It is equally interesting to note that this homosexual practice is in no way associated with fetishism or cross-dressing, susceptible to subverting gender categories. Further, it is traditional that all young men engage in these practices for years, first in the role of “receiver” and then later as “giver”; these practices do not exclude relations with women or, later on, heterosexual
marriage
.The situation is thus very different from the Western concept of homosexuality as effeminate and devoid of heterosexual relations.
Sexual relations described by Herdt and other anthropologists follow precise rules in agreement with traditional rites and laws. In Melanesia at least, ritualized homosexual relations are usually based on age, whereby the younger one always plays the role of “receiver.” Herdt reminds us, however, that ritualized or not, this homosexuality always implies sexual excitation, at least for the “giver.” (By contrast, homosexual relations between equals are less common, and accounts of lesbian relations are rarer still.) This ritual homosexuality is not only tolerated, it is valorized as an essential means to produce a complete man. Under these conditions, homophobia as we know it does not appear in these societies.
Colonial & Post-Colonial Oceania
Then, the great explorers led the way for the Europeans to preside over Oceania. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the region was under the thumb of colonial powers, divided among England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and later Australia, Japan, Java, New Zealand, and the US. Europeans established colonial administrations, new laws (and particularly anti-sodomy ones), and religious missions. One of the first effects of the Europeanization was the impact of the missionaries’ homophobia on indigenous masculinity, particularly in places where ritual homosexuality had been highly valorized until then. Tribes and indigenous cultures suffered greatly from this intervention, which provoked irreversible changes. As a result, rather than abandon their ancient traditions, many clans started to conduct their initiation rites in secret and concealed their sacred objects from the invaders; even today, they maintain a total silence around the secret “affairs” of men and women, even in Australia.
This colonial heritage clearly appears in the institutions and laws of the countries of Oceania. Male homosexuality is now illegal in several countries where ritual homosexuality was practiced in times past, particularly Papua New Guinea. Paradoxically, homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia, which is the most populous Muslim state in the world, nor in Vanuatu or French Polynesia, where French law applies.
The last quarter of the twentieth century was an era of decolonization, reforms, and the dismantling of homophobic laws. Australia and New Zealand decriminalized homosexuality in 1975 and 1986 respectively, introduced laws against
discrimination
, and have equal opportunity policies with regard to gays and lesbians in the military and police force. However, although same-sex couples may now be recognized by law in New Zealand through civil unions, discrimination persists. In New Zealand, for instance, gay men are not allowed to give blood, and in Australia, same-sex commitment ceremonies do not constitute any legal semblance of marriage. Further, in spite of legislative advances, homophobic biases are still used in courtrooms. The most renowned example is without doubt Australia’s notorious “homosexual advance defense,” in which a person accused of a crime alleges that he acted either in self-defense or under provocation in response to a homosexual advance made by another person. (It is known in the US as the “gay panic defense.”) While it is not formally recognized by Australian law, it has been used to attain acquittals or lenient sentences for trials for homophobic murders, in the states of Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia. One example was Malcolm Green, who in 1997 was acquitted of murder and instead convicted of manslaughter, as the court agreed that he acted in self-defense in response to unwanted homosexual advances.
In 1994, the Australian organization Gay Men and Lesbians Against Discrimination (GLAD) published the results of a survey on the gay and lesbian population of the Australian state of Victoria. Seventy percent of the 492 lesbians and 69% of the 510 gay men questioned reported they had been the victim of insults, threats, or violence due to their sexuality. In addition, 11% of the lesbians and 20% of the gay men had been physically assaulted, and 2.6% of the lesbians and 5.5% of the gay men had been assaulted by
police
. Further, many countries in Oceania have had to deal with the tragic problem of homophobic murders. In Fiji in 2001, the country’s Red Cross director John Scott and his partner Greg Scrivener, both from New Zealand, were brutally murdered by a man wielding a machete; at the time of the perpetrator’s arrest, the police commissioner claimed that the young man had been “exploited” by the couple. Paradoxically, in 1997, Fiji had become the second country in the world (after South Africa) to explicitly protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation in its constitution. Although the constitution’s position has been precariously tested by two military coups since then, it would appear that consensual sex between gay men is not an issue for the police, however, it is still illegal.
