” … Aristophanes professed to open another vein of discourse; he had a
mind to praise Love in another way, unlike that either of Pausanias or
Eryximachus. Mankind; he said, judging by their neglect of him, have
never, as I think, at all understood the power of Love. For if they had
understood him they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and
offered solemn sacrifices in his honor; but this is not done, and most
certainly ought to be done: since of all the gods he is the best friend
of men, the helper and the healer of the ills which are the great
impediment to the happiness of the race. I will try to describe his power
to you, and you shall teach the rest of the world what I am teaching you.
In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has
happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present,
but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally
three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a
name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real
existence, but is now lost, and the word “Androgynous” is only preserved
as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round,
his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet,
one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and
precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to
correspond.

He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as
he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning
on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over
and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast.
Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the
sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the man was originally the child of
the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is
made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and
round: like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the
thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the
gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes[1] who, as Homer
says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods.
Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and
annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then
there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to
them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence
to be unrestrained.

At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said:
“Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their
manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then
they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will
have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk
upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet,
I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.”[2] He
spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling,
or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after
another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in
order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would
thus learn a lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their
wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled
the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the
belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the
center, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel);
he also molded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a
shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in
the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state.

After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half,
came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in
mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of
dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do
anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived,
the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them, being the
sections of entire men or women, and clung to that. They were being
destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the
parts of generation round to the front, for this had not been always
their position and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like
grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the
transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the
mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might
continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go
their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one
another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making
one of two, and healing the state of man.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but
the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men
who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous
are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also
adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the
woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female
companions[3] are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male
follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original
man, they hang about men and embrace them[4], and they are themselves the
best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some
indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do
not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and
manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like
them. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only,
which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach
manhood they are lovers of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry
or beget children,–if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law;
but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another
unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love,
always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets
with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of
youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of
love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other’s
sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass
their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire
of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards
the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of
something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot
tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side,
by side and to say to them, “What do you people want of one another?”
they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw
their perplexity he said: “Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and
night to be in one another’s company? for if this is what you desire, I
am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being
two you shall become one, and while you live a common life as if you were
a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one
departed soul instead of two–I ask whether this is what you lovingly
desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?”–there is not a
man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not
acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming
one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the
reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and
the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. There was a time, I
say, when we were one, but now because of the wickedness of mankind God
has dispersed us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into villages by the
Lacedaemonians [Spartans[5]]. And if we are not obedient to the gods,
there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in
basso-relievo, like the profile figures having only half a nose which are
sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be like tallies.

Wherefore let us exhort all men to piety, that we may avoid evil, and
obtain the good, of which Love is to us the lord and minister; and let no
one oppose him-he is the enemy of the gods who oppose him. For if we are
friends of the God and at peace with him we shall find our own true
loves, which rarely happens in this world at present.
———————
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In the Odyssey, Homer states that Ephialtes and Otys were the
“tallest men on earth” ["nine fathoms tall and nine cubits broad"] and
planned to overthrow the gods by piling Mt. Ossa on top of Mt. Olympus,
and then Mt. Pelion on Ossa, but Zeus destroyed them before they could
accomplish their plan.
[2] Specifically, “dancing as at the Askolia,” the second day of the
rural Dionysia, a rustic festival in honor of the wine-god Dionysus.
Aristophanes, in his comedy The Acharnians, describes one such festival,
which featured the singing of lewd songs and the carrying of an enormous
phallus in a procession.
[3] This apparently corresponds somewhat to our modern term “Lesbian,”
and is closely related to the Greek word for courtesan (”hetaira”) but
otherwise rather obscure etymologically. Courtesans generally were the
only women in classical Greece accorded a public life; being
well-educated in politics, philosophy, history, art, drama and other such
matters, they were often encouraged to participate with men in debates on
those topics. According to the classicist Kenneth Dover, “this is the
only surviving passage from classical Attic literature which acknowledges
the existence of female homosexuality.”
[4] Rather, “They love men and delight in lying down beside and being
entwined with men.”
[5] The Spartans attacked the Arcadian city-state of Mantinea,
demolishing its walls, and dispersing its population into four different
settlements.

