Achilles, begins one of the foundational texts of Western Civilization, the Iliad of Homer. By twenty-first century standards, Achilles, son of the nymph Thetis and the warrior Peleus, would be considered bisexual; the rage of which Homer speaks owed to a dispute over his love for the Trojan woman Briseis. In another outburst, however, Achilles kills the Trojan prince Hector - known as the "tamer of horses" in classical antiquity - after Hector in turn kills Achilles' lover Patroclus. Both relationships are treated by the ancient authors as equal.
In the society of republican and then imperial Rome, equally, same-sex attraction was commonplace and entirely within the norm of acceptable behavior.
One of the few imperial writers who does appear to make some sort of comment on the subject in a general way wrote, "Zeus came as an eagle to godlike Ganymede and as a swan to the fairhaired mother of Helen. One person prefers one gender, another the other, I like both." Plutarch wrote at about the same time, "No sensible person can imagine that the sexes differ in matters of love as they do in matters of clothing. The intelligent lover of beauty will be attracted to beauty in whichever gender he finds it." Roman law and social strictures made absolutely no restrictions on the basis of gender. It has sometimes been claimed that there were laws against homosexual relations in Rome, but it is easy to prove that this was not the case. On the other hand, it is a mistake to imagine that anarchic hedonism ruled at Rome. In fact, Romans did have a complex set of moral strictures designed to protect children from abuse or any citizen from force or duress in sexual relations. Romans were, like other people, sensitive to issues of love and caring, but individual sexual (i.e. gender) choice was completely unlimited. Male prostitution (directed toward other males), for instance, was so common that the taxes on it constituted a major source of revenue for the imperial treasury. It was so profitable that even in later periods when a certain intolerance crept in, the emperors could not bring themselves to end the practice and its attendant revenue.
Gay marriages were also legal and frequent in Rome for both males and females. Even emperors often married other males. There was total acceptance on the part of the populace, as far as it can be determined, of this sort of homosexual attitude and behavior. This total acceptance was not limited to the ruling elite; there is also much popular Roman literature containing gay love stories. The real point I want to make is that there is absolutely no conscious effort on anyone's part in the Roman world, the world in which Christianity was born, to claim that homosexuality was abnormal or undesirable. There is in fact no word for "homosexual" in Latin. "Homosexual" sounds like Latin, but was coined by a German psychologist in the late 19th century. No one in the early Roman world seemed to feel that the fact that someone preferred his or her own gender was any more significant than the fact that someone preferred blue eyes or short people. Neither gay nor straight people seemed to associate certain characteristics with sexual preference. Gay men were not thought to be less masculine than straight men and lesbian women were not thought of as less feminine than straight women. Gay people were not thought to be any better or worse than straight people-an attitude which differed both from that of the society that preceded it, since many Greeks thought gay people were inherently better than straight people, and from that of the society which followed it, in which gay people were often thought to be inferior to others.
Fast forward several centuries after the advent of Christianity, and the story changes. In large part, we can lay that at the doorstep of Saint Paul of Tarsus, who arguably did more than anyone to imbue the emerging Catholic Church with traits of homophobia and misogyny that linger to this day. Interestingly, some sources have argued that Saint Paul himself - who, cough, remained a lifelong bachelor - was what we would call a closeted gay man, perhaps the J. Edgar Hoover of his day. In Catholic Europe and its outliers in Byzantium and Russia, male and female homosexuality was criminalized. Dante's inferno places sodomites in the seventh circle of Hell.
The first rays of light after a thousand years of repression and darkness begin to dawn for gays and lesbians in the Renaissance, when the wealthy Italian city-states rediscovered and emulated the art and mores of antiquity. Legal restrictions began to fall; mind you, we're talking about moving from burning at the stake to not burning at the stake, so these improvements were certainly incremental.
In the realm of art, however, the changes were transcendent. Art rediscovered the muscular nude body, literature, in the new form of the sonnet, love between two men or two women.
That is not to say, of course, that any of this was described as 'homosexual' as we understand the term today. One of the defining characteristics of pre-modern heteronormativity is that same-sex relationships largely were not considered physical in any meaningful sense.
Needless to remark, what with our ingrained prudery, the English-speaking world was and remained behind the curve; we're debating to this day whether Shakespeare had same-sex attractions (he did). Victorian England sentenced Oscar Wilde to two years of hard labor on charges of gross indecency as late as 1895, with cries of "Shame!" ringing through the court room.
Here in America, it has been a long, hard slog to come to where we are. And we're by no means done. Indeed, we can see ourselves on television, and certainly in the magazine racks at your local book store. But none of that compares to the sheer impact of LGBT men and women, cisgendered and transgendered, living our lives in the broad light of day.
We can't expect Hollywood, Madison Avenue, or the White House, to give us equality. We need to demand it, live it, blog it, work for it. But one day, we will be able to quote the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and say "free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last."
(Diary by MBNYC)