C4LEB's Blogs

• https://lgbtq.carrd.co/

Moche civilisation, Peru (100-800 CE)

Incan civilisation, Peru (before 1533 CE)

Male soixante-neuf, 13th-century Ecuador

Mayan culture, Guatemala.

    (Colonial period, 1519-1821 CE)

Homosexuality did not exist until 1869, when the German Austrian-born novelist, Karl-Maria Kertbeny, used the term in a pamphlet against Prussian anti-sodomy laws. It didn't go into popular use until almost twenty years later, when Richard von Krafft-Ebing used the terms 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' in his book Psychopathia Sexualis, and it did not lead to the creation of a distinct sub-culture until even later.

Before this time, homosexuality was neither a culture nor a description; instead, people were more concerned with physical activities. Therefore, a common description of what we now call a homosexual was sodomite, which referred of course to sodomy — defined as man-on-man sex — which was decried by a church which was concerned with any sexual activity that did not lead to procreation.

Psychopathia Sexualis
• https://usa1lib.org/book/2756170/be5ae2

Available in English, French, Italian, and German
(use 'Richard von Krafft-Ebing' as the search term)

Pierre Francois Hugues d' Hancarville (1719-1805)

Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville, son of a bankrupt cloth merchant of Nancy, was an adventurous connoisseur and art dealer, an art historian and historian of ideas. It was he who introduced Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), vulcanologist, art collector and envoy-extraordinary to the Spanish court at Naples, to the Porcinari family, the owners of a large collection of ancient classical vases which Hamilton bought and enlarged, and then sold to the British Museum in 1772. (Hamilton was one of the first Englishmen who collected and appreciated Greek vases. His wife, Lady Emma Hamilton, was a connoisseusse of fine English admirals.) Before their shipment to England, all the objects were listed, drawn and described under the supervision of the brilliant but unscrupulous Pierre-François Hugues, self-styled 'baron' d’Hancarville.

Hugues also had printed two books from his collection of classical erotica, supposedly taken from actual medallions, both under fictitious imprints; and this one (below), Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis (1771). These were widely pirated, in variously incompetent editions, during his lifetime. In 1769 Hancarville was forced to flee his creditors in Naples. His financial problems led him to forfeit the finished plates for the final volumes to Florentine creditors in 1773. He died in Padua in 1805.

Access to Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis, Pierre d'Hancarville, 1771, Naples
• https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/collection-of-pornographic-art-from-antiquity-1785

Christian saints don't make the cover of gay magazines every day – even less so in a slick of baby oil and a pair of Calvins. But such was the case with last July's issue of reFRESH, the saint in question being played by French policeman-turned-TV-hunk, Sebastien Moura.

Was he playing Ignatius Loyola? Francis of Assisi? Paul of Tarsus? Not quite. The only saint who really cuts it as a cover-boy is St Sebastian, that curly-haired Roman youth shot with arrows on the orders of the emperor Diocletian. Sebastian's appeal to gay men seems obvious. He was young, male, apparently unmarried and martyred by the establishment. Unlike, say, St Augustine of Hippo, he also looks good in a loincloth and tied to a tree.

Not only was St Sebastian middle-aged and butch, he wasn't killed with arrows. Punctured, yes, but not killed. The perforated martyr was rescued from the stake and nursed back to health by St Irene of Rome – a woman, boys – before unwisely haranguing Diocletian for his paganism as he passed by on a litter. Unmoved by his tenacity, the emperor had Sebastian clubbed to death; his body was then dumped in Rome's sewers.

In 1348, Europe had been ravaged by the Black Death: up to half of the entire population of the continent died in a torment of bloody flux. In their terror, Romans prayed to Sebastian – he'd survived those arrows, after all – and the epidemic lifted. Willy-nilly, he became the hottest plague saint in Christendom. It is incumbent upon plague saints to look as though they haven't got one foot in the grave (or, come to that, in the sewer). So by the end of the 14th century, the middle-aged Sebastian had had a makeover, his beard, wrinkles and actual cause of death neatly airbrushed from the picture.

