Here, have an op-ed/thing from the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, which is coincidentally the Palins’ local paper in Wasilla, AK (h/t my editor and cool dude Jesse, who posted this on Facebook):

While the word “homosexual” is not in the Bible, the behavior of those who practice homosexuality, and God’s estimation of them, very definitely is. When the word came into existence I cannot tell you, but what we can say for sure is that when Noah Webster published his first dictionary in 1828, it was not included. This means that homosexuality is a modern word invented to replace the word Noah Webster did include, sodomy, defined as a crime against nature. This is historical revisionism in action.

I’m pointing this out not because of the homophobia—we’ve heard that all before—but just because of how hilariously lazy it is. I suppose that Ron Hamman, the author of this article, must never have heard of the OED, whose first citation for “homosexuality” is an 1892 English translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which defines the word as “Great diminution or complete absence of sexual feeling for the opposite sex, with substitution of sexual feeling and instinct for the same sex.” Do you see the word “sodomy” there? Yeah, me neither. That’s because, no matter what decade you’re from or how out-of-touch bigoted you are, “homosexuality” and “sodomy” are not, historically speaking, equivalent terms—as the historians’ brief in Lawrence v. Texas (subscription-only) famously pointed out:

… sodomy prohibitions have varied enormously in the last millennium (and even since our own colonial era) in their definition of the offense and in their rationalization of its prohibition. The specification of “homosexual sodomy” as a criminal offense does not carry the pedigree of the ages but is almost exclusively an invention of the recent past.

Prohibitions against sodomy are rooted in the teachings of Western Christianity, but those teachings have always been strikingly inconsistent in their definition of the acts encompassed by the term. When the term “sodomy” was first emphasized by medieval Christian theologians in the eleventh century, they applied it inconsistently to a diverse group of nonprocreative sexual practices. In subsequent Latin theology, canon law, and confessional practice, the term was notoriously confused with “unnatural acts,” which had a very different origin and ranged even more widely (to include, for example, procreative sexual acts in the wrong position or with contraceptive intent). “Unnatural acts” is the older category, because it comes directly from Paul in Romans 1, but Paul does not associate such acts with (or even mention) the story of Sodom (Genesis 19) and appears not to have considered that story to be concerned with same-sex activity.

Later Christian authors did combine Romans 1 with Genesis 19, but they could not agree on what sexual practices were meant by either “unnatural acts” or “sodomy.” For example, in Peter Damian, who around 1050 championed the term “sodomy” as an analogy to “blasphemy,” the “sins of the Sodomites” include solitary masturbation. In Thomas Aquinas, about two centuries later, “unnatural acts” cover every genital contact intended to produce orgasm except penile-vaginal intercourse in an approved position. Many later Christian writers denied that women could commit sodomy at all; others believed that the defining characteristic of unnatural or sodomitical sex was that it could not result in procreation, regardless of the genders involved. In none of these authors does the term “sodomy” refer systematically and exclusively to same-sex conduct. Certainly it was not used consistently through the centuries to condemn that conduct. The restrictive use of the term in the Texas law at issue must itself be regarded as a historically recent innovation.

The brief goes on to discuss at great length the sodomy laws that were established in colonial America, which followed a broader definition of “unnatural acts” as described above. So if we’re going to be throwing around the “revisionist” label at anyone, it should really Hamman’s side—he’s the one deviating from the letter of the Bible and how it was implemented in Christian societies all the way through the 19th century. “Homosexuality” was a word that became increasingly common in the early 20th century in particular to describe a psychological condition, and later a less stigmatized way of being and sexual object choice. Its connotation is not that of specific sexual acts, and it’s pretty damn inaccurate to say that “homosexuality” replaced “sodomy” as a term. You simply can’t equate the two words, whatever connotation you want to ascribe to them.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I know that whoever reads this probably doesn’t need to be told all that. But if I may rationalize my self-indulgence, I think it’s important to reiterate these pieces of history, which even LGBT folks and their allies rarely learn, unless they take it upon their own initiative to do so (credit, by the way, for the Lawrence stuff goes to this past semester’s gender and sexuality class, information from which has graced this blog many times). I think there’s a lot to be said for compiling a historical narrative and then making sure that it gets heard, and that historical inaccuracies are called out—even if Hamman and folks who agree with him never read this post. If someone is motivated to be homophobic by their personal “ick” factor or their personal understanding of the religious doctrine they subscribe to, well, there’s not a whole lot I can do about that. But I have the facts on my side, and I think there is an intrinsic value to making sure they get heard alongside the complete disinclination of someone like Hamman to learn them.

Via Bilerico, there’s a bill in the South Carolina legislature that would introduce a program into the schools for educating middle- and high-school students about domestic violence—except its sponsors are adamant that it should only teach about domestic violence in opposite-sex relationships. Here’s one of the sponsors of the bill:

Bill sponsor Rep. Joan Brady said excluding gay relationships is fine and declared that, “Traditional domestic violence occurs in a man-woman, boy-girl situation.”

“The fact is, this is a gender-specific, abusive behavior. The overwhelming predominance of dating abuse occurs in a traditional or heterosexual relationship,” said Brady, R-Columbia.

This is one of those homophobic statements that’s so ridiculous, you have to laugh. Not only is traditional marriage between a man and a woman, so is traditional domestic violence! Since I usually expect the anti-gay line to be that same-sex relationships are more unstable or more prone to issues such as domestic violence, I was pretty surprised at this one. Maybe if that’s what the South Carolina legislature thinks of same-sex relationships, they should consider striking down their gay marriage ban….

