While Aquinas did not write much about same-sex sexual relations, he did write at length about various sex acts as sins. For Aquinas, sexuality that was within the bounds of marriage and which helped to further what he saw as the distinctive goods of marriage, mainly love, companionship, and legitimate offspring, was permissible, and even good. Aquinas did not argue that procreation was a necessary part of moral or just sex; married couples could enjoy sex without the motive of having children, and sex in marriages where one or both partners is sterile perhaps because the woman is postmenopausal is also potentially just given a motive of expressing love.
For example, a Thomist could embrace same-sex marriage, and then apply the same reasoning, simply seeing the couple as a reproductively sterile, yet still fully loving and companionate union. Aquinas, in a significant move, adds a requirement that for any given sex act to be moral it must be of a generative kind. The only way that this can be achieved is via vaginal intercourse. That is, since only the emission of semen in a vagina can result in natural reproduction, only sex acts of that type are generative, even if a given sex act does not lead to reproduction, and even if it is impossible due to infertility.
The consequence of this addition is to rule out the possibility, of course, that homosexual sex could ever be moral even if done within a loving marriage , in addition to forbidding any non-vaginal sex for opposite-sex married couples.
What is the justification for this important addition? This question is made all the more pressing in that Aquinas does allow that how broad moral rules apply to individuals may vary considerably, since the nature of persons also varies to some extent. Unfortunately, Aquinas does not spell out a justification for this generative requirement. The first is that sex acts that involve either homosexuality, heterosexual sodomy, or which use contraception, frustrate the purpose of the sex organs, which is reproductive.
It has, however, come in for sharp attack see Weitham, , and the best recent defenders of a Thomistic natural law approach are attempting to move beyond it e. If their arguments fail, of course, they must allow that some homosexual sex acts are morally permissible even positively good , although they would still have resources with which to argue against casual gay and straight sex. Although the specifics of the second sort of argument offered by various contemporary natural law theorists vary, they possess common elements Finnis, ; George, a.
As Thomists, their argument rests largely upon an account of human goods. The two most important for the argument against homosexual sex though not against homosexuality as an orientation which is not acted upon, and hence in this they follow official Catholic doctrine; see George, a, ch.
Personal integration, in this view, is the idea that humans, as agents, need to have integration between their intentions as agents and their embodied selves. Hence, natural law theorists respond that sexual union in the context of the realization of marriage as an important human good is the only permissible expression of sexuality. Natural law theorists, if they want to support their objection to homosexual sex, have to emphasize procreation.
If, for example, they were to place love and mutual support for human flourishing at the center, it is clear that many same-sex couples would meet this standard. Hence their sexual acts would be morally just. There are, however, several objections that are made against this account of marriage as a central human good. Sex in an opposite-sex marriage where the partners know that one or both of them are sterile is not done for procreation.
Yet surely it is not wrong. Why, then, is homosexual sex in the same context a long-term companionate union wrong Macedo, ? The natural law rejoinder is that while vaginal intercourse is a potentially procreative sex act, considered in itself though admitting the possibility that it may be impossible for a particular couple , oral and anal sex acts are never potentially procreative, whether heterosexual or homosexual George, a.
But is this biological distinction also morally relevant, and in the manner that natural law theorists assume? Natural law theorists, in their discussions of these issues, seem to waver. On the one hand, they want to defend an ideal of marriage as a loving union wherein two persons are committed to their mutual flourishing, and where sex is a complement to that ideal.
Yet that opens the possibility of permissible gay sex, or heterosexual sodomy, both of which they want to oppose. Then, when accused of being reductive, they move back to the broader ideal of marriage. Natural law theory, at present, has made significant concessions to mainstream liberal thought.