In order to shake things up a bit, turn your preconceived notions about what is “right” and “wrong,” “superior” or “inferior,” this entire hetero-supremacist attitude of yours on its head, including the place male homosexuality, homosexual promiscuity and male heterosexuality hold in society, all we have to do is leave the present for a moment, and take a closer look, for instance, at the negative imagery associated —for MILLENIA— with the more extreme forms of male heterosexuality, such as the “womanizer”. Remember — these are views, beliefs, concepts about heterosexual males that held sway all the way from ancient Greece until late-17th-century-Europe:

“If, in early modern England … homosexuality [coexisted in a highly conflicted but intensively structured combination] to patriarchy, we cannot be sure that all sodomites were perceived to be men who acted like women. Nicholas Breton’s character of ‘An Effeminate Fool’ [published in London in 1616] suggests just the opposite. At first Breton’s caricature in prose seems to match perfectly the modern stereotype of a faggot”[1]:

“An Effeminate foole is the figure of a Baby; he loves nothing but gay, to look in a Glasse, to keepe among Wenches, and, to play with trifles: to feed on sweet meats, and to be daunced in Laps, to be imbraced in Armes, and to be kissed on the Cheeke: To talke Idlely, to look demurely, to goe Nicely, and to Laugh continually….”[2]

“But when Breton tells us the effeminate fool keeps a mistress and that he is a ‘Womans man,’ we realize that Breton’s ideas about effeminacy are no different from those of Plutarch’s Protogenes [in his “Moralia,” written around the beginning of the second century A.D.] Homosexual desire in Protogenes’ view is not a matter of men wanting to be like women. QUITE THE CONTRARY. IT IS TOO GREAT A SEXUAL INTEREST IN WOMEN THAT MAKES A MAN BECOME LIKE THEM [original text italicized]. Homosexuality is a matter of men desiring other men.”[3]

The Roman historian Cornelius Nepos (c. 110 B.C.- c. 24 B.C.) supports this view in his prologue to “Liber de excellentibus ducibus exterarum gentium” [“On the Great Generals”] that: “Laudi in Creta ducitur adulescentulis quam plurimos habuisse amatores.” / “In Crete it is considered praiseworthy for a young man to have as many male lovers as possible.”

“Many Greeks represented gay love as the only form of eroticism which could be lasting, pure, and truly spiritual. The origin of the concept of ‘Platonic love’ (which postdates Plato by several centuries) was not Plato’s belief that sex should be absent from gay affairs but his conviction that only love between persons of the same gender could transcend sex. The Attic lawgiver Solon [Athenian legislator and poet, ca. 640 – ca. 560 B.C.] considered homosexual eroticism too lofty for slaves and prohibited it to them.”[4]

In a book of his “Moralia” (“Erotikos” / “Dialogue on Love”), “Plutarch [46 – c. 119 A.D.] had … the proponent of gay love [Protogenes], deprecate heterosexual passion in strident terms”[5]:

“True love has nothing to do with women’s quarters, nor will I agree that you have ever felt LOVE for women or girls, any more than flies feel love for milk…. But if this [heterosexual] passion must also be called ‘love,’ it is an effeminate and illegitimate one…. The one true love is the love of youths…. That other soft and domestic passion that whiles away its time on the laps and beds of women, constantly seeking indulgence and emasculating itself with unmanly, unloving, and uninspiring pleasure—it deserves to be banished, as Solon did in fact banish it…. Love is beautiful and decorous; pleasure is vulgar and servile. For this reason it is considered uncouth for a free man to be in love with slaves, since this sort of passion is merely sexual, like relations with women…”[6]

“The [twentieth-century] idea that gay men are less masculine … and gay women less feminine is almost certainly the result of antipathy to homosexuality rather than empirical observation. … It must not be supposed, however, that such stereotypes affected more tolerant societies, or that any connection between homosexuality and ‘inappropriate’ gender behavior was assumed. On the contrary, among ancient peoples who acknowledged the likelihood and propriety of erotic interest between persons of the same gender it was often assumed that men who loved men would be more masculine than their heterosexual counterparts, by the logical (if unconvincing) argument that men who loved men would emulate them and try to be like them, while men who loved women would become like women, i.e. ‘effeminate.’ Aristophanes’ [Greek poet, ca. 445 – ca. 385 B.C.] speech in the Symposium of Plato [ca. 427 – ca. 347 B.C.] is probably the most blatant example of this counterprejudice. ‘Those who love men and rejoice to lie with and be embraced by men are also the finest boys and young men, being naturally the most manly. The people who accuse them of shamelessness lie; they do this not from shamelessness but from courage, manliness, and virility, embracing what is like them. A clear proof of this is the fact that as adults they alone acquit themselves as men in public careers [i.e. they alone become statesmen].’
An equation of homosexuality with effeminacy in men would hardly have occurred to people whose history, art, popular literature, and religious myths were all filled with the homosexual exploits of such archetypically masculine figures as Zeus, Hercules, Achilles, et al.”[7] “[For example, with] Hercules alone more than FOURTEEN male lovers are associated.”[8]

