a four-part series by Mark Salzwedel
Part One: Avoiding Execution
Queer Rights up to 1900
Minorities have often been used as a target of fear-mongering, and with homosexuals comprising only five to ten percent of the population worldwide, they were easy targets, often used as props in various quests for power. With a minority status that could be hidden, camouflaged, or misdirected however, gay, bi, and transgender individuals could often avoid discrimination if they were extremely careful. But that also meant that the LGBT threat was perceived as insidious, possibly much worse or much closer at hand than common, decent people could imagine. That meant that leaders could ramp up paranoia and promise to take that fear away, if they got what they wanted.
In more primitive cultures the difference of LGBT individuals sometimes led to a sort of reverence, as with some Native American tribes like the Zuni, where “two-spirit” people were thought, because of their male and female attributes, to be a bridge between our world and the spirit world, serving as a special type of shaman or seer.
In some of the early dynasties of China, where segregation of the sexes was more common, homosexuals were often tolerated, used as political operatives, and inspired stories, like the one that got them their nickname, “cut sleeves.” During the Han dynasty (200 BC to 200 AD), Emperor Ai was said to be so respectful of his male lover, he cut off part of his sleeve to leave bed without waking Dongxian, who was still asleep on top of it.
More often through much of world history, the difference of LGBT people was seen as a sickness, an evil, or a moral weakness. The Roman historian Tacitus reported homosexuals being strangled and dumped into or drowned alive in swamps in first century Northern Europe.
With the arrival of the Christian Church in Europe a couple of centuries later, the struggling religious sect was happy to establish itself by giving the local political leaders an excuse for their antigay policies. Sodomy was established as a sin through a misinterpretation of the story in Genesis of Sodom and Gomorrah, and in order to let heterosexual couples who enjoyed the same type of sexual act off the hook, the term “sodomite” was coined, to refer to males for whom sodomy was their only option for sexual intercourse. Much later, the term was applied to female couples, even though the act it originally referred to was not part of their repertoire.
Indeed the potentially higher distribution of functionally, if not openly, bisexual individuals, estimated at 30-40% of the world population, provided additional fodder for the Church’s attempts to brand this aspect of sexuality as a moral sin. If bisexuals could have opposite-sex partners, their same-sex attraction could more easily be perceived as a weakness that needed to be excised.
And the existence of homosexuals in their midst made bisexuals more worried. They might be more easily tempted into sodomy, and heterosexuals could hold up the struggles of their bisexual friends as evidence that gays were somehow indoctrinating or deceiving their otherwise healthy and normal kith and kin and had to be stopped.
The resulting struggle was far from today’s pursuit of equal rights. It was trying not to be executed for whom one loved. Although 12 countries (including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Sudan) still impose death penalties for homosexuality, the execution of gays and transgender people was much more common in the past.
Cases like Prussia in the 18th century, where the death penalty for sodomy was abolished, were rare. Though small pockets of tolerance appeared thereafter, it wasn’t until the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the ascendance of medicine and psychology that LGBT identity moved from being a death sentence to being a disease state.
Mark Salzwedel
917-318-3368
markvonsalzwedel@gmail.com
The Hidden History of LGBT People Part Two: Damaged Brains– The Pathology of Queerness 1900-1960