• https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/arrows-of-desire-how-did-st-sebastian-become-an-enduring-homoerotic-icon-779388.html

Aelred was born in 1110 in northeastern England near the Scottish border in the small town of Hexham, Northumbria. The son of Eilaf, a priest during a period when English priests were allowed to marry and keeper of the shrine of Hexham, he came from a long line of priests, a role handed down for four or five generations. (Aelred’s great-grandfather was the sacristan who tended the dead body of Saint Cuthbert, who had a close male companion named Boisil at the monastery of Melrose.)

Around age 14 or 15, Aelred was sent to study at the court of King David I of Scotland. He stayed there for about a decade until age 24. While rising to the rank of steward, he delighted in friendships. “I delighted in the pleasure of being with my friends more than in anything else…. Nothing was more pleasant or more delightful or more useful than to seem to be loved and love in return,” he wrote in his book, “Spiritual Friendship”.

Apparently his special friend was the king’s stepson, Waldef or Waltheof of Melrose, with whom Aelred formed “ties of the most intimate friendship”. Like Aelred, he later became a saint. Aelred admitted to the “loss of my chastity” during his years at court, and experienced inner turmoil.

Waldef left court to join a monastery and soon Aelred followed suit by entering a different monastery. In 1134 Aelred moved to Rievaulx and joined the Cistercian abbey where he would spend the rest of his life. His mentors included Bernard of Clairvaux, another saint known for the homoeroticism of his spiritual writings and relationships. Aelred travelled to France every year to visit Clairvaux, where Bernard was abbot. He reportedly wrote his book “The Mirror of Charity” at Bernard’s request.

Aelred rose quickly through the ranks to become abbot at Rievaulx from 1147-1167. The monastery thrived under his administration, growing to around 140 monks and 500 lay brothers, with five new communities in England and Scotland. In two decades he did not dismiss even one person from the monastery.

Illumination from a manuscript of St Aelred’s Life of Edward the Confessor showing St Aelred in monastic habit kneeling before King Henry II, from an Anglo-Norman verse Life of St Edward the Confessor, written in England probably in the later 1230s or early 1240s and executed ca. 1250-60.

The Mirror of Charity
• https://ca1lib.org/book/6103304/0be742

The Way of Friendship
• https://ca1lib.org/book/21447421/d8de2b

Spiritual Friendship
• https://ca1lib.org/book/6103319/f8a15b

Antiquarian book dealer Neil Pearson, whilst "on a hunt for early gay literature", has discovered what is presently the earliest known Aleister Crowley manuscript in existence.

Crowley, who called himself the Great Beast 666 and pursued a lifelong interest in magic and the wilder shores of religion and sex, was nicknamed the Wickedest Man in the World by the British magazine John Bull after a former follower made a series of lurid allegations, including the claim she and her husband had been forced to drink the blood of a sacrificed cat.

Born in 1875, Crowley was a novelist, yoga enthusiast, heroin addict, occultist, sexual adventurer, magician, some say spy, and perhaps most improbably, enthusiastic mountaineer who scaled K2, the Eiger and many other peaks.

Love me or leave me
Your love is light
To pass through the pale streets
I, who am dying for thy kiss
He, who seduced me first
A sailor's kiss is branded
Did you speak truly?
The old dark evening  

In 1898 Aleister Crowley arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge and promptly fell in love with Herbert Jerome Pollitt.

Trinity College was known for theatre arts and Pollit was a very famous female impersonator and actor at Trinity. It was a quick and torrid affair, in a nutshell as Neil Pearson writes:
"The sonnet sequence seems to address his love affair with Herbert Jerome Pollitt, conducted whilst the pair were up at Trinity College, Cambridge. The verse is rather broken-backed, and vulgar where he is trying to be honest. But it was written at a time when he was feeling heartbroken and vulnerable and it does somehow humanise him – and God knows Aleister Crowley, more than most people, needs humanising.”

Pollitt, in his guise of theatrical female impersonator, also answered to the name Dine de Rougy. Crowley arrived at Cambridge in 1895, the two met in October 1897, and the affair was over by the following year.

In 1898, heartbroken Aleister Crowley’s love affair with Herbert Charles Jerome Pollitt had ended and he looked to his poetry for comfort.

