BY PHILIP JASON

Homosexuals

in a related culture: a brief investigation

INVESTIGATORS, both qualified and and otherwise, have long debated the problem of the origin of homosexual behavior and its existence in every time and clime. Indeed, this is one facet of the whole problem of the in• tegration of human behavior in partic ular social systems. Of course, any social system is the outcome in large part of man's attempt to channel his behavior pattern into an orderly mold, but the mold itself is often as much a reflection of his ideals as it is of his objective state of being.

Thus, in the sexual sphere, as in others, a given culture projects its ethical strictures upon individual bebavior – conditions it, it were as regardless of whether those ethical strictures are in fact consonant with innate behavior. The proof of this is in our own Western civilization, imbued as it is with the Christian ideal – ba. sically anti-sexual – and actually prac· ticing an unwritten code at complete variance with this ideal. It may therefore be of some interest to note how a kindred culture complex, related both in time and geography to our own, has ventured to deal with the homosexual facet of human behavior. This parallel culture complex, that of the Balkans and the Near East, comprising a mosaic of peoples and creeds, has often been called our (win.

A twin it is in origin, but a twin that was frustrated in its course by

historic factors and which is now becoming increasingly exposed to the induence of Western European technology and ideas. It shares with us the heritage of Greco-Roman civilization and Judeo-Christian theology. Its dom. inant religion, Islam, is a variety springing from the same Old Testament origins. Its society, when untouched by contemporary influences, seems to be somewhat the distorted image of our own medieval past.

Regarding female homosexuality, little material is available, although harem life in the overstocked female menageries of the ruling classes, a thing of the past save in, perhaps, Saudi Arabia, was not without it. But if

was furtive thing, resembling nothing so much as that found in our prisons, where it is the only outlet besides masturbation available. Sultans, after all, had to conduct the af fairs of state and lead armies in wars, and an army of wives, imprisoned and guarded by eunuchs, had to make the best of a situation.

Among recorded instances of female homosexuality in Turkey in the days of the Ottoman Empire's height is that set down in 1694 by Busbecq, the French ambassador to the Porte, who relates in his "Four Epistles Concerning the Embassy Into Turkey" the story of an elderly woman who fell in love with a girl at the baths. She dressed as a man, hired a house near

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the home of the girl's father and made Overtures to the family for the girl's hand in marriage. The unsuspecting father agreed, but after the marriage the girl went before the authorities and denounced the imposture. Brought to judgment, the woman replied to her judges with a brave if pathetic gesture. "'Away, sir," she said in justify ing herself, "you do not know the force of love and God grant you never may." She was afterwards ordered strangled and thrown into the Bos. porus.

In our own society it is usual for female homosexuality to suffer lesser penalties than corresponding male acts. While female attachments were as heavily concealed in the East as they have been elsewhere, it was the rare female caught who suffered the more severe punishment. Punishable in theory, the male homosexual rarely fell under such censure. Poets sang of their beloved boys and the literature of the Near East treated homosexual acts as a matter of commonly ac cepted fact.

Beginning with the pre-Islamic poetic fragments and including the Persian and Turkish poets who wrote in the most glorious periods of the Moguls, the Seljuks and the Ottomans, we find substantial homosexual homosexual content. Unfortunately, honest translations from their works are rare. English translators from Islamic languages, after all, have all their precedents in Victorian times when homosexuality was, at very best, "the love that dares not name itself." For example, the most often quoted Persian quatrain in English is Omar Khayyam-Fitzgerald's

"llere with a loaf of bread.

a flask of wine, a book of verse And thou, beside me, singing in the wilderness

and wilderness is paradise enow."

A modern orientalist, in the notes that precede his own translation of Omar. points Out that Fitzgerald's ambiguous "thou" in the original is a pretty youth, which the Englishman explains as in keeping with the Persian poetic taste." This particular translator, Dr. Arthur J Arberry, however, preserves Fitzgerald's ambiguity in his own text (see Arberry, A. J.. Litt.D., F.B.A., Omar Khayyam, a New Version Based on Recent Discoveries, Yale University Press, 1952, p.22).

This may be very neat poetically. but we are here given an example of why some oriental poets we think we know well, we really know not at all unless we are gifted with the ability to read them in the original.

It was not exclusive male homosex. uality, however, that had struck the foreigner resident in the Near East so forcibly as the place that homosexuality had in the overall sexual life. The Moslem male, as a rule, re. garded his diversions with other males with the attitude that variety is the spice of life. In the past, it was not infrequent that one found boys kept in noble harems for this reason. In this, perhaps, the Near Eastern Moslem is closer to Greco-Roman social atti tudes than to our own contemporary outlook.

An example is provided by the hist orical personage of Ali Pasha, Lion of Yannina, who was better known in the West than his liss distinguished co-Pashas in the Turkish Empire be cause of his political position. He was the virtually independent monarch of what is now northwestern Greece and southern Albania in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Numbers of foreigners, including Lord Byron and Baron Broughton (John Camm Hob house), visited him and left accounts. A modern commentator, Osbert Lancaster, in his Classical Landscape with Figures (London 1947. p. 170), drawing upon these accounts, notes the following

"Singularly benign in appearance, with kindly, twinkling blue eyes and a long white beard, exquisitely court●ous in manner, foreign visitors to his court, who included among their num ber Byron, Hobhouse and Cockerell, were hard put, despite the evidence provided by the cornice of freshly severed heads which formed the origInal and regularly renewed decoration of the principal gateway of his palace, to credit the deplorable tales which circulated of his fantastic cruelty and ruthlessness. (Owing to the equivocal appearance of the numerous youths who were constantly in attendance on their master, curlous rumors as to the ambiguous character of his private life were less easily discounted, even by the resolutely unsophisticated Hob house.)"

Stoyan Christowe, in his modern fictionalized narrative of Ali's life, 9