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DECEMBER 1980-HIGH GEAR Page 7
New book about gay history indispensable
By R. Woodward
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century--By John Boswell. 424 pages. University of Chicago Press. $27.50. For gay men and women the appearance of this book is probably the most important publishing event of the 1980's.
"Knowledge is power" is not a poetic exaggeration. It is the literal statement of a fact. People who are isolated and ignorant are more easily controlled and mistreated.
This book puts the reader in touch with more of the ideas, the feelings, and the strengths of gays throughout 2000 years of Western history than any other book ever written. The sheer amount of information that the author has been able to gather, assimilate, and arrange is an astonishment and a revelation.
(Boswell is able to cite sources he has read in 12 different languages, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Catalan, Aragonese, Provencal, and Old Icelandic.)
More than any other scholarly work that has yet appeared. Boswell's book inspires and obliges respect for lives of gays as an historical topic--from nongays as well as gays, and from the general reading public as well as from academics.
Unlike most scholarly types who go through huge masses of specialized data, Boswell has a writing style that the general reader will have little trouble accepting as clear, intelligible English. Most readers will not find it hard to see for themselves that Boswell's findings and information contain fascinating challenges to widely-held assumptions.
Boswell's book anticipates and handily disposes of so many different hand-me-down objections to gays, that anyone who has read it is likely to be entertained at how unusually easy it is to see people trying to ignore, dismiss. belittle, or perhaps even suppress it without considering what it says.
The history of Europeans clinging to anti-gay notions is the history of people making fools of themselves (quite often dangerous rather than funny ones). Those who try to argue with
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Boswell's assertions, which ne has based on painstaking research and careful analysis, who don't try to move beyond the confines of their idle preconceptions, will be proving the existence of the fool's tradition and setting themselves up as conspicious examples of those who blindly follow it.
One of the chief virtues of Boswell's book is that it is generally restrained and objective, despite all of the gathering.comparing, and synthesizing he was obliged to do. (It is, of course, impossible for any work covering such a vast topic to be absolutely free of factual errors and author's Diases). ·
What it's about
Boswell's book is a heavily documented demonstration of something that many gays have realized for a long time--that Christian doctrine is not the cause of intolerance against gays but an excuse for it. Europeans did not become intolerant of gays because someone discovered anti-gay passages in the Bible: they have seemed to find anti-gay passages in the Bible
because their preconceptions convinced them that they had to be there. The same approach to the Bible used to justify anti-gay prejudice has also been used to justify slavery and anti-semitism.
Boswell examines in detail anti-gay passages in writings of Augustine. Chrysostom, and Aquinas, and finds these writers basically conforming to popular prejudices around them. Boswell shows that their great efforts to devise systems of logic, in which anti-gay ideas are inevitable, conclusions which follow from their leading ideas, are noticably inconsistent and at times blatantly circular. Thomas Aquinas, for example, defines homosexuality as being immoral because it is unnatural, after defining what is, unnatural as being what is immoral.
Indispensable for defending yourself against conservative and fundamentalist types is Boswell's detailed linguistic analysis of passages in the Bible which have been taken to condemn homosexuality.
Boswell shows that what the Bible says literally it does not usually say in English..
From John Boswell's book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Gay People In Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century: On gays and the Bible:
"The belief that the hostility of the Christian Scriptures to homosexuality caused Western society to turn against it should not require any elaborate refutation. The very same books which are thought to condemn homosexual acts condemn hypocrisy in the most strident terms, and on greater authority: and yet Western society did not create any social taboos against hypocrisy, did not claim that hypocrites were "unnatural," did not segregate them into an oppressed minority, did not enact laws punishing their sin with castration or death. No Christian state, in fact, has passed laws against hypocrisy per se, despite its continual and explicit condemnation by Jesus and the church. In the very same list which has been claimed to exclude from the Kingdom of heaven those guilty of homosexual practices, the greedy are also excluded. And yet no medievel states burned the greedy at the stake. Obviously some factors beyond biblical precedent were at work in late medieval states which licensed prostitutes but burned gay people: by any objective standard, there is far more objurgation of prostitution in the New Testament than of homosexuality...
"The New Testament takes no demonstrable position on homosexuality. To suggest that Paul's references to excesses of sexual indulgence involving homosexual behavior are indicative of a general position in opposition to same-sex eroticism is as unfounded as arguing that his condemnation of drunkenness implies opposition to the drinking of wine. At the very most, the effect of Christian Scripture toward homosexuality could be described as moot. The most judicious historical perspective might be that it had no effect at all. The source of anti-gay feelings among Christians must be sought elsewhere."
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especially in some of the most commonly used translations.
There is no word in the Bible that can be accurately translated as "homosexuality." The word and the general concept that goes with it does not exist in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, despite many individual words for specific acts. Classifying people according to the gender of the people towards whom they feel. the strongest sexual attraction is
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a peculiar notion that has not occurred to most people throughout most of history.
The Bible contains many, words whose meanings are uncertain. An example important for gays is the Greek word arsenokoltal which is frequently translated as a phrase indicating gay sex in general in that passage from Romans which Falwell (Cont'd on next page)
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