Pollitt was four years Crowley’s senior, a friend of both Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, had been painted by James McNeill Whistler and was the president of the university’s Footlights Dramatic Club. “I lived with Pollitt as his wife for some six months and he made a poet out of me” is how Crowley described their relationship.
Crowley later wrote of his lover: “Pollitt was rather plain than otherwise. His face was made tragic by the terrible hunger of the eyes and the bitter sadness of the mouth. He possessed one physical beauty - his hair ... its colour was pale gold, like spring sunshine, and its texture of the finest gossamer. The relation between us was that ideal intimacy which the Greeks considered the greatest glory of manhood and the most precious prize of life.”

• https://dangerousminds.net/comments/earliest_known_aleister_crowley_manuscript_surfaces

Client Lubricating a Prostitute (the caption of this illustration reads, “Pardon me if I tear your arse…”, Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)

Records of men who have sex with men in Japan date back to ancient times. Western scholars have identified these as evidence of homosexuality in Japan. Though these relations had existed in Japan for millennia, they became most apparent to scholars during the Tokugawa (or Edo) period. Historical practices identified by scholars as homosexual include shudō (衆道), wakashudō (若衆道) and nanshoku (男色)

The Japanese term nanshoku (男色, which can also be read as danshoku) is the Japanese reading of the same characters in Chinese, which literally mean "male colours". The character 色 ("color") has the added meaning of "sexual pleasure" in both China and Japan. This term was widely used to refer to some kind of male-to-male sex in a pre-modern era of Japan. The term shudō (衆道, abbreviated from wakashudō 若衆道, "the way of adolescent boys") is also used, especially in older works.

Modern terms for homosexuals include dōseiaisha (同性愛者, literally "same-sex-love person"), okama (お釜, "kettle"/"cauldron", slang for "gay men"), gei (ゲイ, gay), homo (ホモ) or homosekusharu (ホモセクシャル, "homosexual"), onabe (お鍋, "pot"/"pan", slang for "gay women"), bian (ビアン)/rezu (レズ) and rezubian (レズビアン, "lesbian").

Miniature from an illuminated manuscript, 13th century. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr. 854, fol. 135.

Marbod of Rennes (ca. 1035 – 1123), archdeacon and schoolmaster at Angers, France, then Bishop of Rennes in Brittany, depicts same-sex desire in terms of enthusiastic acceptance and approval in some poems but with disgust and loathing in others, and his lyrics often highlight that he is writing to and among a community of like-minded men. In his poetry, Marbod often concentrates on the sexual favours granted by boys to their lovers, and he presents these relationships openly and without any embarrassment. In Ad amicum absentem (To an Absent Friend), the narrator admonishes a friend to hasten home so that his boy will not be tempted to leave him for another:

Perdes in hac villa plusquam lucraris in illa:
Namque quid tanti, quanti puer aequus amanti?
Qui nunc est aequus, fiat mora, fiet iniquus.
Blanditiis siquidem tentatur pluribus idem;
Et qui tentatur, metus est ne decipiatur.

(You are losing more in this town than you are getting in that one. / For what is as precious as a boy who is fair with his lover? / Now he is even-tempered [but if] a delay is made, he will be made wicked. / Indeed, he is assailed with many flatteries, / And [if] he can be tempted, there is a fear that he could be beguiled.)

As the speaker offers advice to his friend, the poem addresses same-sex desire in a matter-of-fact tone. No hint of censure of same-sex relationships appears; the only fear expressed is that same-sex desire will be frustrated rather than realized. The poem also hints that there are a wide range of sexual partners for the boy through its reference to the “blanditiis ... pluribis” (“many enticements”). This passage indicates that same-sex desire and activity runs rampant throughout the boy’s community.

Freyr, sometimes anglicized as Frey, is a widely attested god in Norse mythology. According to Adam of Bremen, Freyr was associated with peace and pleasure, and was represented with a phallic statue in the Temple at Uppsala.