“A … major distortion in modern treatments of Roman homosexuality is the idea that tolerance of or indifference toward homosexual practices was associated with the decline of Rome. Several varieties of this theory exist, some claiming that it was homosexuality and general immorality which CAUSED the decline of Rome, others that such sexual license was a concomitant of imperial decadence. … It is worth noting in this context that the period of greatest output of gay literature was not during the decay of the Empire at all—homosexual writings from the third century on became increasingly rare—but from the first two centuries of the Empire, when Rome was at the zenith of its power and prestige. Petronius, Juvenal, Martial, Plutarch (Erotikos), Achilles Tatius, Lucian, and many of the later Greek poets—all worked not in the collapsing Empire of the third and fourth centuries but in the thriving, vital Empire of the first and second, following the traditions of Vergil, Catullus, et al. who had written even earlier. By the time the Empire was clearly in decline, very little literature dealt with homosexual themes, and that which did—like the Affairs of the Heart—depicted a society in which tolerance of homosexuality was declining as rapidly as political stability.”[9]

“Romans inherited Greek attitudes on this subject and were in any case familiar with the homosexual interests of such thoroughly masculine public figures as [Lucius Cornelius] Sulla [Roman general and politician, 138 – 78 B.C.] and Hadrian [i.e. Publius Aelius Hadrianus, 76 – 138 A.D., Roman emperor]. Long after public idealization of gay males disappeared in the West, they continued to distinguish themselves in traditionally masculine enterprises. Richard Lion Heart [King of England from 1189 to 1199], Edward II [King of England from 1307 to 1327], … the Prince de la Roche sur Yon, the [general, Louis Joseph de Bourbon] Maréchal de Vendôme [1654-1712] — all these men, noted for martial skill or valor were also noted for being gay, and it would have been difficult to foment in the minds of their contemporaries any necessary association of effeminacy and homosexuality in men.”[10]

“The first evidence we have of homosexual acts being associated with our [20th-century] sense of effeminacy does not occur until the eighteenth century. Even then, however, patriarchy and homosexuality were still equated in the minds of certain outsiders who ought to have known whereof they spoke—and acted. During the eighteenth-century wave of homophobia in England, it was the women in the crowd who were the most angry and most abusive when sodomites were pilloried…” [See the following URL for a depiction of an 18th-c. "Molly" (gay man) at the pillory]:
http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/exalted.htm

“…Why such outrage? Was it their identity as women that was threatened? Or their prerogatives? Did they suspect that a conspiracy of men was cheating them of sexual satisfactions that ought to be theirs alone?”[11]

FOOTNOTES:
1. Bruce R. Smith, “Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics,” p. 171, The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
2. Nicholas Breton, “The Goode and the Badde, or Descriptions of the Worthies and the Unworthies of this Age,” pp. 30-31, George Purslowe, London, England, 1616. Cf. OED [Oxford English Dictionary] under “gay”: “2. Anything that looks gay or showy; an ornament; esp. One that is used to amuse a child. b. Fig. A ‘toy,’ childish amusement.” (with citation of another text by Breton).
3. Bruce R. Smith, op. cit., p. 171.
4. John Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century,” p. 27, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London, 1980.
5. Ibid, p. 125.
6. Ibid., pp. 24-25.
7. Ibid., p. 25 n. 44.
8.Ibid., p. 25.
9.Ibid., pp. 71, 73.
10. Bruce R. Smith, op. cit., pp. 172-73.

——————————————————
“During the rise of secularism in 18th Century France, ‘pederasty’ was used as a replacement for the term ’sodomy’ which seemed old and ecclesiastical because of its biblical origins. In spite of the original Greek meaning of the term, the French used it to refer to sex between males, and sometimes even between females, regardless of the age of the participants. This usage continued in 18th and 19th Century France and Germany, but was ultimately replaced by ‘homosexual’ at the beginning of the 1900s.” Source: http://www.gayhistory.com/rev2/words/pederasty.htm

“We stand stunned before the brutality with which the Nazis threatened, persecuted and destroyed all those who did not correspond to their inhuman ideology,” Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Culture, Bernd Neumann (from the aforesaid Christian Democratic Union party, the German equivalent to America’s Republican party) said while inaugurating the memorial to homosexual victims of the Nazi regime six months ago. “The experience of war and Holocaust, state terror and tyranny, puts on us Germans a special responsibility to protect freedom and human rights.”