In contrast certainly to its medieval formulation, most contemporary natural law theorists argue for limited governmental power, and do not believe that the state has an interest in attempting to prevent all moral wrongdoing. They also argue against same sex marriage Bradley, ; George, b. There have been some attempts, however, to reconcile natural law theory and homosexuality see, for example, Lago, ; Goldstein, While maintaining the central aspects of natural law theory and its account of basic human goods, they typically either argue that marriage itself is not a basic good Lago , or that the sort of good it is, when understood in a less narrow, dogmatic fashion, is such that same-sex couples can enjoy it.
With the rise of the gay liberation movement in the post-Stonewall era, overtly gay and lesbian perspectives began to be put forward in politics, philosophy and literary theory.
Initially these often were overtly linked to feminist analyses of patriarchy e. Yet in the late s and early s queer theory was developed, although there are obviously important antecedents which make it difficult to date it precisely.
Sticking with the example used above, of a specific conceptualization of lesbian identity, it denigrates women who are sexually and emotionally attracted to other women, yet who do not fit the description. What may be of utmost importance, for example, for a black lesbian is her lesbianism, rather than her race. Many gays and lesbians of color attacked this approach, accusing it of re-inscribing an essentially white identity into the heart of gay or lesbian identity Jagose, Such a view, however, largely because of arguments developed within poststructuralism, seemed increasingly untenable.
The key figure in the attack upon identity as ahistorical is Michel Foucault. In a series of works he set out to analyze the history of sexuality from ancient Greece to the modern era , , Although the project was tragically cut short by his death in , from complications arising from AIDS, Foucault articulated how profoundly understandings of sexuality can vary across time and space, and his arguments have proven very influential in gay and lesbian theorizing in general, and queer theory in particular Spargo, ; Stychin, One of the reasons for the historical review above is that it helps to give some background for understanding the claim that sexuality is socially constructed, rather than given by nature.
Although the gender of the partner was more important in the medieval than in the ancient view, the broader theological framework placed the emphasis upon a sin versus refraining-from-sin dichotomy. It is difficult to perceive a common, natural sexuality expressed across these three very different cultures.
The examples can be pushed much further by incorporating anthropological data outside of the Western tradition Halperin, ; Greenberg, Yet even within the narrower context offered here, the differences between them are striking. The assumption in ancient Greece was that men less is known about Greek attitudes towards women can respond erotically to either sex, and the vast majority of men who engaged in same-sex relationships were also married or would later become married.
Yet the contemporary understanding of homosexuality divides the sexual domain in two, heterosexual and homosexual, and most heterosexuals cannot respond erotically to their own sex.
In saying that sexuality is a social construct, these theorists are not saying that these understandings are not real. Since persons are also constructs of their culture in this view , we are made into those categories. Hence today persons of course understand themselves as straight or gay or perhaps bisexual , and it is very difficult to step outside of these categories, even once one comes to see them as the historical constructs they are.
Instead it is purely relational, standing as an undefined term that gets its meaning precisely by being that which is outside of the norm, however that norm itself may be defined. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. By lacking any essence, queer does not marginalize those whose sexuality is outside of any gay or lesbian norm, such as sado-masochists.
Finally, it incorporates the insights of poststructuralism about the difficulties in ascribing any essence or non-historical aspect to identity. This central move by queer theorists, the claim that the categories through which identity is understood are all social constructs rather than given to us by nature, opens up a number of analytical possibilities.
For example, queer theorists examine how fundamental notions of gender and sex which seem so natural and self-evident to persons in the modern West are in fact constructed and reinforced through everyday actions, and that this occurs in ways that privilege heterosexuality Butler, , The fluidity of categories created through queer theory even opens the possibility of new sorts of histories that examine previously silent types of affections and relationships Carter, Another critical perspective opened up by a queer approach, although certainly implicit in those just referred to, is especially important.
Since most anti-gay and lesbian arguments rely upon the alleged naturalness of heterosexuality, queer theorists attempt to show how these categories are themselves deeply social constructs. An example helps to illustrate the approach. In an essay against gay marriage, chosen because it is very representative, James Q.
