How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality

Abstract

The history of sexuality is now such a respectable academic discipline, or at least such an established one, that its practitioners no longer feel much pressure to defend the enterprise -to rescue it from suspicions of being a palpable absurdity. Once upon a time, the very phrase "the history of sexuality" sounded like a contradiction in terms: how, after all, could sexuality have a history? Nowadays, by contrast, we are so accustomed to the notion that sexuality does indeed have a history that we do not often ask ourselves what kind of history sexuality has. If such questions do come up, they get dealt with cursorily, in the course of the methodological throat clearing that historians ritually perform in the opening paragraphs of scholarly articles. Recently, this exercise has tended to include a more or less obligatory reference to the trouble once caused to historians, long long ago in a country far far away, by theorists who had argued that sexuality was socially constructed -an intriguing idea in its time and place, or so we are reassuringly told, but one that was taken to outlandish extremes and that no one much credits any longer. 1 With the disruptive potential of these metahistorical questions safely relegated to the past, the historian of sexuality can get down, or get back, to the business at hand.But this new consensus, and the sense of theoretical closure that accompanies it, is premature. I believe that it is more useful than ever to ask how sexuality can have a history. The point of such a question, to be sure, is no longer to register the questioner's skepticism and incredulity (as if to say, "How on earth could such a thing be possible?") but to inquire more closely into the modalities of historical being that sexuality possesses: to ask how exactly-in what terms, by virtue of what temporality, in which of its dimensions or aspects-sexuality does have a history.That question, of course, has already been answered in a number of ways, each of them manifesting a different strategy for articulating the relation between GLQ 6:1

Why is the History of Heterosexuality Essential? Beliefs About the History of Sexuality and Their Relationship to Sexual Prejudice

“…Texas case (see Tribe, 2004), and pro-gay/lesbian social constructionist histories (e.g., Faderman, 1991;Halperin, 2000), Study 2 shows how the belief that homosexual identity is a modern construction is not, in essence, a heterosexist belief.…”

“…Within this debate, 'essentialists' tended to argue that such behaviour implied that people with homosexual identities existed in pre-modern periods (e.g., Boswell, 1994), and "social constructionists" argued that homosexual identities only cohered in recent modern periods as sexuality became more central to Western concepts of personhood (Faderman, 1991;Foucault, 1978;Halperin, 2000). Essentialism might appear to be a pro-gay strategy because the assertion that gay people have always existed seems to legitimate the rights of gay people to exist in the present.…”

How to do the history of the self

“…Queer theory's criticisms, however, inspired them to reflect on the matters of continuity and change, coherence and incoherence, and stability and instability. David Halperin (2000Halperin ( , 2002 has most fruitfully adapted his earlier ideas on the construction of homosexuality to accommodate Sedgwick's criticisms. In How to Do the History of Homosexuality, he claimed that every history of homosexuality should start from modern notions of homosexuality, in all their incoherence.…”

Absent Love in Pleasure Houses. Frederick II of Prussia as art collector and patron

“…Our recent categories of`homosexuality' and`heterosexuality' do not seem to help ± an insight which has by now become commonplace. As a starting point for our inquiries one might rather chose Halperin's four modes of pre-modern`homosexuality', which still largely apply to the eighteenth century:`(1) effeminacy, (2) pederasty or``active'' sodomy, (3) friendship or male love, and (4) passivity or inversion'. 3 Certainly, the first three at least bear discussion in our context.…”

“…As a starting point for our inquiries one might rather chose Halperin's four modes of pre-modern`homosexuality', which still largely apply to the eighteenth century:`(1) effeminacy, (2) pederasty or``active'' sodomy, (3) friendship or male love, and (4) passivity or inversion'. 3 Certainly, the first three at least bear discussion in our context. Frederick II of Prussia is an ideal ± and well-documented ± object for our inquiry, because he is both extremely typical as a figure of the eighteenth century and as a collector, and at the same time one of outstanding importance.…”