One of the last surviving homosexuals of the Holocaust and bearer of the Pink Triangle, 95-year-old Rudolf Brazda, who was incarcerated in the Buchenwald concentration camp from 1941 bis 1945, visited the above-mentioned Memorial on June 28th of this year. (Brazda lived with his lover, who died six years ago, for 35 years in southern Germany. He is presently residing in France.)

You will find his picture, and a short recount of his life (in German), at the following URL:
http://www.ondamaris.de/?p=1914

It is high time America, too, learned from its past mistakes and repented for both past and present trespasses it has committed against us.

Maybe now some of the readers here are finally, dimly, beginning to realize that state and national laws supporting and sustaining heterosexual supremacy and hegemony are, in the end, incompatible with democracy, or democratic ideals, as preached, but most certainly not practiced by the United States. Do you really need me to tell you that the Emperor is naked, and your “democracy” as it now stands — a farce? Under present conditions, the American Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution aren’t worth the yellowed, moldy parchment they’re written on. We can only hope Pres. Obama achieves the many goals (including the recission of DOMA and all antigay legislation, and the initiation of federal anti-discrimination laws) he promised to work toward should he become President.

“We are not legislating, honorable members, for people far away and not known by us. [In the Spanish original: ‘No estamos legislando, Señorías, para gentes remotas y extrañas.’] We are enlarging the opportunity for happiness to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends
and, our families: at the same time we are making a more decent society, because a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members.”
“In the poem ‘The Family,’ our [gay] poet Luis Cernuda was sorry because, ‘How does man live in denial in vain by giving rules that prohibit and condemn?’ [In case you speak Spanish, the original text to Luis Cernuda’s poem, “La Familia,” reads: ¿Cómo se engaña el hombre y
cuán en vano da reglas que prohiben y condenan?]
“Today, Spanish society answers to a group of people who, for many years, have been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose dignity has been offended, their identity denied, and their liberty oppressed. Today Spanish society grants them the respect they deserve, recognizes their rights, restores their dignity, affirms their identity, and restores their liberty.”
“It is true that they are only a minority, but their triumph is everyone’s triumph. It is also the triumph of those who oppose this law, even though they do not know this yet: because it is the triumph of
Liberty. Their victory makes all of us (even those who oppose the law) better people, it makes our society better. Honorable members, There is no damage to marriage or to the concept of family in allowing two people of the same sex to get married. To the contrary, what happens is this class of Spanish citizens get the potential to organize their lives with the rights and privileges of marriage and family. There is no danger to the institution of marriage, but precisely the opposite: this law enhances and respects marriage.”
“Today, conscious that some people and institutions are in profound disagreement with this change in our civil law, I wish to express that, like other reforms to the marriage code that preceded this one, this law
will generate no evil, that its only consequence will be the avoiding of senseless suffering of decent human beings. A society that avoids senseless suffering of decent human beings is a better society.”
“With the approval of this Bill, our country takes another step in the path of liberty and tolerance that was begun by the democratic change of government. Our children will look at us incredulously if we tell them
that many years ago, our mothers had less rights than our fathers, or if we tell them that people had to stay married against their will even though they were unable to share their lives. Today we can offer them a
beautiful lesson: every right gained, each access to liberty has been the result of the struggle and sacrifice of many people that deserve our
recognition and praise.”
“Today we demonstrate with this Bill that societies can better themselves and can cross barriers and create tolerance by putting a stop to the unhappiness and humiliation of some of our citizens. Today, for
many of our countrymen, comes the day predicted by Kavafis [the great Greek gay poet] one century ago:
‘Later ‘twas said of the most perfect society / someone else, made like me / certainly will come out and act freely.’”

According to Hergemöller, typical medieval forms of execution for gay men were: “death by starvation after being locked up in a large bird cage,” “drowned in swamps,” “drowning … being shackled and then tossed into the sea,“ “… strangulation. The garrotte, a ligature of chain used to strangle someone to death, was the preferred instrument of execution for sodomites in the Netherlands of the early modern era, but it was also avidly used in Spain, Portugal and other countries. … But the most typical form of punishment for sodomites in the Middle Ages was being publicly burnt at the stake, the same mode of death that heretics, Jews and witches met with. Normally, the victims were beheaded before being burnt … but such means of easing the transition to death were not obligatory.”[1]

