Homosexualities

Full Title: Homosexualities
Author / Editor: Stephen O. Murray
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2002

Review © Metapsychology Vol. 7, No. 52
Reviewer: Sundeep Nayak

Private homosexual
conduct has changed in it perception so much in the seventeen years that it
took to definitively declare the Bowers v. Hardwick ruling (478 U.S. 186, 106
Supreme Court 2841, 92 L. Ed.2d 140) unconstitutional in June 2003. The magic
of history is manifest in its evanescence: yesterday’s headlining Defense of
Marriage Act is tomorrow’s footnote. Stephen O. Murray, a comparative
sociologist from San Francisco, amalgamates hundreds of citations and culls the
published literature for a coherent and incredibly wide-reaching stratification
of same-sex behavior through the ages and across national lines in Homosexualities.

‘Age-structured
homosexualities’ filters recurring patterns of diversity seen through the prism
of cultural diffraction. The normative primary direction of desire is from the
older and the direction of duty is from the younger, irrespective of the
particular physical sexual acts desired. These loosely documented patterns are
but roses by any other name. In the absence of unifying theories, semantics may
make things appear more dissimilar than they truly are but a critical
dissection clearly indicates the converse. Examples include the universally
acknowledged (Japanese acolytes and pages, ancient Greek pederasts, American
hustlers) and the chimeratically obscure (boy-wives in the Sudan, cruising
grounds in Early Modern Italy, Islamic prostitutes). It is delightful to bask
in the non-Eurocentric light that illuminates the effluvia of published
literature.

‘Gender stratified
organization of homosexuality’ proposes that geographically disparate societies
display different levels of acceptance and assign different meanings to loosely
established female and male homosexual roles, gender identity and purportedly
sacralized roles. Here, it is the penetrated male who eagerly seeks relatively
indifferent penetrators. Conventionally masculine males have often been
passive, paid by or supported by an unmasculine male eager to be penetrated. The
subsection that examines in considerable detail the intertwined roles of
religion and homosexuality (Afro-Brazilian Possession religions, Northeastern
Siberia’s Transformed Shamans, Prostitution of Peruvian temple functionaries)
is extremely lucidly presented to captivate the reader.

‘Egalitarian
homosexualities’ pertain to the current avatar of same-sex behavior. It
emphasizes that mobility (both in space and occupations different from the
conventional norm) is an essential pre-condition for the obvious urban
concentration and multiplication of probably exclusive and non-role-bound
relationships of modern homosexuality. For the non-status-defined homosexual of
today, who is the lover and who the beloved is matters progressively less as
the receptive/insertive balance is rarely precisely equal but not clearly
structures without the historical finite expectations of dominance, submission,
and resistance.

This compendium is
an excellent resource that reviews the evolution of societal homosexualities.
On the other hand, it establishes firm but hitherto lesser known historical and
cultural perspectives that would support full civil rights for gays and
lesbian. Homosexualities is not easy summer reading but it illuminates
its thousand points of light with crisp celerity.