I haven’t read at all in two weeks because I have 30 pages left in “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” I’ve never read any Tom Robbins before but I’ve heard he is notorious for Downer endings. I feel like I’m at a fake out point in the story, it looked like the character was going to make a really bad decision, but she course corrects at the last moment. With this much story left, I get the feeling the last bit is her slowly sliding into the same scenario she narrowly avoided.

Which is why I didn’t use the term straight or gay in either of my comments. The reason I responded to the initial comment was because I think that people often say this because it deletes male/male compassion from the equation, which I think straight American men are really more uncomfortable with than the sexual aspect. I’m not saying that two Spartans bustin’ a nut together makes them gay, like you said the term doesn’t apply to those people. But it does paint a different picture of how homosexual activity fit into there life and culture. The main thing I’m trying to get at is there consistent and significant incongruities in every cultures values around sex and how people actually behave, and a general impulse to “prudify” the past. I’m not saying this applies to you, you clearly know your history, but I feel the need to correct the record when people imply that Greek and Roman homosexual activities were compassion-less expressions of power. It’s not accurate, and people sometimes use it to claim that modern homosexual activity is somehow new.

So the origins are a little more loosely Goosey, but I’ll spell out how I see it. So around a thousand years ago chattel slavery really started its decline, it took a long time though. We see the start of it’s decline with the moral philosophers of the dark ages, and really even earlier than that, the late Roman Empire did not see slavery as moral, it was just a fact of life. It would be like asking if war is moral. As less and less of the labor force was legally compelled yo work, either by being owned directly or being serfs that came packaged with the land they were on. If people aren’t legally obligated to work for you, how do you keep them working? One effective way is to control access to sex. It wasn’t just homosexuality that was less repressed, like I was saying in the other comment Roman’s did not consider having sex with a prostitute to be adultery. By disenfranchising women and making it illegal for them to own property, you put women in a situation where they have to marry. By making fornication and same sex encounters illegal, you force men to have to enter into a marriage contract to (legally) get access to sex. Burdened with dependents, you limit a man’s economic freedom of movement and his freedom in general. A man with mouths to feed is less likely to stand up for himself due to poor treatment. It’s even pretty explicit that this was the goal at points in history, there is a lot of talk about marriage being an institution meant to civilize men. Which is another way of saying “this system helps preserve the status quo.” It also keeps the population growing, which was seen as more and more imperative as industrialization ramped up and the labor potential of any able bodied man skyrocketed. We of course also see that in laws being passed against sodomy, those laws weren’t just for gay folks, it was the states way of saying “fucking is only for making babies and nothing else. You don’t get to have sex unless there is a chance of it producing offspring in a stable family environment.” It seems from a modern perspective that the repression around sex really peaked in Europe during the Victorian era, but it’s hard to tell as historical resources about gay life are often destroyed. For instance, at the same time that homosexuality was punishable by imprisonment in Europe, we have records of various “Molly houses”, which were quite a bit like modern gay bars or burlesque houses. We also have some old words that imply a more complicated situation, for instance the historical meaning of the word “Minion” is the lover of a powerful man. Powerful men were allowed things like that, so long as they fulfilled their martial duties as well. Even here in the US I’ve seen the rhetoric shift just in my life time, when I was younger you would hear a lot of talk from the political right about “family values” and “ensuring a stable society”, these days, now that gay marriage has been around for awhile and society didn’t spontaneously collapse, they seem to have switched to calling trans people pedophiles.

But the reason I think this moment is different and not just part of the cycle is the legalization of gay marriage. That’s an endorsement that these relationships are allowed in our societal setup. And I think things have been moving that direction since the sixties. Ironically, the birth control pill might have paved the way for gay acceptance. The advent of the pill meant women could have careers, and could also plan out when they were going to get pregnant. The women’s rights movement sprung out of that, and that disruption of the “men provide for women” setup created room for gay relationships to fit in.

I don’t really see a contradiction with what I said and what you’ve laid out here. What I’m trying to get at is that there is always an incongruence between societally accepted and recognized relationships, so we should take interpretations that rely on law or philosophy from the time with a grain of salt, especially when they seem to contradict primary sources from day to day life.

I’m aware of the Roman’s high levels of bottom shame, and, as I said above, it persist in modern culture. As you said, it would be a source of shame to be the bottom, and I will admit to a bit of purposeful omission regarding sex between soldiers. Most of the depictions we have of that are soldiers engaged in frottage, no one is “playing Juliet”, so to speak. But that’s the official party line, if we went off official attitudes in the military from the 70s in the same way we would have to say there were no gay military relationships at the time, and we know that’s just not true.

But to expand out on what you are saying, yeah it does seem to be a common theme in other cultures too, with variations, many of which also persist today. Some cultures it was seen as childish for a man to enjoy receptive sex, some controls conflated it with transsexuality and would only accept gay men who presented as women (usually in areas where the population has less sexual dimorphism). One of the big problems in my opinion is that we see just in recent times how quickly attitudes can change and fluctuate, and we know that cultures that rely heavily on persecution of out groups are more likely to destroy media and historical records, and given that homosexuality is a persistent out group, there is probably a lot of queer history that’s been destroyed. Like the works of sapho have been lost and found 3 times, and I think it’s telling that her work deals with love and lust outside of social institutions.