“Holy” heterosexual matrimony thus served, from the very beginning, as an instrument of (lethal) oppression of homosexuals! This only goes to show how desperately this “time-honored” institution is in need a complete, democratic overhaul. Denying us the right to marry only perpetuates the suffering which began with these murderously exclusive tactics that were once part and parcel of “holy matrimony”.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the first publication of ANY laws in colonial America, the “Capitall Lawes of New-England,” as “Established within the Iurisdiction of Massachusets” in 1641 and ‘42, included the death penalty for sodomy. Most of the fifteen capital crimes were based on Old Testament references actually cited (!) in the text! The capital laws of Massachusetts Bay provided death for:
1.“any man” who worshipped “any other God, but the Lord God” (Deut. 13. 6., etc.)
2.“any man or woman” who “be a Witch” (Exod. 22. 18, Lev. 10. 27, etc.)
3.“any person” who “shall blaspheme the Name of God the Father, Sonne, or Holy Ghost, with direct, expresse, presumptuous, or high-handed blasphemy, or shall curse God in the like manner” (Lev. 24. 15, 16)
4.“any person” who “shall commit any wilfull murther [murder]” (Exod. 21. 12, 13, 14, etc.)
5.“any person” who “slayeth another suddenly in his anger, or cruelty of passion” (Lev. 24. 17, etc.)
6.“any person” who slew another “through guile” (Exod. 21.14)
7.“a man or woman” who “shall lye with any beast or bruit creature, by carnall copulation” (Lev. 20. 15, 16.
8.“a man” who “lyeth with mankinde, as he lyeth with a woman, both of them have committed abomination, they both shall surely be put to death. (Lev. 20. 13)
9.“any person” who “committeth adultery with a married, or espoused wife, the Adulterer, and the Adulteresse, shall surely be put to death. (Lev. 20. 10 and 18)
10.“any man” who “shall unlawfully have carnall copulation with any woman-childe under ten years old, either with, or without her consent, he shall be put to death. (No Old Testament references here.)
11.“any man” who “shall forcibly, and without consent, ravish any maid or woman that is lawfully married or contracted, he shall be put to death.” (Deut. 22. 25&c.)
12.“any man” who “shall ravish any maid or single woman (committing carnall copulation with her by force, against her will) that is above the age of ten yeares ; he shall be either punished with death, or with some other grievous punishment, according to circumstances, at the discretion of the Judges : and this Law to continue till the Court take further order.” (No Old Testament references here.)
13.“any man” who “stealeth a man, or man-kinde, he shall surely be put to death.” (Exod. 21. 16)
14.“any man” who rises up “false witnesse wittingly, and of purpose to take away any mans life, he shall be put to death.” (Deut. 19. 16, 18, 19)
15.“any man” who “shall conspire, or attempt any invasion, insurrection, or publick rebellion against our Common-wealth, or shall endeavour to surprize any Towne or Townes, Fort or Forts therein : or shall treacherously, or perfidiously attempt the alteration and subversion of our frame of pollity, or government fundamentally, he shall be put to death. (Sam. 3. & 18, & 20)

[Note: Bible passages might be incorrectly numbered due to the relative illegibility of numbers in the original document (photocopy).]

In the recent past, the (woefully misnamed) Rev. Daniel Lovely[2] of the Watertown Baptist Temple in New York, advocated capital punishment for homosexuals. “They should be killed through government means. There a lot of people in Watertown that enjoy living in a non-Christian world and it’s got to be stopped.”

In the theocracy such “Religious Right” kooks strive for, we might well find ourselves confronted with the (no doubt verrrrrrrrry selective!) reintroduction of Bible-based legislation such as that of mid-17th-century New England (leaving out, of course, all passages that might directly affect HETEROSEXUAL male behavior, such as the death penalty for “committing adultery” and “ravishing maids.” After all, it probably wouldn’t be in the best interests of religious zealots and right-wing Republicans (such as the known adulterer Newt Gingrich), to have two-thirds of the population, including themselves and most of their parishioners and following, decimated. No wonder today’s gay and lesbian community, like Jesus Himself, loathe the hypocrisy of holier-than-thou religious leaders!

Incitement to verbal or physical acts of violence against gay and lesbian people is fascism, pure and simple. Due to its own history, “incitement to hatred against a minority” [“Volksverhetzung”] is a punishable offense in today’s Germany that can lead up to five years imprisonment.

