Gay Richard the Lionheart

Don't the Medivals have a concept of "gay" through the Bible?

I'm not sure they had. They burned a lot of people for Biblical sins during the which panics (which of course was during a different era) but I don't think a lot was burned for homosexuality, at least compared to beastiality. But then again, I'm no expert on medival Europe.
 
Don't the Medivals have a concept of "gay" through the Bible?
Only that for a Man to Lay with a Man as he would with a Woman, Is a Capital Offense ...

Other than that, Not Really; The Bible doesn't Even Mention Such Things as Lesbianism or Being Transgendered ...

Medieval Rabbinic Authorities were Starting to Come to The Assessment that ALL Sexual Acts were Permissible within the Confines of a Marriage, But The Catholic Community Still Lacks a Comparable Doctrine!

:D
 
I'm not sure they had. They burned a lot of people for Biblical sins during the which panics (which of course was during a different era) but I don't think a lot was burned for homosexuality, at least compared to beastiality. But then again, I'm no expert on medival Europe.

There were many recorded cases where homosexuals were killed when "outed" in medieval Europe. They may not have been burned, but quite often they were killed in quite inventive ways. Indeed, that is the reason why Edward II ended up with a hot poker up his bum, rather than being killed some more conventional way. Both the church and the secular authorities looked at it with extreme disapproval.
 
Don't the Medivals have a concept of "gay" through the Bible?

Not really, no. 'Gay' is defined as sexual attraction exclusively to the same gender. You can be gay, but celibate. There is no indication medieval concepts of sexuality acommodated the idea. Men having sex with men were a familiar phenomenon, but this was an estabnlished part of the sexual sin category. A man who slept with a pretty boy would not have been viewed as fundamentally different from one who slept with a pretty girl. It happened, they weren't supposed to, and if the clergy could make it stick (which was rare enough), there would be penalties. Sex with a man or boy - referred to variously as sodomy, Florentine sin, or doing the heretical thing) was considered worse than with a woman or girl, but e.g. sex with a nun was worse than sex with a lay boy by most standards (clergymen kept meticulously detailed lists about what sexual act precisely merited which penalty). In simple terms, gay is what you are, sodomy is what you do. Richard could have committed sodomy (and this being the twelfth century, most people would not have cared a button), but if he had said 'I'm gay', people wouldn't hae known what he meant. There wasn't the vocabulary for it.
 
So was Edward II gay?

Very likely the sin of poor Edward was that he was a 'bottom', a most unkingly thing to do.

In the late middle ages, especially in Central Europe, there was a spate of persecutions which targeted men who had sex with men. Many of them probably were what we would call gay, others were bisexual. Previously, enforcement of whatever laws were in place had been patchy, with the church being the driving force, but starting in the 14th century and especially forcefully in the 15th and early 16th, you have special municipal (secular) courts promising bounties to informers who deliver sodomites the same way the inquisition went after heretics. The records of some of them survive, and there are some very interesting cases, but mostly it was a sordid tale of snooping, blackmail and fear. It's all part of a rising public concern with private morality that eventually leads to the European tradition of teaching the poor to be more like the middle class thinks it is.
 

Dom

Moderator
Not really, no. 'Gay' is defined as sexual attraction exclusively to the same gender. You can be gay, but celibate.

So does this mean if you are exclusively sexually attracted to women, but still have sex with men you're still 100% straight?
 
What happens if the church doesn't go all homophobic?
Does a gay identity evolve sooner?

:)

Very hard to engineer, since God is quoted in the Bible as calling homosexuality "despicable". The Bible even condemns wearing clothes of the other gender - technically women wearing jeans is heretical ;)
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Very hard to engineer, since God is quoted in the Bible as calling homosexuality "despicable". The Bible even condemns wearing clothes of the other gender - technically women wearing jeans is heretical ;)
Actually, He is quoted as calling men who have sex with men a to'evah - a ritual term which means something that is not permitted to Jews as it would violate their extensive purity laws but is nevertheless all too commonplace among the people surrounding them. Furthermore, He is completely silent on the issue of lesbianism, so one really can't say that "homosexuality" is despicable (or anything else really) according to the Bible.
 