From an interview Allen Ginsberg gave in 1965, as quoted in Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex, ed. Regina Marler:

… the only way you can be saved is to sing. In other words, the only way to drag up, from the depths of this depression, to drag up your soul to its proper bliss, and understanding, is to give yourself, completely, to your heart’s desire. The image will be determined by the heart’s compass, by the compass of whatever the heart moves toward and desires. And then you get on your knees or on your lap or on your head and you sing and chant prayers and mantras, till you reach a state of ecstasy and understanding, and the bliss overflows out of your body.

Well, I certainly can’t say anything to add to that.

From George Chauncey, Gay New York:

While some men regretted the supposed aberration in their character that queer denoted, others regarded their difference positively and took pleasure in being different from the norm. (As one associate of the writer Carl Van Vechten quipped, “Who wanted to be ‘normal’ and boring?”)

Well indeed.

From the Historians’ Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas, the SCOTUS case that struck down the Texas sodomy law:

Only the New Haven colony penalized “women lying with women,” and this for only ten years.

I think this must explain a great deal about Yale, don’t you?

I am reading this play about AIDS (that I mentioned above) and it is making me cry. I just wanted to share one more monologue with you:

I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan,John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold … These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier. Bruce, did you know that it was an openly gay Englishman who was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans’ Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do-and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don’t they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn’t have killed himself and maybe you wouldn’t be so terrified of who you are. The only way we’ll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn’t just sexual. It’s all there-all through history we’ve been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what’s in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we’re doomed. That’s how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war. Being defined by our cocks is literally killing us. Must we all be reduced to becoming our own murderers?…

When you talk to 20-year-old kids about how to define gay culture or gay identity, their answers are not just post-Stonewall. They’re post-AIDS. I cannot imagine being 20 or 30 years older and watching my friends die. And I think the fact that young people don’t have a sense of unified gay community, or maybe only do in terms of the marriage equality fight, has as much to do with the fact that we are no longer perceived as dying because of the kind of sex we have as it does with the fact that the police are no longer raiding our community spaces. Groups band together when they have to fight back. And we can fight AIDS now outside of the boundaries of the gay community, so it is presumptuous of me to say that that community needs still to band together. What new threat can possibly equal AIDS? But oh, I feel so shaken by how fragile things seem to have been, then.

Yet another real-seeming moment that has now been historicized from the point of view of my generation. Yet this one is not so distant that it can’t make me cry.

I’m reading about AIDS for gender and sexuality this week, and fuck, it’s depressing. You’ve got to wonder how gay liberation would have worked out differently if it weren’t for AIDS—and you’ve also got to mourn the dead, and all the homophobia that AIDS generated.

We’re reading this play called The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer, about the beginnings of the AIDS crisis in New York. The quote of the day is from the play, on a flyer distributed by a group of AIDS awareness activists, and it is this:

It’s 1982 now, guys, when are you going to come out? By 1984 you could be dead.

I had to stop reading to write that down. I’ve been thinking so much about this politics-of-the-closet stuff, and here I am having come of age so long after AIDS broke, so long even after Will and Grace and Ellen. Here I am in the age of same-sex marriage. What do I know of the problems the gay community faced, back then?

But I think we can all learn still from the sentences I quoted. European intellectuals back in the day used to make Catholic confessions on their deathbeds—just to be on the safe side. (God, how I rant incoherently.) I wish that no one should have to die in the closet.

For school, I read Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, one of those too-cool “non-fiction novels” of the ’60s, which tells the story of the anti-Vietnam March on the Pentagon in October 1967. One of the major events in the book (and generally historically speaking) is the hippies’ show of attempting to levitate the Pentagon, engineered by Abbie Hoffman and emceed by Ed Sanders, the frontman of The Fugs. After reading Mailer’s rendition of the happening, I thought it was about time I familiarized myself with the Fugs’ music, so downloaded an album called Tenderness Junction. I was shocked to hear, right in the middle of the album, the recording of what Ed Sanders said to “exorcise the evil spirits” from the Pentagon:

In the name of the amulets of touching, seeing, hearing, groping, and loving, we call upon the powers of the cosmos to protect our ceremonies, in the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis, God of the Dead, in the name of all those killed for causes they do not comprehend, in the name of the lives of the dead soldiers in Vietnam who were killed because of a bad karma, in the name of seaborne Aphrodite, in the name of the Magna Mater Deu Madea, in the name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Jesus, Yahweh, the unnameable, the quintessent finality of the Zoroastrian fire, in the name of Hermes, in the name of the beak of Thoth, in the name of the scarab, in the name… in the name of the Tyrone Power Pound Cake Society in the sky, in the name of Ra, Osiris, Horus, Nepta, Isis, Hippocrates, Hera, in the name of the flowing, living universe, in the name of the mouth of the river, we call upon the spirit TO RAISE THE PENTAGON FROM ITS DESTINY AND PRESERVE IT!

Which dissolves into a general chanting of “Out, demons, out!” and a fairly traditional exorcism-type thing that I can only juxtapose ironically with the only other famous exorcism I can think of offhand—what’s in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. I wonder what was going through the minds of Abbie Hoffman and the Fugs and all, then, when they planned this. I don’t know enough: how much political sarcasm lay behind the acided-out, freewheeling flower children? Mailer certainly shows us how the “beautiful people” front was perverted by soldiers who brutally attacked the protesters, which is an interesting and disturbing image, especially given the way that the hippies are so often mocked for their avoidance of the harsh reality that the soldiers faced in Vietnam.

Nevertheless, what I get out of that ridiculous speech, especially after hearing it spoken, is darkness behind its absurdity. The March on the Pentagon, of course, was an overtly political event, but even Woodstock had its political overtones. These aren’t just acid freaks, you know? They knew what they were doing.