Tomas Prower. The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. Volume 25, Issue 6, November-December 2018.
Everyone knows about the ancient Greeks and their celebration of same-sex love of a certain kind. But positive representations of queerness in the popular imagination appear to disappear with the Greeks, or possibly with the Romans, to be resumed only in 1969 with the Stonewall Riots and the revolution they unleashed. But surely something of interest must have happened in the intervening 2,000 years, not only in Western societies but elsewhere in the world as well.
Within the Euro-centered world with which we are most familiar, those two millennia have been dominated by a Christian morality that frowned upon open expressions of same-sex love. But for all the Church’s efforts, just such expressions continued to erupt, often in high and visible places, over the centuries. And when we move to queer representation in non-Western societies both ancient and modern, we find that anti-gay values and institutions are by no means universal. The point I’d like to make is supported by numbers, by the multiplication of cases from around the world, so let me cast a wide net across these two millennia to illustrate that LGBT people can be found in the most unlikely of times and places, often struggling against prevailing social norms and pressures to conform.
To begin somewhere in the middle of this stretch of time, in medieval England, we home in on an icon of heroic manhood, King Richard the Lionheart. Long before he gained this epithet, Richard was the intimate boyhood friend of Prince Philip II of France, and their special fondness for each other carried over into adulthood. Their contemporaries mention how Richard and Philip ate together and shared the same bed regularly. Granted, some historians claim that this bed-sharing was a political statement of the times, but what’s harder to contest is Richard’s infamous confession and penitence.
According to chroniclers of the time, Richard later left his estranged queen to seek out a renowned hermit to whom he could confess his sins. After hearing his damning confession, the hermit specifically told Richard to stay away from “the sin of sodomy,” at which point Richard immediately stopped seeing Philip and took back his wife (though the couple rarely saw each other and never produced an heir, leaving Richard’s highly incapable younger brother John of Robin Hood and Magna Carta fame to succeed him and rule the kingdom). Nowadays, the gayness of this famous figure of English history is forever immortalized in the Academy Award-winning film The Lion in Winter with a young Anthony Hopkins co-starring (with Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn) as the tortured closet case Richard.
Queen Christina of Sweden is remembered today as one of the most educated women of the 1600s. Intelligent, fickle, and moody, she openly flaunted her fondness for other women much to the displeasure of her royal court. Pope Alexander VIII even described Christina as “a queen without a realm, a Christian without faith, and a woman without shame.” And yet, she is one of the few women to be buried in the Vatican grotto.
Christina was well known in her own time as a cross-dressing lesbian who caused huge scandals when she openly rejected the sexual role expected of a queen, refusing to marry and voluntarily abdicating the throne at age 28 (she died at 62). While still the reigning monarch, though, she loved to dress in masculine drag and interact incognito with her subjects at the raunchy inns and taverns where the action was.
Even in the throne room, she was openly irreverent, forcing foreign dignitaries to acknowledge her lesbian lover. Ultimately, her conversion to Catholicism and ardent unwillingness to produce an heir led to pressure for her to step down in heavily Protestant Sweden. Even when her successor, Charles X Gustav, offered to marry her so she could again be queen, she just laughed at him, moved to Rome, and began wearing her male drag more regularly. Like King Richard, Christina’s queerness is immortalized in the classic film Queen Christina, which starred, appropriately enough, the ambiguously lesbian Swedish-American actress Greta Garbo in the title role. The Middle East is not without its gay heroes. Islam’s most popular and universally beloved poet, Rumi, also appears to have been a member of the tribe. Rumi was a Sufi mystic, dancer, and poet who lived in Persia in the 13th century. Said to be gifted as a child, he reported having visions and being able to express knowledge beyond his years. Once established as something of a famous mystic, Rumi encountered the philosopher Shams Tabrizi, who became his spiritual instructor and romantic lover.
Shams Tabrizi had been raised exclusively by women, and his profound wisdom was matched by his rugged good looks. Rumi and Shams complemented one another perfectly, and as their relationship grew, Rumi brought his lover to live with him at his academy and began writing some of Sufism and Islam’s most beautiful and romantic queer poetry. Popular topics included: how Shams’ beauty allowed Rumi to see the Divine, loving the Divine through loving Shams, and sex as a sacred act.
But trouble arose when Rumi’s students became increasingly jealous of Shams, whom they harassed mercilessly, to the point where Shams had to leave the academy for the sake of his sanity. Their time apart became the impetus for Rumi’s world-renowned philosophical works into the nature of love.
Staying in the Middle East, the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Ruth still stands as an exemplary tale of female-female love. It tells of a famine that devastates Israel, causing Naomi and her family to flee to nearby Moab, where her husband dies and her sons marry two Moabite women, one of whom is Ruth.
Years later, both of Naomi’s sons die, and in a gesture of sociopolitical compassion, she tells her daughters-in-law to go ahead and return to their original families and remarry so as not to be strapped with the life-long burden of taking care of their mother-in-law without a man to support them. (This was a society in which women could not own property and could not survive on their own. They depended upon their husband or, if need be, their parents for economic survival, so this was a highly altruistic gesture on Naomi’s part.)
However, Ruth refuses to leave Naomi, agreeing to go wherever she goes and help shoulder the burden of living as widows in a man’s world. Ruth’s self-sacrificing dedication to her mother-in-law eventually catches the eye of a man named Boaz, and the two marry and have children, making Ruth the great-grandmother of David, the giant slayer and king of Israel, as well as Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary and step-father of Jesus Christ (proving again that everyone has at least one queer relative in their family tree).
