Subscribe"The sodomite was a recidivist, but the homosexual is now a species."I couldn't find a full source on the net.
"The homosexual of the 19th century became a person: a"past, a history and an adolescence, a personality, a life style; also a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mystical physiology. Nothing of his full personality escapes his sexuality."
“As a third Boston High School student was arraigned in the assault of a Moroccan girl by classmates who thought she was gay, a relative of the alleged victim yesterday said the child was terrified about returning to school alone... The girl told police last week that she had been attacked while riding an MBTA train by six teenagers who believed she was a lesbian because she followed a custom common in her homeland: holding hands with another girl.”from Quotes about Friendship
— Francie Latour, Boston Globe, February 2, 2000
Nearly one in 10 men who say they're straight have sex only with other men, a New York City survey finds. And 70% of those straight-identified men having sex with men are married....Heh, they said annals.
In fact, 10% of all married men in this survey report same-sex behavior during the past year.In nearly every study of sexual behavior, the percentage of men who report sex with men is higher than the percentage of men who report being gay....
The findings appear in the Sept. 19 [2006] issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man — which, hard to define, underlies the lessons and ideals of the profound saviours of every land and age, and which seems to promise, when thoroughly developed, cultivated, and recognized in manners and literature, the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these states will then be fully expressed.By now, the word "adhesiveness" is as forgotten as phrenology itself -- but the emotion remains near the heart of the masculine soul, looking for safe and reciprocated outlets, with no adequate name of its own.
It is to the development, identification and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it) that I look for the counter-balance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy and for the spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream and will not follow my inferences: but I confidentially expect a time when there will be seen running through it like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown, not only giving tone to individual character and making it unprecedentedly emotional, muscular, heroic and refined, but having the deepest relation to general politics. I say democracy infers such loving comradeship as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain and incapable of perpetuating itself.
...my own documentation of the lost world has been with everyday photographs of two or more American men together...Eric Anderson writes:
Official athletic team portraits were once especially common scenes of closeness among males, with teammates sometimes lying atop each other. ...the earliest snapshots also often showed males, boys and men alike, posing very close together, obviously delighting in one another’s company...
With a distancing and stiffness of pose in team portraits, the first widespread signal of a change, males began slowly but quite surely to move apart in photographs as the twentieth century progressed... The contrast between earlier and later poses of men together in photographs is striking, charting an increasing discomfort with closeness to each other’s bodies. The practice of males having their studio portraits taken together, once such a common token of association, was by comparison virtually extinct by the 1930s.
The closeness of old, and even studio portraits of men together, survived, however, even thrived, in the military, particularly in wartime. So common were poses of obviously tender affection between servicemen during the Second World War, and so extensive was men’s participation in that war, that one can speak of no less than a widespread revival during those years of romantic friendships among men.
...Ibson’s collection shows that as American culture increasingly became aware of homosexuality, and particularly the notion of the homosexual as a distinct kind of person, that the resultant fear of being thought “one of those” (homophobia) put a wedge in-between the intimacy that men once used to cherish as the ultimate – fraternal bonding.That conclusion may be a matter of debate but the photographic evidence is compelling.
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posted by jouke at 3:50 PM on March 17, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]