Toward Stonewall: Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World

Preface

G&S Typesetters PDF proof Preface As the sheer volume of writings on gay and lesbian history has grown in recent years, so too has the need for works of synthesis, pulling together this widely scattered and often not readily available material. What follows is just such a work, aimed at a general audience both within and, it is hoped, beyond the gay and lesbian community. It is only recently that homosexuals and homosexual subcultures have joined the ranks of previously neglected or underreported minorities and subordinate groups as subjects for dispassionate study by historians and other social scientists. Few subjects are more divisive or raise issues as disquieting as the nature of sexuality and the meaning of gender identity. What is more, homosexuality is controversial not only in and of itself but for the light it throws on society at large, often from unexpected and disturbing angles. By showing how subordinate groups accommodate themselves to their subordination , often at terrible psychic cost to themselves, it reveals just what society ’s demands and expectations are; by showing whether, in what way, and how successfully they challenge their subordination, it reveals just how open society is to change; by showing the way society treats weak or unpopular groups, it reveals a true measure of the distance between society’s professed and actual values; and by showing society’s willingness to employ scapegoats and which groups it chooses for that role, it reveals the nature and level of social anxiety. That tense relationship, at least as much as the internal development of homosexual subcultures, is the subject of what follows. Indeed, neither is comprehensible without the other. Homosexuality also raises in an acute form the vexed question where the boundary should be drawn between the public and the private. Although nothing is more personal, more intimate, than an individual’s choice of a sexual partner, whether for the night or for life, that choice is often far from private . All sorts of social institutions regard it as too important a matter to be| ix 00-V2660-FM 6/19/03 6:50 AM Page ix G&S Typesetters PDF proof left to the individuals involved and therefore have their say: families to ensure that such choices are socially acceptable or advantageous, churches to define their morality, governments to ensure their legality, doctors to assert whether they are physically and mentally healthy. The definition of what is acceptable, moral, legal, and normal has often been quite narrow, and all other choices have been and frequently still are labeled as deviant. But of all the deviant sexual practices not involving incest, violence, or children, the one that has been most condemned by most societies in the West is homosexuality, whether or not it was practiced in private. England and Germany did not decriminalize homosexual relations between consenting adults in private until the late 1960s, and then only within strict limits, and as late as 1986 the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of state antisodomy laws in part on the grounds that a majority of the population still viewed homosexuality as “immoral and unacceptable.” Over time, of course, the labels have changed, both those imposed from outside, such as sodomy, buggery, pederasty, and homosexuality (not to mention pejorative slang terms), and those coined from within the subculture in the hope of establishing neutral or positive terminology, gay (following failed attempts to gain widespread acceptance for other language) and lesbian. The rationale for condemnation and persecution has evolved as well. Depending on the time, the place, and the circumstances, the terms sinful, unnatural, criminal, antisocial, sick, or combinations of any or all of these have been applied to homosexuality. The shifts in perception and self-perception implied by these changes in labeling provide perhaps the best clues to the character and development of a beleaguered minority that has all too often been, as the title of one volume of essays on the subject suggests, “hidden from history.” In only a generation historians have established a generally accepted chronology , proposed and furiously debated opposing theoretical models, and identified the major players, rescuing many of them from near oblivion. The modern history of homosexuality and homosexual subcultures as we now generally use and understand these terms appears to date back only some three hundred years, to a significant shift in attitudes toward sexuality in northwestern Europe in the late seventeenth century, although the extent and sources of that shift remain very much matters of debate. However...