Absent is the initiatory pedagogical aspect evident in Greek culture where an older man took a youth under his wing to teach him about life while enjoying him sexually, and accented is the social distinction between free and not free, citizen and not citizen, active and non-active.
33
This binary construct existed for dual reasons. First, it maintained a class distinction that hindered underclass men from succeeding at anything but slave labor and prostitution, so that the riches could reside with the most fortunate families and the Church, which continued to make money from taxing the slave trade. Freedom in the Roman Empire came only with birth, capital, or mercy. Second, it rationalized men’s sexual behavior, in this case their same-sex behavior.
Active and passive sex roles were becoming rigorously defined as respectively masculine or feminine, and as Christian doctrine was establishing itself, culturally expected and imposed sexual roles played the leads in a morality play scripted to polarize gender and sexual relations. The proponents of new, procreative sexual laws codifying chastity for the unmarried presumably intended to increase the strength and productivity of the empire; encouraging coupling would, as the theory goes, increase the chances that children would be cared for. This tenet backfired, however, resulting in overpopulation and scores of abandoned illegitimate children, who were often fated to become prostitutes as they entered young adulthood. Again, I quote Dauphin:
Christianity’s condemnation of any type of non-procreative sexual intercourse brought about the outlawing of homosexuality in the Western Empire in the third century and consequently of male prostitution. In 390, an edict of Emperor Theodosius I threatened with the death penalty the forcing or selling of males into prostitution. Behind this edict lay not a disgust of prostitution, but the fact that the body of a man would be used in homosexual intercourse in the same way as that of a woman. And that was unacceptable, for had St. Augustine not stated that “the body of a man is as superior to that of a woman, as the soul is to the body?”
34
As a clear byproduct of this admixture of an ancient sexism, a legislated retreat from sex for pleasure, and a sharpened definition of gender roles, homophobia emerged in Rome. This unfortunate development prefigured the police brutality, social stigma, and the resultant danger that would characterize Western male sex work to the present day. Shortly after its engraving, Theodosius’s decree was glowingly enforced:
In application of Theodosius’ edict in Rome, the prostitutes were dragged out of the male brothels and burnt alive under the eyes of a cheering mob.
35
Beginning in 600 CE, female Roman sex workers were legally respected. They were no longer grouped with male workers and were semantically differentiated. For instance, female sex workers were termed
heterae
, not
sphintria
. However, sexually undeveloped girls could be compared to passive boy prostitutes in a unique linguistic transgenderism. Dauphin tells of a girl from Constantinople named Theodora, who became Emperor Justinian’s consort:
[She] was known to Syrian monks as “Theodora who came from the brothel”. Her career proves that Byzantine courtesans like the Ancient Greek
hetairai
could aspire to influential roles in high political spheres. Long before her puberty, Theodora worked in a Constantinopolitan brothel where, according to the court-historian Procopius of Caesarea’s
Secret History
, she was hired at a cheap rate by slaves as all she could do then was to act the part of a “male prostitute.”
36
Dauphin’s analysis raises questions about the merit of the
meritrix
in ancient Rome and Byzantium. She suggests that abandoned children supplied the sex work market, quoting Clement of Alexandria’s plea to deadbeat dads: “How many fathers, forgetting the children they abandoned, unknowingly have sexual relations with a son who is a prostitute or a daughter become a harlot?”
37
Clement provided the first real indication of transgender sex work by describing a custom at slave auctions where boys were “‘beautified’ to attract potential buyers.”
38
By all indications, male prostitutes in the Roman Empire were generally young abandoned slaves with little career choice—a change from their status in the republic, when they at least could have aspired to become high-class courtesans. The need for Romans to create and maintain a separate class of citizenry who existed solely for physical and sexual slavery resulted from an almost totalitarian empirical rule distinguished by its strict Christian doctrine. Several decrees were enforced to further foment, and profit from, this class, including the taboo against same-sex male intimacy with anyone other than slaves, the continuing taxes on female prostitution, and edicts like that issued by Constantine I in 394 CE, which allowed poverty-stricken parents to sell their children.
Although by this time illegal in many regions, male sex work continued in parts of the Roman Empire into the sixth century CE, especially in the eastern regions, which approached India. Dauphin reports that
male prostitution remained legal in the
pars orientalis
of the empire. From the reign of Constantine I, an imperial tax was levied on homosexual prostitution, this constituting a legal safeguard for those who could therefore engage in it “with impunity”. Evagrius emphasises in his
Ecclesiastical History
that no emperor ever omitted to collect this tax. Its suppression at the beginning of the sixth century removed imperial protection from homosexual prostitution. In 533, Justinian placed all homosexual relations under the same category as adultery and subjected both to death.
39
For 200 years, Roman interpretation of Christian doctrine had given men who had sex with other men an out; there were some cases where the law did not or would not apply, namely in cases of slavery. Sex exchange between men had thus become distorted into a solidly remunerative, marginally sanctified act of exploitation. This metamorphosis freed freeborn Roman adult males to act as gods:
The erotic ideal of Ganymede, the beautiful shepherd who willingly allowed himself to be the sexual plaything of the king of gods in exchange for immortality, is an apt metaphor for the Roman conception of the male prostitute. Although morally stigmatized by his profession, and lacking many of the legal rights of other Roman men, the male prostitute performed a necessary function within society. He was defined by his participation in the framework of public sexuality.
