On the other hand, a relationship between two women was never considered to be equivalent to a relationship between two men. While certain types of sexuality between men were socially admissible, there were no scenarios at all where the practices classified today as “feminine homosexuality” would have been acceptable to the Romans.
In Greece, sexual relations between women were perceived as falling outside the realm of sexuality. However, in Rome, the contrary was true: most texts touching on the subject describe only the sexual character of this behavior, removing all other aspects one might expect from a relationship (affection, exchange, pleasure, etc.). A women’s desire for another woman was, in the first texts making mention of the subject, presented as a mistake (in a fable about Phaedra, it was due to an error by Prometheus, who had drunkenly created certain humans the wrong way) or part of a temporary condition intended to be corrected (in a passage from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, one of two women had been transformed into a man). Little by little, the reactions of rejection and disgust became more explicit: the
tribade
persona appeared and became the object of caricature and mockery (the Latin term
tribas
, based on the Greek verb
tribein
, means “to rub,” but the creation of this word also demonstrates how the invention of this practice was attributed to another culture). Martial and Juvenal, first-century satirists, position their female characters as women with no self-control (the concept of excessiveness is recurring, temperance being the mark of a civilized person), drunken and indecent. Philaenis (described in poet Martial’s
Book VII
[67]) is endowed with exceptional strength and displays a degrading hyper-sexuality. It is said of these women that they “act like men” without really succeeding, while the situation of the other partner is never taken into account.
This kind of discourse, which today can be qualified as homophobic, is deeply rooted in the Roman attitude toward women in general. What was most shocking and fearful about a woman loving women was the fact that in doing so she transgresses the role assigned to her by Roman sexual morality. This fear can be explained by the fact that in Rome, women had a more important social role than they did in Greece—they were in charge of educating children, which included inculcating Roman values. More involved in daily life, women represented a danger to these values if, in addition to their social and familial activities, they decided to exert the same autonomy over their sexuality.
The greatest difference between homophobic discourse targeting men and that targeting women lies in the fact that there is no mention of any real cases of women who were prosecuted or subjected to persecution, nor are there any juridical writings condemning sexual relations between women. The issue was raised in cases of adultery (such as in Seneca the Rhetorician’s first-century
Controversiae
[I, 2, 23]), but it concerned marriage and the rights of the husband, and not specifically feminine homosexuality as such. Thus, no conclusion can be made.
While it was possible to launch accusations (founded or not) against men, invectives against
tribades
remained within the realm of fiction. One of the characteristics specific to the “
lesbophobic
” discourse in Rome was that it operated only in self-referential isolation, acknowledging itself only through sly winks and innuendo, and never referring to anything real. As a result, relations between women were presented as impossible, something prodigious or monstrous.
From the Middle Ages to the Modern Day
By the beginning of the Middle Ages, the repression of homosexuality was taking place at the municipal level, as the freedom from imperial power began to permit the development of local autonomy. Prosecuting the “crime” of sodomy was of interest to municipalities for two reasons. Firstly, this allowed an area to increase its resources as a result of confiscating a sodomite’s assets, a practice common in the majority of Italian communes beginning in the fourteenth century. Secondly, it allowed the communes to demonstrate their independence from papal authority, though collaborations with the
Inquisition
were common. This repression would last throughout the Renaissance, during which all the large cities would prosecute sodomites, including such figures as Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini.
An episode that is emblematic of the political exploitation of homophobia took place during the Middle Ages, with the conflict between the Guelphs (primarily
bourgeois
—bankers, merchants, etc.—who favored the Pope and had ties with monastic orders) and the Ghibellines (supporters of Frederick II). The papacy launched accusations of sodomy against those imperial forces with which they were at war, and the Guelphs were particularly insistent on the execution of
heretics
, sodomites, and other offenders of morality. The conflict was bloody, as much in terms of the individual prosecution of Ghibellines accused of sexual laxity as in terms of the collective battles. An arbitrary link between the moral and the political was constructed. The political expansion of the Church was legitimized (at least internally) by the necessity of spreading the moral and religious doctrine. And as morals and politics had become inseparable, reducing the conflict to a mere political level was simply not supportable by the papacy and the Guelphs, who needed to attribute to their Ghibelline adversaries a degraded moral dimension against which to fight. In this way, the Guelphic and papal conquest fabricated its justification of a moral struggle against sodomy (the worst crime of the era), as a means to pursue its political objectives.
Decriminalization
progressively took hold after the end of the eighteenth century. It began first in Tuscany under the reign of Grand Duke Leopold, then in all of Northern Italy after the promulgation of the Napoleonic Code. Charles Albert’s Code of 1837 for Piedmont-Sardinia was extended to all of his possessions after the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1870 by the House of Savoy. No punishment existed for homosexuality after decriminalization had successively reached all the Italian regions with the creation of the Kingdom. This decriminalization was also accompanied by a less repressive social climate.
Benito Mussolini did nothing to change this situation at first. In 1930, he even maintained that, given that Italians were naturally virile and non-homosexual (as opposed to degenerate foreigners), it would not be necessary to fashion laws against homosexuality. Another important factor motivated his refusal: Italy’s economic need for the substantial influx of money brought by homosexual tourism. Moreover, in the Hitlerian ideology, Latins, like Slavs, were considered an inferior race. In this light, the Latin European and South American Fascist countries integrated racial conceptions to a far lesser extent and had little reason to believe that homosexuals were a danger to the race. After the creation of the Rome-Berlin axis in 1936, Mussolini promulgated anti-homosexual decrees, under Nazi pressure, in this way breaking with the relatively liberal Latin tradition.