In contrast, he puts forward loving, monogamous marriage as the natural condition of heterosexuality. Heterosexuality, in his argument, is an odd combination of something completely natural yet simultaneously endangered. One is born straight, yet this natural condition can be subverted by such things as the presence of gay couples, gay teachers, or even excessive talk about homosexuality. If gayness is radically different, it is legitimate to suppress it. It is a common move in queer theory to bracket, at least temporarily, issues of truth and falsity Halperin, Instead, the analysis focuses on the social function of discourse.
Since heterosexuality is the natural condition, it is a place that is spoken from but not inquired into. In contrast, homosexuality is the aberration and hence it needs to be studied but it is not an authoritative place from which one can speak. By virtue of this heterosexual privilege, Wilson is allowed the voice of the impartial, fair-minded expert. Yet, as the history section above shows, there are striking discontinuities in understandings of sexuality, and this is true to the point that, according to queer theorists, we should not think of sexuality as having any particular nature at all.
Through undoing our infatuation with any specific conception of sexuality, the queer theorist opens space for marginalized forms of sexuality, and thus of ways of being more generally. The insistence that we must investigate the ways in which categories such as sexuality and orientation are created and given power through science and other cultural mechanisms has made queer theory appealing to scholars in a variety of disciplines.
Historians and sociologists have drawn on it, which is perhaps unsurprising given the role of historical claims about the social construction of sexuality. Queer theory has been especially influential in literary studies and feminist theory, even though the dividing lines between the latter and queer thinking is contested see Jagose, ; Marinucci, One of the most prominent scholars working in the area of gay and lesbian issues in constitutional law has also drawn on queer theory to advance his interrogation of the ways that US law privileges heterosexuality Eskridge, Scholars in postcolonial and racial analyses, ethnography, American studies, and other fields have drawn on the conceptual tools provided by queer theory.
Doubtless the French republican self-understanding, which is universalist and often hostile to movements that are multicultural in their bent, was a factor in the slow and often strenuously resisted importation of queer theoretical insights. Similarly, queer theory has also been on the margins in German philosophy and political philosophy.
In sum, it is fair to say that queer theory has had a greater impact in the Anglo-American world. Queer theory, however, has been criticized in a myriad of ways Jagose, One set of criticisms comes from theorists who are sympathetic to gay liberation conceived as a project of radical social change.
It desexualizes identity, when the issue is precisely about a sexual identity Jagose, A related criticism is that queer theory, since it refuses any essence or reference to standard ideas of normality, cannot make crucial distinctions.
How far does this extend? Greek homosexuality was like adolescent horseplay, frat-house initiations or prison rape. It was like male monkeys presenting rumps to their superiors This was also a time when Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape and its sequels were topping international bestseller lists.
The only difference was that these human apes had taken this universal gesture of sexual domination a little further than their primate cousins. There were problems with this neat theory, however. In the first place, there was little positive evidence to support it. It was not just that Dover's translations were sometimes simply wrong - the Greeks did not in fact go around saying "fuck you", as Housman, for one, could have told him - nor that the ancient Greeks talked of sex not as an act of aggression, but rather as a "conjoining" or "commingling" if a father dreams of having sex with his absent son it is auspicious, says one ancient writer, reassuringly, since it means they will soon be reunited.
The main problem was that the Greeks did not seem terribly concerned with the ins and outs of sexual positions at all, details which for Dover were critical. Like the Victorians, the Greeks were being coy, he suggested: their silence on the matter only proved its importance. All this lovey-doviness was simply a cover for their true anxiety about "homosexual submission". He decided he would have to supply his own more detailed texts, "translating" the innocent-sounding discussions in Plato's Symposium, for example, into something more graphic: "Acceptance of the teacher's thrusting penis between his thighs or in his anus is the fee which the pupil pays for good teaching".
Was it possible that the Greeks had got the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus so badly wrong, that a peculiarly same-sex-loving culture had simply chanced upon a passionate same-sex relationship at the heart of its foundational text?