Just by the by, this is also why I think that the women’s liberation movement really kicked off the gay rights movement. The last 100 years have seen tons of pushback from subalterns of one sort or another, and I see that as being the “moral arc of history” and all that Jazz. But we see pockets of it throughout history. Like I had a professor get mad at me once for writing an essay arguing that Diogenes was the “ earliest recorded punk rocker” lol, but I really do think it has some merit. And there is a weird connection between being the receptive partner and rebelliousness, the term punk originally had an association with being a male receptive partner.

I think the take that their relationships were vastly different due to power structures is a bit lacking in nuance. I don’t mean to come off as a jerk with what I’m about to say, but this is important to me so please give what I’m saying a fair shake.

If we live in a post scarcity world a thousand years from now, the people of the future could just as easily say “they lived in a society of unequal access, love as we know it wasn’t possible for them.” I also think the idea that homosexual activity always took place within a power structure is, for one inaccurate, but is also a concession that keeps men from having to look too closely at their own sexuality. It keeps sex in a viewpoint of the receptive partner being somehow lower than the penetrating partner. It’s hard for modern men to reconcile how much homosexual activity there was compared to our modern world, it’s easier if we think it was mainly the context of it being forced on someone of a socially lower position. In modern American society there still seem to be a lot of people who believe you aren’t “really gay” unless you are the receptive partner, and I think this view of Greek/ Roman same sex relationships is easier for people to come around to.

We also have a ton of examples of men of the same social station having sex with each other, the Spartans would be fucking their bunk mates for years before they were married. I think the interpretation is backwards, it’s more that marriage wasn’t an institution of love. It could be seen as dismissing same sex relationships because there was no equivalent institution for same sex couples. But, it also wasn’t considered adultery to have sex with another man of your station or lower, or to have sex with a prostitute. Because the marriage wasn’t necessarily for that, it was to build connections and influence while continuing your family line. You weren’t seen as threatening that institution (as a man) as long as the people you were banging couldn’t legally be your wife anyway. There were certainly marriages where the participants started in love, or fell into love, just as in the case with arranged marriages today. But love can blossom in many different types of relationships. Take modern day relationships between men in the military. People might get in to them for simple release of tension, for companionship and safety, for camaraderie, or for love. But that’s also true of who ever you might meet at the bar, or even who you might marry. So I do imagine there were relationships between men that looked pretty recognizable to modern homosexual relationships. The past is a foreign country, but people are the same all over.

Beyond that, Greece was an extremely small part of the ancient world. Many cultures accepted homosexuality, and it’s created this strange incongruence in there modern culture and their mythology. Cultures started to really fall in lock step about it a thousand years ago, but pretty much everywhere it’s fluctuated between “put them to death!” And “uncle Steve and Kevin are just roommates.” Several times since that point, and we are only starting to see real acceptance again in the last forty or so. I think industrialization really solidified homophobic attitudes and laws, and the women’s liberation movement have room for people to pushback, but that’s a whole other comment.

I gotta defend this one a bit. I think most people find the Johnny Truant parts of the book to be a slog, but it’s what makes the pacing effective. I couldn’t read this book quickly, I would read a Johnny Section, a house section, and take a break. Yeah, part of me would like to see more happen in the house, and it takes a bit to get really wild. Whenever I describe the book to someone I think would like it, I never give much away about the house, just that “this family is making some renovations to a house and they discover that the house is a tiny bit bigger on the inside than the outside. That’s all I can tell you.” But it’s part of the story that we can’t really have a satisfying answer about the house, it’s an ongoing endeavor. Spending more time their or writing exciting parts that don’t really serve a purpose beyond being exciting would only serve to piss readers off at the ending when we don’t get a satisfying answer about the nature of the house. It woulda been “lost” in book form. But I agree it can be a slog.

I got this a lot with N0S4A2, there is a whole sequence about the main character abusing ecstasy and it just screams “I have never had a drug habit / lived adjacent to those who have.” Nothing wrong with that, I think the idea that all great artist are depraved is false and damaging to young people. But it wasn’t at all well researched, and that’s a pretty weird drug to chose for having a regular habit of. It’s characterized that she’s doing ecstasy like a couple times a week, alone and just kinda listening to music in her room. That sounds more like a pot habit, and the whole thing reads like the author felt like a pot habit was too light and a heroin or Xanax habit was too much.

Oh no I’m reading even cowgirls get the blues rn and it’s my first book by him and I’m absolutely loving it. Now I’m scared (nobody spoil anything!)

One time I got caught selling weed in college, I was still living in the dorms. I had a disciplinary hearing with the head of housing for my dorm block, which could have potentially cost me my housing. I get into the office and she has the entire set of the wheel of time series on her bookshelf. We started talking about fantasy books, and she decided that the best course of disciplinary action was “do nothing”.

….so yes?