By Dr. Bill Lipsky–
Men have been lovers of men and women have loved women at least since the beginnings of recorded history. From the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu 47 centuries ago, through the days of the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and to modern times, people have enjoyed same-sex relationships and celebrated them in stories, poetry, art, and gossip. We have always been here. Only the ways we understand ourselves and the ways others understand us have changed.
The women and men of long ago did not regard either the world or themselves as we do. No one considered herself to be lesbian or himself to be gay, not only because the words did not yet exist, but also because they had no idea of sexual orientation. People believed sexual interaction was a behavior, not an expression of identity. It was something someone “did” and not something someone “was.”
Human nature does not change. Only the concepts we create to understand it and the rules we construct to regulate it change. The ancient codes of law, which had severe penalties for almost everything, were mostly silent on sexual intimacy between two people of the same gender. The Code of Ur-Nammu, ca. 2100–2050 BCE, the world’s oldest known set of legal rules and regulations, says nothing about it. (Perhaps that tablet has yet to be discovered.)
The more famous Code of Hammurabi, ca. 1780 BCE, one of the earliest complete and most influential collections of laws before the Ten Commandants, lists hundreds of specific misdeeds and their punishments, but does not mention same-sex intimacy at all. The edicts of ancient Egypt also are silent on the subject. The Hittites made it illegal only between close relatives as part of a general rule against incest, not sexuality.
Was same-sex intimacy in those days so rare that it went unnoticed—which seems impossible—or so common that nobody cared? When mentioned at all, male-male experiences are never condemned as immoral and “homosexuality itself carries no implications.” What was important was the class, the status, the ages of the lovers, and the so-called roles they took when enjoying each other. Sexual relations between women were almost never mentioned and never forbidden.
The ancients, it seems, were much more concerned about divining the future than tut-tutting the present. A vast work entitled the Šumma alû and dated to sometime during the seventh century BCE contains a list of more than 10,000 prophecies. Only five explicitly mention the consequences of male-male sexual relations—none allude to women pleasuring each other—foretelling what was to come, given the social standing of the men involved and who did what with whom:
“A man who enjoys a man of equal status will become foremost among his brothers and colleagues. If a man enjoys an assinnu (a male cult prostitute), trouble will leave him.”
“A man who allows other men to enjoy him in prison as if he were an assinnu will experience evil.”
“If a man enjoys a gerseqqu (a male courtier or royal attendant), worry will plague him will for one whole year, then vanish.”
“If a man enjoys a (male) slave, care will seize him.”
The ancient Greeks and Romans also had strict social guidelines for same-sex intimacy, but no legal statutes forbidding it. Like the Sumerians and Babylonians, they required their citizens to accept specific so-called sexual roles when they were with each other—but what they did in private is unknown. As the historian John Boswell wrote, “If there was a law against homosexual relations, no one in Cicero’s day knew anything about it.”
Not until the Greek and Roman empires had been gone for hundreds of years and kingdoms and caliphates had replaced the empires where they once ruled were same-sex relationships commonly seen as being sinful. Many of the world’s great religions disapproved and punished them for moral reasons, so their followers eventually codified prohibitions against homosexuality into secular law that they then imposed on the lands they would conquer and colonize.
Only when the Darwinians began classifying everyone and the Freudians began analyzing them did anybody begin to consider why some men sought other men and some women sought other women for emotional and sexual intimacy; previously, possession by demons and corruption by foreigners were among the more popular explanations. No one considered that they were simply expressing what was natural and normal for them. Now they needed their own categories and reasons for being “different from the others.”
As early as 1862, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs created the term “uranian” to describe women and men whom he was convinced belonged to an intermediate or “third sex.” Early advocates of sexual liberty, including John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter, adopted and popularized the term in the English-speaking world. They and others believed that men who were uranian possessed a male body and a female temperament and that women who loved women were females with a male temperament.
The term “temperamental” became widely used during the first half of the 20th century, when it was overtaken by “homosexual,” a word created in 1869 by Karl Maria Kertbeny, who also invented the designation “heterosexual.” Now criticized as too narrow and clinical, it was replaced by “lesbian” and “gay.” Even those became wanting when people began to recognize and understand themselves in many different ways. We are so much more complicated than the so-called experts once thought.
For a long time, the conversation was about causation, nature vs. nurture. Now it is about identity, as Donald Hall writes, between those who believe that our sense of self is “natural, fundamental, and historically constant” and those who believe that “there were no discursive means by which sexual activity alone could lead to an identification of the self that would … allow us to responsibly analyze it as ‘homosexuality.'”
Does any of this really matter? Does any of this really help us to understand that across time women have desired other women and men have sought to be with other men for physical and emotional intimacy, even when they did not know about sexual orientation or sexual identity? As Gertrude Stein said, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” However we see ourselves today, and however others define us in the future, we will always be here.
Bill Lipsky, Ph.D., author of “LGBTQ+ Trailblazers of San Francisco” (2023) and “Gay and Lesbian San Francisco” (2006), is a member of the Rainbow Honor Walk board of directors.
Faces from Our LGBT Past
Published on March 7, 2024
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