Surely that was more than fortuitous. Indeed some lines in the Iliad had seemed so overheated to later generations that they had excised them as inauthentic additions, not because they indicated homosexual love, but because they implied a particularly degenerate and extreme kind of passion that was considered unworthy of the dignity of warriors and inappropriate to the grandeur of the epic genre.
And if Homer's Greeks knew nothing of homosexuality, how had it managed to spread so far and so fast and so variously in the space of a couple of generations? And then, of course, there was the question of the girls. How did lovely Wianthemis, Astaphis and Philulla fit into this gestural homosexuality of penetration and domination? What of Sappho and the lady-loving ladies of Lesbos?
All-in-all, Dover's solution caused more problems than it solved. So how do we begin to make sense of this truly extraordinary historical phenomenon, an entire culture turning noisily and spectacularly gay for hundreds of years? When I first embarked on the research for my book The Greeks and Greek Love I was not expecting any easy answers, but I did not expect it would be quite as hard as it turned out to be, and take so long as it ultimately did.
In fact, it was 10 years later that I finally felt ready to write a conclusion, and it was the longest chapter in the book. I started to think of the phenomenon as a great big Gordian knot at the heart of Greek culture, tying lots of things together but extremely difficult to unravel - "The knot was made from the smooth bark of the cornel tree, and neither its end nor its beginning was visible.
But the first lesson I learned about my own particular knot was to stop looking for a single neat solution to a homogeneous phenomenon. These revealed very different attitudes and employed very different practices: "We Athenians consider these things utterly reprehensible, but for the Thebans and Eleans they are normal. But there was more to it than that. The males of Elis, in particular, the guardians of Olympia - the holiest shrine in Greece - seem to have got it on together in a particularly "licentious" way.
Unfortunately none of our sources could bring himself to say what was so licentious about it: "I will not say it", "I pass over it". There are hints, however, that their sexual transactions were shockingly "straightforward" and did not involve any preliminary courting; and one particularly illustrious Elean, Phaedo, a member of the aristocracy, was said to have served as a male prostitute in his youth, "sitting in a cubicle", waiting to serve whoever walked in.
Was this a garbled allusion to the "sanctioned lust" of Elis? The "peculiar custom" of the Cretans, on the other hand, involved an abduction and a tug-of-war over a boy, a two-month-long hunting expedition, lavish gifts, the sacrifice of an ox and a great sacrificial banquet, at which the boy formally announced his acceptance or not of "the relationship". Thereafter he got to wear a special costume that announced to the rest of the community his new status as "famed".
Our evidence for this elaborate ritual comes from a general account of the Cretan "constitution". When the sources compare and contrast Athenian homosexuality with, say, Theban or Spartan homosexuality, they are not referring to undercover reportage - "My night spent with the Army of Lovers: The secrets of the Sacred Band revealed"; nor to surveys of contemporary attitudes - "Do you think it is A.
These local institutionalised practices covered all stages of same-sex loving, from courting to coupledom to sex. Athenian same-sex courting meant literally following a boy around or writing "so-and-so is beautiful" in a public place. Thousands of examples of such "kalos-acclamations" survive, signed by hundreds of different hands. And, in the archaic period at least, there seems to have been an equally formulaic sexual practice when one's wooing got a result - "Athenian homosex", what they called diamerion, or "between-the-thighs" sex, ie "frottage".
Spartan homosex, on the other hand, meant sex with one's cloak on: "everything except the dirty deed itself": a fragment from a vase shows the great Spartan hero Hyacinthus engaged in precisely this bizarre sexual act with his lover the winged wind-god Zephyr, hovering with him above the horizon. Was this what our well-informed source was alluding to when he claimed that the Spartan "lawgiver laid down that it was shameful to be seen to reach out to touch the body of a boy"?
Doubtless there was a great deal of same-sex loving on Crete, fumblings, fondnesses and passionately devoted relationships, that did not involve a tug-of-war, two months of hunting and the sacrifice of an ox. So we need to make a further distinction between "Cretan homo-sexuality"in all its customary, disruptive and expensive glory, which may have occurred only once or twice a month, and "homosexuality in Crete", the latter, by its very undisruptive and unspectacular nature, much more frequent, but also much more elusive and certainly very difficult now to reconstruct.