Magnus Hirschfeld, who was both Jewish and homosexual, founded the world’s first homosexual emancipation movement in Berlin in May of 1897. It was crushed, its buildings ransacked by brownshirted Storm Troopers, its books tossed into huge bonfires and burned, all gay rights groups disbanded, gay bars closed and homosexuals hunted down and incarcerated in concentration camps shortly after Hitler seized power in 1933. “Thousands of homosexuals were sent to forced labor camps.” writes the United States Holocaust Museum. “There, in an explicit campaign of ‘extermination through work,’ homosexuals and other so-called security suspects were assigned to grueling work in ceaselessly dangerous conditions [for instance, the brickworks near the Sachsenhausen concentration camp just outside Berlin's city borders].” “At least 1,000 homosexual men are known to have been held at Sachsenhausen between its opening in 1936 and the end of the war. Many perished from the exertions of grueling labor in the brickworks.” My lover and I visited an exhibition on German homosexuals incarcerated between 1933 and 1945 in Sachsenhausen in 2000, at the grounds of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp itself, which is now a memorial site. He had nightmares for months on end afterward. “Homosexuals in these camps were almost always assigned to the worst and often most dangerous work. Usually attached to ‘punishment companies,’ they generally worked longer hours with fewer breaks, and often on reduced rations. The quarries and brickyards claimed many lives, not only from exertion but also at the hands of SS guards who deliberately caused ‘accidents.’” A memorial site was inaugurated in the center of Berlin in May of this year “to honor the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.”

The four-meter (13-foot) high monument, which has a window showing a never-ending film of two men kissing (which will be replaced in two years by a lesbian couple that is kissing, then, every two years, by gay- and lesbian-related film material), was unveiled in Berlin on May 28, 2008. The new memorial – which was inaugurated by Berlin’s gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, and Germany’s Culture Minister, Bernd Neumann (incidentally a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Party) – is situated across the street from that for the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Nazis branded homosexuality an aberration threatening their perception of Germans as the master race, and 55,000 gay men were deemed criminals. As many as 15,000 of those men were killed in Nazi concentration camps. What’s more, after the “liberation” of the camps by the Allies, those survivors who wore the pink triangle – denoting that they had been imprisoned as homosexuals – were treated as common criminals who had deserved their incarceration. A yellow Star of David under a superimposed Pink Triangle represented gay Jewish prisoners. (So much for America exporting its version of “democracy” to the world. When it came to “queers,” their line of thinking was, and sometimes still IS not unlike the Nazis’.) Many were transferred to prisons proper to serve out their terms . . . According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Allied Military Government of Germany repealed countless laws and decrees. Left unchanged, however, was the 1935 Nazi revision of [the anti-homosexual] Paragraph 175. Under the Allied occupation, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment regardless of time served in the concentration camps.” This gross injustice serves as a clear indictment of American homophobia, all those who continue to preach and teach against gays and lesbians and treat gay marriages as somehow “inferior” to their heterosexual counterparts.

“Europeans have gone through an extended and extremely productive post-fascist learning process. … In the Sixties and Seventies West Europeans gradually dissociated themselves —in what was at times a long-drawn-out struggle— from the persistent after-effects of fascism, and also from a conservative version of Christianity that was jointly responsible for anti-Semitism and fascism, but which, in the postwar period, distracted from its complicity by insisting on sexual purity.
West Europeans have since developed a new moral discourse in which the infliction of suffering is regarded as a more important problem than the practicing of sexual freedom. In short, they learned to regard sexual rights as essential, inalienable human rights.” — Dagmar Herzog in: “Illegitimite Child of the Sexual Revolution: The Religious Right in the USA, Sex and Power” [“Illegitimes Kind der sexuellen Revolution: Die religiöse Rechte in den USA, Sex und Macht”] in the anthology “Queer Lectures,” p. 35, (publ.) Männerschwarm Verlag, Hamburg, Germany, 2008, [English translation mine].

People like Daniel Lovely and Pat Robertson (who, sounding like a medieval theologian or priest, blamed the GLBT community (!) for the New Orleans floods), who cloak their hatred in pseudo-religious rhetoric, are the true threat to civil society, not same-sex marriage!