While not overtly lesbian, the homoerotic aspect of Naomi and Ruth’s relationship has been noted and debated down to the last semantic detail. By far the most memorable part of the tale is Ruth’s vehement refusal to leave Naomi and remarry. The passage claims that, while her sister-in-law kissed Naomi goodbye, Ruth “cleaved unto her.” In the original Hebrew, the word utilized is “dabaq,” which was used in the preceding books in the Torah, where it meant uniting with a spouse and being romantically or sexually drawn to someone. Moreover, Ruth’s passionate declaration to stay by Naomi’s side, come what may, is often a passage used in modern Jewish weddings between heterosexual couples, causing many to point out that the love between Naomi and Ruth is truly a romantic love.
Traveling east to China, we can find numerous examples of gay emperors, but none more so than Emperor Ai of the Han Dynasty, who ruled China during the 1st century BCE. He made no attempt to hide his sexual preference for men and carried out a long-lasting public romance with one of his minor officials, Dong Xian. Their relationship was the basis for the still-used Chinese euphemism for homosexuality as “the passion of the cut sleeve.” This originated from a legendary incident in which, while cuddling together in bed, the Emperor wanted to get up, but doing so would risk awakening his lover, who was fast asleep on top of one of his large, courtly sleeves. Rather than take that risk, Ai cut off his sleeve and slipped away.
Like other openly gay Han emperors before him, Ai showed undue favoritism to his beloved, promoting Dong Xian to “Commander of the Armed Forces.” Unfortunately for his lover, though. Emperor Ai died suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving Dong Xian as the socially despised top-ranking official in an emperor-less court. Dong Xian was soon ousted and forced to commit suicide.
Over in the new world, the Maya held the concept of queerness in high esteem, assigning it a special deity known as Chin. According to Mayan cosmology, Chin was a demon who developed a special attraction to a fellow male demon. Note that a demon here is understood as a non-divine spiritual being, without the connotation of “evil” that it has in Judeo-Christian culture. Instigated by Chin, the two began fooling around and developing ways in which people of the same sex could enjoy one another physically, thus introducing homosexuality into the world. The Maya regarded homosexual sex as originating from a spiritual being and as something more magical and powerful than heterosexual sex. It came to be associated with pomp and circumstance and, in turn, with wealth, elitism, and aristocratic luxury in Maya culture.
On crossing into U.S. territory, one tribe of Native American peoples that we encounter are the Zuni, who furnish one of the best-known examples of a “two spirit” person who combined and transcended the two main genders. The most famous of these individuals was We’wha, who was born a male and was at first initiated into the male mysteries of the Zuni people, only to be initiated into the female mysteries later on, an acknowledgment of her latent feminine energy, which became more pronounced with age.
We’wha’s charisma, networking skills, and connections with the white colonists who were coming into the New Mexico Territory brought her into close friendship with ethnologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson, who was studying the Zuni. Being the featured subject of Stevenson’s well-receive literary writings and research, We’wha gained prestige among the educated elite of American society and was eventually hired to create Zuni religious pottery for the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Moving in with Stevenson, she became something of an exotic curiosity as well as a Zuni cultural ambassador.
While in Washington, she circulated among and socialized within the highest levels of U.S. government personnel. However, during her rise to influence among the politically powerful, no one knew that We’wha had been born a biological male (predating M. Butterfly and The Crying Game by over a hundred years). Everyone, including President Cleveland, took her for a biological woman the whole time.
It wasn’t until years later that Stevenson found out about We’wha, making a special note of it in her diary, writing of how she would always regard We’wha as a woman and continue to treat her as such. We’wha, however, didn’t encounter such open-minded white people when she moved back to New Mexico, where she and some other high-profile Zuni leaders were accused of witchcraft and imprisoned.
To end this quick tour on the continent where our species originated, Africa: in Nigerian mythology Erinle is a Yoruba “Orisha”—a spirit in human form—who is dual-gendered, able to switch from male to female and back again. As a male, he is the god of healing and the earth, masculine and powerful, imposing and unyielding. As a female, she is the goddess of the waters, swift-flowing and life-giving. Primarily depicted as a male, Erinle switches between the two genders as needed to serve the people.
According to legend, Erinle was a hunter who lived in the forest for half of the year and with his wife for the other half. To amuse himself while hunting alone in the woods, Erinle used to chant and sing to himself. Enchanted by his beautiful voice, various villages spread his fame as a singer, until Ogun—the Orisha of weaponry and metalworking and also a famous percussionist—heard that someone equal to him in musical ability was wandering the woods. Their encounter was amicable: Ogun offered to teach Erinle the art of drumming in exchange for singing lessons. The two became close friends and could always be seen together, roaming the forest while singing and hunting. Many believe that this relationship had a romantic and sexual aspect
Erinle’s wife Oshun is among those who suspect such a relationship, and this gives rise to another cycle of stories. Oshun is the Orisha of luxury, pleasure, sexuality, and beauty—a challenge for any husband—and her relationship with Erinle is troubled. Oshun was originally attracted to Erinle’s seductive mix of masculinity and femininity, especially his firsthand ability to understand the needs of a woman. They eventually married and had many children together, but Oshun is (perhaps understandably) jealous that Erinle spends half of every year with his male “friend” Ogun. Eventually she has the marriage annulled and leaves Erinle with their children, disavowing all of them.
Needless to say, we can only scratch the surface of all the representations of queerness that have existed in and influenced human history and the arts. What about the queer-curious Odin of Viking lore? What about the third-gender mahu of Hawai’i, who preserved the hula throughout centuries of missionary oppression? What about the queer shamans of Siberia who exist beyond the binary of male and female? And the LGBT+ rites-of-passage among the aboriginal Australians and the samurai class of feudal Japan? Other tales for other days.