Response to the review by John Rundin of Thomas K. Hubbard, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents

I do not normally believe in responding to reviews of my books, but the first two paragraphs of Mr. Rundin's review of my sourcebook Homosexuality in Greece and Rome contain attacks of an ad hominem nature that are extraneous to the book itself and have more to do with past disagreements over professional association policy. For the record, I have always opposed sodomy laws and actively support a version of domestic partner benefits for my own institution, but I did not believe that the feeble symbolic measures that Mr. Rundin's group proposed to the APA were either politically effective or cognizant of countervailing association needs. I saw no reason to demand that the APA limit its already narrow list of possible meeting venues, when many thousands of gay and lesbian tourists each year continued to patronize resorts such as Provincetown and Key West, both in states with sodomy laws at the time. As someone who has in print championed the rights of sexual minorities which are marginalized by the mainstream gay rights establishment and who has challenged "gay marriage" as too assimilationist, I am amused to read that I am known for a "conservative approach to queer issues."

The reviewer's ill-informed conjecture about my political philosophy leads him to a skewed perspective on the book. Anyone who reads the first paragraph of my Introduction will immediately see the falsehood of the claim that my agenda is to "keep us all locked in the vise grip of contemporary sexual categories." Mr. Rundin has no prior publications or expertise in the field of sexuality. The two 1990 books on Greek sexuality that he praises as the "new wave" of scholarship have in fact been superseded by the more nuanced studies of Amy Richlin, James Davidson, and Andrew Lear, as well as several of my own articles. A sourcebook intended for undergraduate and general readers is not the place for such theoretical discussions, but my other publications, which are cited in the sourcebook and the reviewer has apparently not bothered to consult, demonstrate just how dated, one-dimensional, and theoretically unsophisticated this now 20-year old work is. What the sourcebook adds is even more evidence of the variety and range of same-sex behaviors and attractions in the ancient world, which resists simple-minded reduction into the monolithic "regimes" and "sexual protocols" so pretentiously invoked by self-styled Foucauldian epigones.