For the aforesaid reasons, we gay men and lesbians demand the absolute separation of Church and State, and the rescission of DOMA and ALL reactionary state constitutional amendments of the past decade based on Biblical myths, enforcing the supremacy of straight marriages, and our subsequent degradation to 2nd-class status.
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Footnote:
[1] Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, “Randgruppen der spätmittelalterlichen Gesellschaft” [“Fringe Groups of Late-Medieval Society”, Fahlbusch Verlag, Warendorf, 1990.
[2] Text taken from a http://www.unc.edu document from Watertown, N.Y., 1979: “The emergence of gay activism in a small town in upstate New York [in 1979] resulted in violence, harassment, death threats, fire bombings and a call for the execution of local homosexuals.
Watertown, a factory community of 30,000, recently saw the establishment of a gay advocacy group, the Watertown Gay Task Force. This prompted an anti-gay backlash cam- paign by the Rev. Daniel Lovely of Watertown Baptist Temple.
According to the Task Force president Pat Tanner, the ‘God Says Death to Homos’ campaign begun by Lovely prompted more violence and harassment. It included the severe beating of one woman.
Lovely was quoted in the local newspapers as saying that the execution of homosexuals is justified.
‘They should be killed through governmental means,’ Lovely said, ‘there are a lot of people in Watertown that enjoy living in a non-Christian world, and it’s got to be stopped.’”

Other sources:
Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, “Sodom and Gomorrah: On the Everyday Reality and Persecution of Homosexuals in the Middle Ages,” Free Association Books Ltd, London/New York, 2001.

D. J. Noordam, “Riskante relaties: Vijf eeuwen homoseksualiteit in Nederland, 1233-1733” [“Risky Relationships: Five Centuries of Homosexuality in the Netherlands, 1233-1733”], Verloren (publ.), Hilversum, The Netherlands, 1995.

Jonathan Ned Katz, “Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary [from the Early American Colonies, 1607 to 1740 to the United States, 1880-1950],” Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., New York, 1994.

Maybe I had some naive notion that groups who have experienced oppression would somehow band together and support each other – but I was totally floored. To be clear, I’m offended that anyone would want to take away rights from a group they are not a part of – rights that they themselves enjoy.

It’s completely unfair to pin blame for Prop 8’s success on a single group – but when you grow up learning about the struggles of the civil rights movement, watching the videos of the dogs and beating, listening to those inspired speeches … I don’t know … the idea that that same group could dismiss the sort of discrimination gay people suffer is unbelievable.

I understand there’s nuance to the dynamics of any community and rationally I get that there are number of factors why groups voted the way they did – from religion, to exposure to the gay community, etc. – but this really caused a visceral reaction in me. I was physically disgusted and no matter what I do that feeling sticks. Maybe I’m wrong for feeling it but I can tell you this – I’m certainly not the only one.

The sad thing – I believe Gordon is correct and those groups that DO harbor racism against blacks are going to jump all over this. Everyone loses in this situation.

Guess what, Ms. Newman: This is America, a democracy, and the Initiative in California is one of the most direct processes of determining the actual will of the People on certain issues, particularly when the issue is as simple and direct as Prop 8. And you know what? Even “ignorant” people get to vote. All we did here in California is define the word “marriage”, into our constitution in a way that our forefathers and ancestors from all over the world for thousands of years would have never guessed would be necessary. If you think that certain issues should be kept out of the hands of the People to get your preferred result, then you don’t want to live in a democracy where everyone in the voting booth has the right to express their opinion. I often don’t agree with election results either, but you won’t here me say that so-and-so shouldn’t have had the right to vote on a particular thing.

Further, that you think only “ignorant” people got Prop 8 passed is short-sighted; people who may not even personally know gays (as you suggested) are bombarded with “positive” presentations of gay people every day in the media, and yet voted to preserve a traditional definition of the word “marriage” – AGAIN. This is the second time California has voted this way. Sounds like a mandate to me.

My opinion is that those of us who have traditional marriages don’t want that word diluted by being forced to accept that it must include any other relationship people might dream up, whether it’s monogamous gays or any other combination. Once the door is opened, who’s to say where it will stop? All those other people who have relationships that even monogamous gays would consider deviant will eventually be willing to come out of their closet and want to redefine marriage too. Are monogamous “ignorant” gays then going to limit those people from having using the word? The word becomes meaningless if the definition can include anything. No one’s trying to keep gays from Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness – just from using a word to name their relationship that by definition over the ages has never included them. I’m highly disappointed that a few states have actually gone along with it. This isn’t enlightened. It’s shortsighted.

Lots of other words can be used, and given a legal definition that can carry all the rights and benefits that people think they deserve, but please don’t call it “marriage”.

If you read about the history of marriage, you will see that it always had both a religious and civil component. Control of marriage rights were often a road to power: as in European church officials who could determine who kings could and couldn’t marry. Marriage was not just religious, it was intensely political. Royal families were joined through marriage. Wars were fought because the church controlled marriage law.