Another important principle was to recognise that the same words can be used to mean different things. This is especially important when we come to the question of age. Often "boy" pais refers specifically to the formal age-grade of Boys, ie those who have not yet been certified as 18, following two physical examinations, performed first by their local parish and then by the Council of Athens.
Those who failed this examination were sent "back to Boys", and the council fined the parish that had allowed his candidature to go ahead. In Athens these unders were vigorously protected, rather like the young women in a Jane Austen novel, although their younger sisters would have been expected to be married by the age of These were the Boys who were escorted to the gymnasium by the slave paidagogoi and followed around at a distance by a pack of admirers.
Only those in the age-grade above, "18" and "19", a group usually referred to as Striplings meirakia or Cadets neaniskoi , were allowed to exercise alongside them. But even they were forbidden from "mixing" with the Boys or even from "conversing" with them. A number of ancient sources testified to the existence of such strictures, but it was nice nevertheless when, in , an inscription from a Macedonian gymnasium confirmed them: "Concerning the Boys: none of the Cadets may enter among the Boys, nor chat to the Boys, otherwise the gymnasiarch shall fine and prevent anyone who does any of these things.
So far so consistent. The problem is that the sources can also use this same term "boy" more informally, to refer to the next age-grade up, ie that of the Striplings and Cadets, the unders, who were not so well-protected. Tomlinson had been prompted by what had been a big sex scandal of the day - in which a well-respected naval surgeon had been found to be engaging in homosexual acts. A court martial had ordered him to be hanged - but Tomlinson seemed unconvinced by the decision, questioning whether what the papers called an "unnatural act" was really that unnatural.
Tomlinson argued, from a religious perspective, that punishing someone for how they were created was equivalent to saying that there was something wrong with the Creator.
If there was an "inclination and propensity" for someone to be homosexual from an early age, he wrote, "it must then be considered as natural, otherwise as a defect in nature - and if natural, or a defect in nature; it seems cruel to punish that defect with death".
The diarist makes reference to being informed by others that homosexuality is apparent from an early age - suggesting that Tomlinson and his social circle had been talking about this case and discussing something that was not unknown to them.
Around this time, and also in West Yorkshire, a local landowner, Anne Lister, was writing a coded diary about her lesbian relationships - with her story told in the television series, Gentleman Jack.
But knowing what "ordinary people" really thought about such behaviour is always difficult - not least because the loudest surviving voices are usually the wealthy and powerful. What has excited academics is the chance to eavesdrop on an everyday farmer thinking aloud in his diary. An acceptance of homosexuality might have been expressed privately in aristocratic or philosophically radical circles - but this was being discussed by a rural worker.
Claire Pickering, library manager in Wakefield, says she imagines the single-minded Tomlinson speaking the words with a Yorkshire accent. He was a man with a "hungry mind", she says, someone who listened to a lot of people's opinions before forming his own conclusions.
The diary, presumably compiled after a hard day's work, was his way of being a writer and commentator when otherwise "that wasn't his station in life", she says. O'Keeffe says it shows ideas were "percolating through British society much earlier and more widely than we'd expect" - with the diary working through the debates that Tomlinson might have been having with his neighbours.
But these were still far from modern liberal views - and O'Keeffe says they can be extremely "jarring" arguments. If someone was homosexual by choice, rather than by nature, Tomlinson was ready to consider that they should still be punished - proposing castration as a more moderate option than the death penalty. O'Keeffe says discovering evidence of these kinds of debate has both "enriched and complicated" what we know about public opinion in this pre-Victorian era.
Prof Fara Dabhoiwala, from Princeton University in the US, an expert in the history of attitudes towards sexuality, describes it as "vivid proof" that "historical attitudes to same-sex behaviour could be more sympathetic than is usually presumed".
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