A Love by any other name. (Books).

Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality

by Jonathan Ned Katz 

University of Chicago Press 416 pages, $35.

AS admirable a book as Jonathan Ned Katz's Love Stories is, I found it curiously grating in one respect, namely its insistence that "homosexuality" did not exist before the word itself was invented. The Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines "homosexuality" as "sexual desire or behavior directed toward a person or persons of one's own sex." Is this what didn't exist until late in the 19th century? And yet, as Katz himself exhaustively points out, people did use such terms as "girlboy," "sodomite," "mate," "Ganymede," "chum," "buggery," "crime against nature," "she-male," "chicken," "chickenship," "going chaw for chaw," "nameless crime," "athletic love," "robust love," "manly love," "adhesiveness," "amativeness," "comradeship," "affinity," "Arcadian love," "paiderastia," "anderastes," "Greek love"--all of which alluded in one way or another to what we call "homosexuality."

This is not to say, of course, that 19th-century practitioners of same-sex sex understood themselves to be "homosexuals" in the modern sense. But then, a great many and perhaps a majority of 21st-century same-sexers also don't self-identify specifically as "homosexual." Katz takes pains to show that the social construction of eros proceeds in ways that are highly specific to time and place, and that the labels "hetero," "bi," and "homo," because they are relatively recent constructs, cannot be applied to an era when people simply didn't think in those terms. Still, one doesn't have to travel backward in time to find alien ideas of sexual self. Right now in Afghanistan, for example, Pashtun warlords fondling their catamites no doubt would laugh out loud or perhaps reach for a dagger if someone called them "homosexuals." But if the warlord doesn't think he's engaging in homosexuality, can we? And if, somehow, we can't, what the hell has gone wrong? Why can't we identify and characterize that behavior as homosex ual--even if the participants either didn't know the word, or would have rejected it outright?

Katz does have a point: when it comes to sexual identity, historical context is everything, and contexts have changed enormously over the last two centuries--over the last two decades. Does the fact that men in the 19th century didn't think of themselves as "being homosexual" in the modern sense mean that their sexual attractions are completely inaccessible to us today? Isn't there some kind of ancient song at work here capable of linking us to men who lived 200 or 2,000 years ago?

Katz argues at length that the "old," 20th-century view of homosexuality posits an essential sameness over time, a basic homo homogeneity from early civilization to the present. This is a huge mistake, he asserts--and he's surely on firm ground when it comes to categories of sexual identity. The question is, does the social construction of identity rule out any possible links between homosexual behavior of the past and present? Consider the question of sexual arousal, of what makes something a tarn-on or a turn-off. Can't reasonable people speculate about neurological or developmental processes in the human brain that play out today much as they did when dicks got hard in earliest Mesopotamia? It seems safe to assume that Katz would reply with a resounding no.

In 1975 C. A. Tripp published a book titled The Homosexual Matrix that drew on Dr. Tripp's experience as a therapist and on his close association with the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. (Full disclosure: I am currently working on a book with Dr. Tripp.) To simplify hugely, Tripp elaborated a theory of sexual attraction that applies to both hetero- and homosexuality and does so across cultures. One of its key concepts involves a process whereby admiration for the physical and mental qualities of another person acquires an erotic charge. Especially if sexually validated, the process focuses desire more and more narrowly on the "type" of person who exemplifies the admired qualities. Tripp argues convincingly that this plays out in fundamentally the same way whether it's a boy digging a girl, a girl digging a girl, or even a cowboy digging--oh, what the hell, his horse. There are "rules of attraction," the consistency of which Tripp demonstrates with specific examples from a wide variety of historical, anthropolog ical, ethnographical, and sex-research studies. Tripp does not argue that homosexual behavior throughout history has emanated from some "essential sameness." On the contrary, his theory of sexual attraction posits a giant range of possible outcomes with wildly different meanings for the participants. Today's club kid may not have much in common with an adolescent noble of the Roman Empire, but the mechanics of his arousal are the same regardless of the object of arousal--and regardless of whether he's "supposed" to be aroused by that type of person.

Love Stories is a valuable book and often a fun read. The chapter on Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed contains the best scholarship to date on the relationship between those two men, and includes a sensitive discussion of the truly remarkable correspondence they maintained. Katz also convincingly argues a point that, incredibly, has been wholly missed by mainstream Lincoln scholarship: the reason for Lincoln's nervous break-down in January of 1841. The standard interpretation has been that Lincoln couldn't deal with the breaking of his engagement to Mary Todd. As Katz carefully makes clear, Lincoln almost certainly fell apart because on New Year's Day--the "fatal first," in Lincoln's words--Speed announced his intention to sell his store and move back to Kentucky, in effect announcing that he was leaving Lincoln.

Katz in general is extremely good at explaining why, when it comes to the construction of sexual identity, vocabulary is all-important. His central point is that if you don't have a name for something, you tend to be oblivious to its existence. Hence the significance of the "naming" of homosexuality. As long as same-sex sexuality was described by terms like "sodomy," "crime against nature," and so on, the general public could assume that such practices were confined to a tiny number of miscreants. But with the mutation of sodomite into homosexual, suddenly a whole new class of human being materialized, requiring a new, fearful vigilance. One fascinating implication that Katz doesn't spell out and might well reject: before the "homosexual" burst upon the scene as a threat to public order, there may have been, on a per-capita basis, lots more same-sex sex than there is today. This is because authorities weren't policing such activities, indeed didn't know how to recognize them or, perhaps, didn't even know that they existed at all.