When gays and lesbians can marry in more than the 2 states in which we can now marry, (as we can in Holland, South Africa, and elsewhere) it will not determine anything about what particular religions believe or don’t believe. Couples, gay and straight, will be free to make marriage a religious ceremony, or not. Not all straight married people see their union as religious. Some get married solely because of the social and economic benefits. Or simply because they love one another and want to share a life. We agree, as a society, that this is a good thing, a stabilizing thing, a beautiful thing, even when the couple are atheists. This is what separation of church and state means! Otherwise, the state would require married couples to demonstrate they’d been married by a religious institution to validate the union as they do in some countries. We don’t do that, and we shouldn’t, since who would decide which religions did “real” marriages and which didn’t?

This is why we are lucky to live in the US; because we are not a theocracy. Marriage has been between a man and a woman, it’s true. We also were a nation of slaves and slaveholders, and we were a nation in which women didn’t have the vote. Thankfully, in our nation, political progress happens, and it’s written into our Constitution that as ideas change, laws change.

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Let’s take a closer look at this whole “natural/unnatural” argument, which straights (who are, of course, the “natural” ones) almost always revert to when they lack a viable counterargument as to why gay and lesbian people (the “unnatural” ones) do not deserve equal treatment, and which gays and lesbians often counter with (”I was born that way!”) when attacked by bigots for “choosing” their “lifestyle” (”Lifestyle?” What exactly do straights mean by that word, that conjures up images of slick fashion magazines?…our getting up in the morning? showering? getting dressed? going to work? coming home tired and cranky? washing the dishes? doing the laundry? going to the supermarket? paying one’s bills?):

An Iowa City resident named William Stosine once noted that “Those who are prejudiced against gays start out by saying homosexuality isn’t natural ‘because animals don’t do it.’ When it’s pointed out that, yes, animals certainly do, they simply flip-flop and say ‘well, people aren’t animals!’” This is precisely the kind of hare-brained, incoherent “reasoning” homophobic straights spew forth when confronted with a real-life gay man or lesbian, with the usual, predictable outcome:
“Heads, they (the bigots) win, tails we (everyone else) lose.”

“The whole of human history is an ‘argument with biology’” writes Jon Ward in “The Nature of Heterosexuality” (in the anthology “Heterosexuality,” GMP Publishers Ltd, London, 1987): “The very civilization which the most homophobic ideologues are eager to defend is the ANTITHESIS of nature: law and art. This logical oddity is most transparent when appeals are made — as they have been recurrently since [Thomas] Aquinas [in the Middle Ages(!), whom the Catholic Church to this day cites in order to “justify” discrimination of homosexuals!] and before — to the animal kingdom. The animals serve simultaneously as the model of sexual decorum, and the very type of debasement. Thus (in truly Thomist vein) the self-appointed ‘defender’ of heterosexuality: Human sexuality is a continuum of nature — animal, human, and self. Unless we understand this, we are in danger of becoming lower animals only.

Herein lies the mystery of sexual prohibitions. The crime of sodomy represents at once a descent to the pigsty, and the failure to behave like a proper pig. The point is this: that the natural ethic, taken to its logical conclusion, would cancel humanity altogether. Hence it is confined, in a transparently irrational fashion, to the sexual field.

Human SEXUALITY is proclaimed a ‘continuum of nature’ — not human government, or human poetry, or human aviation, or human gateau. AIDS is ‘nature’s retribution’; a collapsing tower block isn’t. Where it is promulgated, the law of nature is absolute, and carries the power of life or death. But it is only promulgated in one or two territories: pre-eminently, sex. The assumption on which the heterosexual imperative founds itself is radically inconsistent. … So long as lesbians and gay men suffer the assaults of its ‘natural’ pretensions, heterosexuality will remain a prison — even for the nicest warders. Freedom for heterosexuals will only be found where those whom they have oppressed are already seeking it: on the uneasy margin of the natural world which is called the human condition.”

In “Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America,” lawyers Michael Nava and Robert Dawidoff take a firm stand against the ideological forces of heterosexism and homophobia: “Why, one must ask, if heterosexuality is ‘natural,’ is all this effort being expended to promote it? Is it because what is being promoted is not natural sexuality but a form of social organization that excludes those to whom its promotions are not addressed? … The culture has no business promoting heterosexuality at the expense of homosexuality, and if this sounds radical, then ask yourself if you agree that the interests of white Americans or male Americans should not be promoted at the expense of black or female Americans. The same principle of equality is at work in all three cases.”