In hoc templo, quod totum ex auro paratum est, statuas atrium deorum veneratur populus, ita ut potentissimus eorum Thor in medio solium habeat triclinio; hinc et inde locum possident Wodan et Fricco. Quorum significationes eiusmodi sunt: 'Thor', inquiunt, 'praesidet in aere, qui tonitrus et fulmina, ventos ymbresque, serena et fruges gubernat. Alter Wodan, id est furor, bella gerit, hominique ministrat virtutem contra inimicos. Tertius est Fricco, pacem voluptatem que largiens mortalibus'. Cuius etiam simulacrum fingunt cum ingenti priapo.
Gesta Hammaburgensis 26

In this temple, entirely decked out in gold, the people worship the statues of three gods in such wise that the mightiest of them, Thor, occupies a throne in the middle of the chamber; Woden and Frikko have places on either side. The significance of these gods is as follows: Thor, they say, presides over the air, which governs the thunder and lightning, the winds and rains, fair weather and crops. The other, Woden—that is, the Furious—carries on war and imparts to man strength against his enemies. The third is Frikko, who bestows peace and pleasure on mortals. His likeness, too, they fashion with an immense phallus.
Gesta Hammaburgensis 26

Male lovers and a bearded man, detail from the frescoes of the Tomba delle Bighe (Tomb of the Chariots), Monterozzi necropolis, Tarquinia (Viterbo). 1827, The British Museum, not on display.

The Tomb of the Chariots at the Etruscan site of Populonia, north-west Italy. The side chambers of the tomb contained a chariot and two-wheeled carriage. Mid-7th to early 6th- century BCE.

• https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_2010-5006-610

The Wedding of Jesus and John 'the Beloved Disciple' at Cana” by Christopher Olwage

Olwage gives flesh to a long-standing but little-known tradition that Jesus and his beloved disciple John were the bridal couple at the Cana wedding feast. The idea is expressed in the second-century apocryphal Acts of John, where Jesus intervenes three times to prevent John from marrying a woman. Eventually John “binds himself” to Jesus “who didst make my joining unto thee perfect and unbroken.” The idea that John and Jesus married at Cana continued in medieval Europe and is re-affirmed in contemporary times by British theologian Gerard Loughlin in his introduction to the book “Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body.”

Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body
• https://ca1lib.org/book/831538/51186f

Fellatio, one of many sexual images on the facade of Khajuraho temple complex, a group of Hindu and Jain temples built between 885-1050 CE in Chhatarpur district, Madhya Pradesh, India.

A chapter of the Kama-Sutra called aupariṣṭhaka is dedicated to oral sex and teaching the eight ways of its practice.

A man exposing himself through a hole in the fence while the women and children on the other side tie his penis with a string. (!?!)

A king sees his son and tutor together in a close embrace, from Five Poems by ʿAṭāʾullāh bin Yaḥyá ʿAṭāʾī (d. 1634), copied by Ḫeyrullah Ḫeyrī Çāvuşzade, 1721 CE

Ottoman Empire (Hungary), 1541-1699

In the poem, the Lover entered the Garden where he saw personifications of the courtly virtues dancing with their partners. Those personifications (Liesse, Richesse, Doux Regard, Largesse, Franchise, Courtoisie and Jeunesse) are female because of the grammatical forms of the nouns they represent (in French). The miniatures do not fit in the popular schemes of decorations of other Roman de la Rose manuscripts. The most surprising illustration is a depiction of Richness with her partner: instead of a lady dancing with her beau, what we have here is a male couple! And the miniature is inscribed (Richece – Varlet), so there’s no room for misinterpretation.

Ottoman Empire (13th century-1922)

As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark

• https://usa1lib.org/book/16895739/67d60d

         Peithinos Cup, painting attributed to Peithinos, c. 500 BCE.

The cup shows an array of couples, including this male couple. In Greek society, pederastic relationships between men and youths were common. These types of relationships were encouraged to help educate the younger partner as he entered adulthood. In Greek art, the older partner is often depicted with a beard (or the beginnings of one) while the younger is smooth-faced.

Gift-giving was an important aspect of courtship in ancient Greece. Lovers often gave items like wreaths and flowers to their beloved as a token of affection. The men on this red-figure kylix offer such gifts to indifferent youths. Attributed to the Douris Painter, c. 480 BCE.

India, Mughal dynasty, ca. 1645, Sa’di with a Young Man in a Rose Garden by Govardhan