So does this mean if you are exclusively sexually attracted to women, but still have sex with men you're still 100% straight?

Probably not 'straight' (something's crooked, at least), but certainly heterosexual.

Imagine you are a hetero guy doing life in medium security. Man-on-man is the only action you're going to get. It doesn't make you gay, and if you ever get out, you won't consider yourself anything but straight.
 
Very likely the sin of poor Edward was that he was a 'bottom', a most unkingly thing to do.
Not to mention that being a "bottom" was generally considered significantly more sinful than being a "top" because it violated the norms of gender identity; men are supposed to penetrate, not be penetrated. The same also tended to be applied in the inverse to lesbians.
 
So does this mean if you are exclusively sexually attracted to women, but still have sex with men you're still 100% straight?

The answer is found in the reverse situation: perhaps hundreds of millions of men throughout history have been exclusively attracted to men, yet have lived their entire lives only engaging in sex with women. Just because they married and had umpteen children and never touched another man in a sexual way, they were still gay on the inside, living a societally imposed lie.

Besides, to put a 100% in front of someone's sexuality kinda misses the point anyway. As an openly gay man, I've still been in a couple of relationships with women, and at least the second one wasn't due to any societal pressures. Also, I've been in a relationship lasting almost a year with a straight guy, and the reason it ended was simply because his job took him elsewhere. He'd never been with a guy before or since (and I refuse to play around with guys on the DL), but the two of us just had this weirdly awesome chemistry that broke the mould.

My point is that just because Richard and Phillippe were lovers at some point in their youths doesn't mean that either of them thought of themselves as homosexuals, or even that their personal attraction for each other meant that either of them was attracted to other men. Shit happens, ya know :p.

And anyway, expecting 12th century leaders to break barriers that have yet to be broken in the 21th is asking a bit much of the gods of History...
 
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ninebucks

Banned
What happens if the church doesn't go all homophobic?
Does a gay identity evolve sooner?

:)

Absolutely not. The 'gay' identity developed because governments banned sodomitic practices, and actually spent significant resources trying to wipe them out. This pushed the proto-gays underground, and instilled within them a sense of solidarity. This sense of solidarity coalesced into a subculture, which in turn led to the point we have today, where huge swathes of the population chose to define themselves primarily on their sexual preference.

People really need to get into their heads that there is nothing universal about 'homosexuality', (or 'heterosexuality' for that matter), the invention of the two terms as opposing concepts arised only a couple of centuries ago. Indeed, I'd argue that it was the concept of heterosexuality that arised first, as a code of state-sanctioned sexual 'normalness'. 'State-sanctioned' being an important point, pretty much as soon as governments had police forces advanced enough to poke their noses into peoples' bedrooms, they did so - early modern governments were obsessed with social engineering, and reinventing human sexuality was principle in such projects.[1]

I don't view the discovery of the 'Gay identity' as any kind of enlightenment. I view it as an understandable backlash against a legacy of sexual authoritarianism. And, I predict, as future sexual historians from a time where society truly no longer cares what people get up to in their bedrooms look back on our period, they'll wonder what exactly the point of dividing the vastly diverse field of human sexuality into two mutually-exclusive opposing parts was.

[1] Such projects were not confined for metropolitan populaces, the crusade to correct sexuality was central to the Colonial process. As an aside, I'd strongly suggest that the reason why many developing countries today seem so backward on issues of gender and sexuality is because their own concepts where so completely fucked up by well-meaning Imperialists. White peoples spread across the globe, covering up tits, confining women to the kitchen and spreading religions that strongly restricted acceptable sexual practices. Imagine what would happen to our culture if an alien force turned up and told us what we thought was a 'man' wasn't a man, and what we thought was a 'heterosexual' wasn't a heterosexual. It would fuck us up.
 
Don't the Medivals have a concept of "gay" through the Bible?

There is no "gay" as an orientation mentioned in the bible, only the sexual acts themselves are mentioned, and in a very vague way. Mentions of a man laying with another man as if she were a woman. I think there is one mention of lesbianism, and IIRC what exactly it is refering to is debated.

So medieval society would know this: "Sometimes men sleep with men and this holy book says it's bad. The king should stop being so open about his perversity."
 
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