Fascist
logic seeks to eliminate all political opposition. In this way, it differs from the Nazi logic, which was to eliminate all people thought to be a threat to the race. Thus, homosexuals came to be considered political criminals. Their punishments under the Fascists were imprisonment, exile to remote regions (usually islands), and loss of employment.
By the end of the twentieth century, as in other Western countries, the first signs of a civil recognition for same-sex couples began to appear (as they did for decriminalization), mostly at the municipal level. In this way, on June 28, 1992 in Milan, ten gay and lesbian couples were married in a series of public civil ceremonies in the Piazza del Duomo. Some municipalities have passed laws providing for civil unions and several regions have formerly supported efforts for national law on civil unions.
Still today, contrary to many of its European neighbors, Italy has no national legal framework dealing with same-sex couples, but a draft bill to recognize domestic partnerships was proposed in 2006. The bill faced considerable opposition and was stripped from reaching the floor for a vote, but in 2007, it was merged with other civil union proposals, and the Senate’s Judiciary Committee has been discussing a new draft. The country is also one of seven European nations that have no national anti-discriminatory laws in regards to sexual orientation; however, in 2004 Tuscany became the first region to ban discrimination against homosexuals, and the region of Piedmont has since followed suit. Finally, the Vatican’s views on the subject of homosexuality remains highly influential.
—Sandra Boehringer, Thierry Eloi, and Flora Leroy-Forgeot
Brown, Judith.
Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy
. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986.
Canosa, Romano.
Storia di una grande paura: la sodomia a Firenze e Venezia nel quattrocento
. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991.
Cantarella, Eva.
Selon la nature, l’usage et la loi. La bisexualité dans le monde antique
. Paris: La Découverte, 1991. Originally published as
Secondo natura
. (Rome: Riuniti, 1988). [Published in the US as
Bisexuality in the Ancient World
. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992.]
Dupont, Florence, and Thierry Eloi.
L’Erotisme masculin dans la Rome antique
. Paris: Belin, 2001.
Gnerre, Francesco. “Littérature et société en Italie,”
Inverses,
no. 2 (2002).
Leroy-Forgeot, Flora.
Histoire juridique de l’homosexualité en Europe
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.
———, and Caroline Mécary.
Le Couple homosexuel et le droit
. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001.
Lupo, Paola.
Lo Specchio incrinato: storia e immagine dell’omosessualità femminile
. Venice: Marsilio, 1998.
Rocke, Michael.
Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence
. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.
Ruggieriero, Guido.
The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime, and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice
. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985.
Williams, Craig, A.
Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity
. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999.
—Art; Catholic Church, the; Damien, Peter; Decadence; Essentialism/Constructionism; Fascism; Greece, Ancient; Heresy; History; Literature; Pasolini, Pier Paolo; Sappho; Theology.
JAPAN
Homophobia in Japan is a complex issue, the origins of which are both ancient and recent; the real debate is on whether the phenomenon is indigenous to Japanese culture or imported from elsewhere. Today, a certain number of Japanese homophobes still insist that China is to blame for the first appearance of homosexuality in Japan, with the establishment of Buddhist monasteries in the eighth and ninth centuries. Opponents of this view however, respond that it is actually
homophobia
that, in many ways, was imported. In this view, homophobia in Japan first appeared in the sixteen century under the influence of Jesuit missionaries, and again during the nineteenth century, in the wake of Japan’s opening up to Western powers. The truth, however, as writer Tsuneo Watanabe demonstrated so well, is much less black and white.
Japan’s rich homosexual history began between the ninth and twelfth centuries among the monastic class, then the warrior and the bourgeois classes at the time of the Edo period, beginning in seventeenth century. It was among the samurai of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries that sexual relationships between men more clearly developed, or more precisely, between an older man and a young page (
kosho),
homosexuality being exalted as “the flower of the
bushido,
” or the flower of “the way of the warrior.” Love between two men, who had no interest in reproduction, was considered less burdened and more pure than the love between a man and a woman. Later, in Edo’s bourgeois milieu during the time of Tokugawa (between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries), homosexuality was often expressed through effeminacy (the usual word for homosexual being
Yokama,
or passive and effeminate) and prostitution. In this respect, the theater played a central role, contributing to Japanese gay culture by way of the
onnagata
, where the very popular actors who specialized in playing female roles in kabuki often offered themselves as prostitutes to customers following the performances. Homosexual practices in ancient Japan appeared to have been rather widespread, so much so that it would have been possible to consider bisexuality the norm; however, this is clearly refuted by the fact that female prostitutes greatly outnumbered male ones. It also must be noted that, if ancient Japanese culture was highly
tolerant
toward male homosexuality, its views of lesbianism were quite the opposite: female sexuality that served no male pleasure and that did not lead to the conception of a child was considered totally unacceptable.
The first great wave of homophobia in Japan coincided with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in 1549; François Xavier saw the “crime of
Sodomy
” everywhere he looked. During a visit to a Zen monastery, he discovered with horror that “among the bonzes [monks], the
unnatural
and abominable
vice
was so popular, that they committed it without any
shame
.” He immediately began to scold them, which provoked nothing but surprise and laughter. Later in his visit, Xavier realized that the
samurais
and the
daimyos
(feudal lords) shared the same morals as the bonzes. He then explained to them that the three great sins were infanticide, idolatry, and the “abominable sin,” to which his audience reacted disdainfully. A
modus vivendi
was established; commoners contented themselves with jeering at the missionaries in the street: “Look! These are the men who say that we are not to sleep with boys!” Watanabe contends that there is no doubt that the Jesuits’ ultimate failure in Japan, starting with their harsh persecution at the hands of the Japanese in 1597, was largely due to their virulent homophobia.