As we go forward in the new millennium, things seem to be progressing for homosexuals in Oceania, and since the end of the twentieth century, homophobia, at least that which the law can sanction, appears to be receding. Today in Australia, Sydney is a world capital for gays and lesbians, and homosexuals are permitted to join the military. In 1999, New Zealanders elected Georgina Beyer, a woman of Maori origin, as a Labor MP for Wairarapa, becoming the first trans-sexual person in the world to sit in a national parliament. Recent years have also seen the emergence of new perspectives, the most striking example being the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras celebration in Sydney, which started in 1978 as a response to homophobia. Today, the parade attracts close to half a million spectators and is one of the world’s largest gay and lesbian events.
Homophobic prejudices, however, still exist in Oceania. Churches and religious associations escape anti-discrimination laws. Certain indigenous cultures, once tolerant of homosexual practices, are today less so because of colonial influences, and homophobic murders remain a troubling problem.
—David Plummer
Aldrich, Robert, and Garry Wotherspoon, eds.
Gay Perspectives: Essays in Australian Gay Culture
. Sydney: Univ. of Sydney Press, 1996.
Beyer, Georgina, and Cathy Casey.
Change for the Better: The Story of Georgina Beyer
. Auckland: Random House, 1999.
Comstock, Gary. “Developments: Sexual Orientation and the Law,”
Harvard Law Review
, no. 102 (1989).
Gay Men and Lesbians Against Discrimination (GLAD).
Not a Day Goes By: Report on the GLAD Survey into Discrimination and Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men in Victoria
. Melbourne: GLAD, 1994.
Herdt, Gilbert. “Ritualised Homosexual Behaviour in the Male Cults of Melanesia, 1862–1983.” In
Ritualised Homosexuality in Melanesia
. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993.
Hodge, Dino.
Did you Meet any Malagas? A Homosexual History of Australia’s Tropical Capital
. Darwin, Australia: Little Gem Publications, 1993.
International Lesbian and Gay Association, Brussels. World Legal Survey.
http://www.ilga.org
(accessed April 23, 2008).
Murray, Stephen O.
Oceanic Homosexualities
. New York: Garland, 1992.
New South Wales Attorney General’s Department.
Review of the “Homosexual Advance Defence
.” Sydney: New South Wales Attorney General’s Department, 1996.
Plummer, David.
One of the Boys: Masculinity, Homophobia and Modern Manhood
. New York: Haworth Press, 1999.
———. “Policing Manhood: New Theories about the Social Significance of Homophobia.” In
Sexual Positions: An Australian View
. Edited by Carl Wood. Melbourne: Hill of Content-Collins, 2001.
Sandroussi, Jewly, and Sue Thompson.
Out of the Blue: A Police Survey of Violence and Harassment against Gay Men and Lesbians
. Sydney: New South Wales Police Service, 1995.
Tomsen, Stephen. “Hatred, Murder and Male Honour: Gay Homicides and the ‘Homosexual Panic Defence’,”
Criminology Australia
6, no. 2 (1994).
———. “Was Lombroso Queer? Criminology, Criminal Justice and the Heterosexual Imaginary.” In
Homophobic Violence
. Edited by Gail Mason and Stephen Tomsen. Sydney: Hawkins Press, 1997.
Wotherspoon, Gary. “Les Interventions de l’Etat contre les homosexuels en Australie durant la Guerre Froide.” In
Sodomites, invertis, homosexuels: perspectives historiques
. Edited by Rommel Mendès-Leite. Lille, GaiKitschCamp, 1994.
—Anthropology; Essentialism/Constructionism; Southeast Asia.
ORTHODOXY (Christian)
Orthodox or Eastern Christian Churches claim to be the authentic Christianity, having received the true faith during the first seven ecumenical councils between 325 and 787 CE. Polycentric, Episcopal, and council-minded, the Orthodox Church is made of nine Patriarchates (first, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, with Rome; then, Moscow, Georgia, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria), three auto-cephalic Archdioceses (Cyprus, Albania, Greece), and three metropolises (Poland, the Czech Republic, the US); in all, between 150 and 350 million believers. It is the second largest Christian church in the world after the Roman Catholic Church. Mainly and originally Eastern, orthodoxy has grown around the world from the sixteenth century due to political crises in the Byzantine and Slavic world. Assuming universality, the Orthodox Church continues to claim a moral authority on the societies that it oversees.
It would be paradoxical if orthodoxy was less homophobic than its Roman rival but that is not the case. The Orthodox Church purports to maintain a faith common to Latins and Orientals before the 1054 schism. The condemnation of homosexuality in all its forms is one area of agreement with the views of Rome, as proven by Moscow Patriarch, Alexius II of Russia’s public declaration for united action with Rome against
decriminalization
and “banalisation” of homosexuality and other “lay violations” of divine law. He wrote to Pope John Paul II about the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2000: “The criteria of division of citizens pursuant to their sexual orientation does not appear to us as inherent to human nature, also the introduction of this criterion does not appear justified.” A position against homosexuality is easily agreed upon through the churches, even divorce and conjugal sex (considered polemic against the Catholic Augustine penchant) are contentious topics. But faced with liberal
Protestantism
, particularly American Protestantism, orthodoxy is threatening to leave the too “inclusive” ecumenical movement if it admits homophile churches or “gay Christians.”
A priori,
it is inconceivable to bless a gay couple (Orthodox Press Services, no. 65, February 1982): priests and “pseudo spouses” would be excommunicated.
By forbidding homosexuals all sexual expression, orthodoxy demands that they renounce this constitutive part of their self and the fulfillment of love, if faithful, while this relation is legitimate for married heterosexuals. The rise of modern theologians more “open” to the reality of a profound sexual orientation (psychological or biological), previously rejected by ecclesiastic authorities, does not change anything: in the past it was a diabolical tendency; new homosexuality remains a pathology in the classical sense of “passion” (demanding to be prevailed over by reason, but also by penance and prayer) and also in the modern sense of illness or mental alteration. Gays, who “are not only that” (being “reasonable souls”), are forced in conscience to absolute chastity with the help of the competent therapist and the sympathetic spiritual father.
Orthodoxy is guaranteed by Canons or codes of laws fixing sexual norms and forbidding the practice of all forms of carnal homosexuality. The local Council of Elvira (Spain, c. 300) and the ecumenical Council of Ancyra (Turkey, 314, Canon 16) are valid eternally due to their essential link to faith. The proof is in the interdictions of the Law (Deuteronomy, Leviticus) confirmed by the destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrah
. St
Paul
’s epistles and St John’s Apocalypse (chapter twenty-one: fire for fornicators and idolaters) have definitely established this interpretation, along with the Apostles’ Didache. The Church punishes with long and humiliating penances, even by excommunication, the sins of
arsenokoitai
(coupling of males) and of
paido-phtoresis
(corruption of boys) with threats of damnation. The Fathers have placed the seriousness of homosexual acts (according to age, practices, roles, and frequency) among masturbation, bestiality, incest, adultery, or fornication. The illegitimacy of the act is double, because there is both fornication and gender anomaly. If intercrural coitus is worth eighty days of penance, St Basile of Caesarea (fourth century) condemned simple sodomy and adultery to fifteen years of penance, eighteen years according to his contemporary St Gregory of Nyssa (Canon 4), and homosexual sodomy demands a penance of thirty years according to the seventh of Basil’s ninety-two canons (“of those who have sinned
against nature
and other great sinners”). St John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople (347–407), considered the death of a young consenting sexually passive man a benefit compared to the damage they cause to themselves, damage, according to him, which is equal to several deaths. Excluded from the priesthood, they also must be prevented from marrying, according to Lucas Chrysoberges, Patriarch of Constantinople between 1154 and 1170, probably to avoid causing damages to their new relatives.
Incidentally, if “sodomy” is compared to witchcraft and idolatry, it is because it constitutes from this perspective a challenge to the order of creation. As any universalism, orthodoxy tries to rationally justify the revelation: its
anthropology
defines sexuality as a device second to “Love.” Due to its biological
sterility
, which seems to negate the sexual complementarities of genders created
ad hoc
by God (sexuation originally for the good of man), homosexuality seems incompatible with faith and it is even compared to “bestiality” (it is the same word in Serbian). Human destiny becomes part of the divine project of creating a free, and mortal, being of flesh. The real
philosophy
(a Byzantine mix of neo-Platonism and Stoicism) that leads to faith establishes the idea of a “natural” norm of morality and sexuality, to which homosexuality is foreign. In substance, orthodoxy wobbles between a neo-Platonism hostile to sexuality as such, always blemished with “carnal pleasure” (John Chrysostom’s tradition, heir to early Christian scholar Origen on this subject), and a conception which legitimizes the pleasure in marriage (Council of Gangres, 340), without dissociating it from the possibility of procreation. The spouses must evolve toward tenderness. It is the chaste relation between the Church and Christ that serves as an analogically perfect model. The soul’s domination of the body and reason’s domination of passion lead to the limitation of sexuality.