Being Gay

[meridannight]

I see Michelangelo's David as being very alive. The elongated arm shows potential action and the cherubic face casts eternal youth over the figure. That's just what I see and, being a piece of art, the work can just as easily say that to me as it can say what you see to you.

Of course. Different people have different interpretations. We all have a different background, after all. We are not blank slates gazing upon a work of art. We bring our past, upbringing, education/culture, and our very core essence into it.

"If you imagine a society where homosexuality has always existed and been visible and acceptable alongside heterosexuality, I do think such a society would not suffer from de-masculinization of gay men, or suffer from it to a significantly reduced and less serious degree."

Is not Late Roman culture an example of this? No one that I know considers the men of that era as anything but "masculine" though homosexuality was open and familiar in society.

I am not so sure about the Romans. They had their issues with the passive partners, and considered the latter a different (lesser) kind of male than the penetrating partner (although they couldn't have mostly known which one was which, so they must have done a lot of assuming along the way. And the process of assuming follows prejudice of its own).

What the contemporary people think of Romans is largely irrelevant, because they were not there to witness anything either way, and most people can imagine things to have been the way they want them to have been. So it is that Caesar's homosexual affairs were ''just rumors'', and even for relatively later figures such as Michelangelo their homosexuality was/is just ''malicious gossip''. People believe what they want to believe.

Even those historical figures whose homosexuality cannot be cast aside through such arguments, suffer from character deformation and their sexuality gets associated with decadence and immorality (Philip II of Macedon, for example). So homosexuality is portrayed as either feminine or decadent. It's a bias characteristic to the Western cultural sphere. Ancient China and Japan did not suffer from it.

China and Japan are the only examples (except for, maybe, some micro-cultural spaces in Europe at different times) I know where male relationships were seen as fully natural and just as authentic alongside the heterosexual relationships.

Greece, of course, could also be an example. But Greece, too, is rather problematic, because most of the homosexual relationships that are documented were between adults and prepubescent boys, or boys a few years (2-5) older than the prepubescent boys they were with (which doesn't exactly make it an adult-child relationship, but it was a temporary thing not expected to survive the growth of the younger's facial hair). (Note that in Greece, puberty started later than in our time!! Altogether four years later than it starts now, it is thought). That's not an adequate reflection on homosexuality. There were exceptions, but by far the man-child dynamic dominates the picture.