40
But Roman men were not gods, and street sex workers were mortal. With psychosocial forces so disparate, it is no wonder that Roman male sex workers were torched en masse, no longer shepherds but certainly scapegoats.
Wakashudo:
Japan in the Bloom of Modernity
During the 17
th
century, and probably for centuries beforehand, pederasty was revered in Japan. Younger males and women were, as in ancient Greece and pre-modern Rome, considered similarly available and pleasurable sexual partners for Japanese men. Examining a collection of 40 short stories written by Ihara Saikaku and collected in
The Great Mirror of Male Love
in 1687, Paul Gordon Schalow writes that “male homosexual relations were accepted as a normal component of male sexuality and followed established social conventions, though the conventions differed when prostitution was involved.”
41
While noncommercial sex between males was practiced among Buddhist priests and
chigo
apprentices, and samurai warriors and their apprentices, kabuki theater offered spaces for transactional sex in early modern Japan.
Just as Greek and Roman societies differentiated between commercial and noncommercial male-male sexual expression, relationships between samurai warriors and their protégés differed in some ways from those of the
kabuki wakashu
, or male actors/prostitutes and their clients. There was significant economic parity between partners in samurai apprenticeships, and the relationship was characterized as a striving for
ikiji
, defined by Schalow as “shared masculine pride.”
42
Schalow compares depictions of mercenary and nonmercenary
wakashudo
in Saikaku’s work:
The narratives on kabuki youths often focused on the youth’s transcendence of the financial transaction and his entry into the emotional realm of
ikiji
, [but] this shift usually required that he abandon prostitution …
ikiji
frequently represented the ennobling potential of the samurai ethic on the townsman’s world of kabuki, but a few narratives showed noncommercial relations based on shared masculine pride developing between merchant and priest and kabuki youth.
43
Kabuki actors in training who wished to remain prostitutes could still aspire to
nasake
, a sensitivity to their clients’ emotional suffering. Schalow quotes Saikaku:
Professional
wakashu
are the finest. Other youths make vows of love from mutual feelings of affection and give their lives to their lovers in return for support in a crisis, but these kabuki
wakashu
have no such pleasures. They must make themselves available to their patrons from the very first meeting before they have even had time to get acquainted. Such love (
nasake
) far surpasses the attention of other youths.
44
While this emotional structure was restrictive, depriving male sex workers of more intimate male bonding, it was elastic enough to allow for love to develop. Legally, kabuki and other male youth were fair game until the latter part of the 17
th
century, when the Tokugawa government passed edicts that prohibited male-male intimacies that crossed class boundaries. However, this only resulted in maintaining samurai apprenticeships as a form of ikiji and preventing samurai from consorting with kabuki.
By maintaining economic parity between sexually intimate males, early modern Japan provided two behavioral modalities based entirely on caste. Same-sex relationships between top-caste samurai were seen as a male-bonding rite of early adulthood, while similar across-caste relationships were perceived as a form of prostitution that, though comparatively less desirable, was legal, common, and allowed for the expression of love.
Doing Evil: Male Sex Work in Preindustrial Europe
Germanic feudal society demarcated class structure into masters and servants, a sublimated sex dynamic that undoubtedly created an atmosphere of continued sexual exploitation by the very rich. In Italy, meanwhile, same-sex relations between males of similar caste began to take on the term “brotherhood.” Much like the commitment ceremony of today, same-sex partnerships could be formal or informal, depending perhaps on their community’s urbanity.
45
Boswell argues that these unions were only partnerships or brotherhoods, and that any remuneration, such as the sharing of property and estate, was secondary to the relationship. As an example of such relationships, Boswell notes the story of St. Peter Ordinski, who ran away from home as a teenager, cofounded a church, and met the Prince of the Tatars, who gave Peter a dowry and ate every meal with him. (Peter is reported to have burst into tears when learning of the prince’s arranged marriage to a high-class Tatar woman.)
46
As new laws were enacted in medieval and pre-modern Europe, they included edicts that disrupted the vocational options of the male sex worker. In many countries, the threat of capital punishment continued to overshadow sex between males, and legal guidebooks such as
The Institutes
and
The Eclogues
contained prohibitions against boys entering the priesthood “if their ‘vessel’ was ‘broken.’”
47
It is clear, however, that state codes did not stop male sexual commerce from occurring in major European cities. In late medieval Italy, where 15 percent of children were abandoned, young unemployed men roamed the cobblestones and became
bardassas
, a word derived from the Arabic word for “slave,” which connotes male prostitutes playing passive sexual roles, and “model-catamites” for artists.
48
Meanwhile, proto-gay-rights literature began to draw distinctions between homosexual sex for pleasure and for money, reaching back to the codes of ancient Greece and Rome and sharing the philosophy of the wakashudo. Describing homosexuality in Florence in the 1600s, Michael Rocke quotes from
Alcibiades the Schoolboy
, a pro-homosexual “dialogue”: