Homo

Timeline of homosexual history The history of the homosexual community in North America is a very interesting one. It dates back to the colonial days. This web page will reveal some of the major events that have shaped gay culture over the years. 1528-36- Spanish explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca writes about finding effeminate Indians in what is now Florida. 1566- Guillermo, a French interpreter, is murdered by the Spanish in Florida for being a "great Sodomite". 1610- The Virginia colony passes the earliest American sodomy law, making the practice punishable by death, usually by hanging. However, women are excluded from the law. 1613- Francisco de Pareja, Spanish missionary in Florida, records in his Confessionario the likelihood of sodomy amond native American Indians. Apparently, homosexuality was rampant in the culture and probably helped fuel the opinion that Indians were savages and less human than the European invaders. 1624- With very little evidence, Richard Cornish, the master of the Ambrose, is hanged in Virginia for "buggery" of one of his indentured servants, the ship's steward, William Cowse. 1629- The first record of gender ambiguity by Thomas/Thomasine Hall in Virginia. - On the Talbot, Reverend Francis Higginson records "5 beastly Sodomiticall boys" who confess to their alleged misdoings. Massachusetts supposedly hanged them, as any male over the age of 14 years could be hanged if caught or even suspected of committing sodomy. 1636- Reverend John Cotton of Massachusetts proposes the death penalty for 16 crimes, including sodomy. Massachusetts rejects the code. - Codification of laws in Plymouth colony include eight death penalty offenses - treason, murder, witchcraft, etc. 1641- Massachusetts makes sodomy a capital crime, but excuses lesbianism as a crime. They cite Lev. 20:13, which condemns "man lying with mankind as he lies with a woman." 1642- Connecticut includes sodomy in its 12 capital crimes. - Salem, Massachusetts: Elizabeth Johnson recieves a whipping for lesbianism. 1646- Jan Creoli, a negro, is choked to death in New Netherland for supposedly sodomizing a ten year old boy named Manuel Congo. Congo recieves a flogging for his participation in the crime. - William Plaine, one of the original settlers of Guilford, Connecticut is accused of committing sodomy twice in England and of corrupting "a great part of the youth of Guilford by masturbations". He is executed in New Haven. 1647- Rhode Island makes sodomy amongst men a capital offense, but excuses lesbianism. 1648- A young soldier in Montreal is charged with "the worst of crimes" (sodomy). The Jesuit Church intervene on his behalf and his sentence to hard labor is commuted on condition that he become New France's first executioner. 1649- Plymouth: 2 married women, Sara Norman and Mary Hammon, are charged with lewd behavior. The 15-year-old Hammon is cleared; Norman (who was older) acknowledged publicly her behavior as punishment, ala The Scarlet Letter. 1656- New Haven: A law is passed that makes the death penalty applicable to both men and women. 1660- New Netherland: Jan Quisthout vander Linde is drowned on suspicion of sodomy. Hendrick Harmensen, the boy supposedly sodomized, is whipped. 1665- New Netherland becomes New York after the British takeover, and imposes the death penalty for anyone over the age of 14 who breaks a capital offense law. 1668- New Jersey passes a capital crimes law. Plymouth and Connecticut later amend theirs to match that of New Jersey. 1673-77- Father Jacques Marquettes, on his first voyage down the Mississippi River, observes cross dressers in the tribes of the Nadouessi and Illinois indians. 1680- New Hampshire passes its first capital crimes laws. 1682- Pennsylvania: A Quaker colony, Pennsylvania is the first state to make sodomy a non-capital offense, limiting punishment to whipping, forfeiture of 1/3 of one's estate, and six months of hard labor. The law was amended in 1700 to life imprisonment or castration.

1712- Mingo, a slave of Wait Winthrop, the chief justice of Massachusetts, is executed in Charlestown for "forcible buggery", ie. male rape. - South Carolina implements the English buggery law. 1718- Pennsylvania revises its laws, making sodomy a capital offense. 1719- Delaware adopts a sodomy law. 1721- Jesuit explorer Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix records effeminacy and widespread homosexuality and lesbianism among the indian tribes in what is now Louisiana. The most prominent tribes in the area at the time were the Iroquois and Illinois indians. 1776- Fleury Mesplet, Ben Franklin's good friend, publishes the play Jonathas et David, or Le Triomphe de l'amitie, the first book ever published in the city of Montreal. It is a three-act tragedy describing the thinly veiled homoerotic relationship of the Biblical characters, David and Jonathan. - The Thirteen Colonies issue the Declaration of Independence from England. 1778- In the newly formed Continental Army, Lieutenant Frederick Gotthold Enslin is court martialed for a sodomy attempt. 1782- Deborah Sampson, descendent of Governor William Bradford, is excommunicated from the First Baptist Church of Middleborough, Massachusetts for lesbianism. 1792- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Moreau de St. Mery, a French lawyer and politician, writes about widespread lesbianism among the women of the city. 1804-10- Nicholas Biddle of the Lewis & Clark expedition notes that among the Minitaree Indians the effeminate boys are raised as females. Upon reaching puberty, the boys are then married to older men. The French call them Birdashes. 1811- Fort Astoria, Oregon: Gabriel Franchere finds the first known Kutenai lesbian amongst the Kutenai indian tribe.

1824-26- Louis Dwight writes the first documented report on homosexual acts in U.S. prisons. 1839- Montreal: Thomas Clotworthy, 17, and Henry Cole, 11, are found sharing a bed. The two boys are prosecuted in a court of law. 1846- New York City: Edward McCosker is dismissed from the New York Police Department for sexually harrassing other male officers on duty. 1848- Seneca Falls, New York: The First Women's Rights Convention officially begins the feminist movement, and jettisons several probable lesbian and bisexual women into the spotlight, including Susan B. Anthony. 1857- Washington, DC: James Buchanan becomes president of the United States - the only bachelor president and likely homosexual. 1860- Gay poet Walt Whitman publishes the homoerotic Leaves of Grass. 1866- Brewster, Massachusetts: Horatio Alger, the author of several popular boys' books, including the popular "rags to riches" novels, is accused by the Unitarian Church of Brewster, Massachusetts of practicing "deeds too revolting to relate" on young boys. Alger leaves town to avoid the scandal. 1870- Bayard Taylor's Joseph and His Friend is the first U.S. novel to touch on homosexuality. 1886- Montreal's La Presse reports on the gay nightlife in the city, including the Champs-da-Mars, and the arrest of Clovis Villenevue through police entrapment. 1892- Tennessee: Alice Mitchell found insane after murdering her lover and fiancee Freda Ward. The story goes that Freda's sister found out about the relationship and broke them up. Alice retaliated by slashing Freda's throat. 1896- For the first time on an American stage, two women kiss in a scene in A Florida Enchantment. At the intermission, ushers were sent up and down the aisles to offer ice water to people who felt faint. 1897- Havelock Ellis writes in Sexual Inversion about the great numbers of homosexuals living in U.S. cities. 1901- Influential New York politician Murray Hall dies, and then is revealed to actually be a woman!

1912- At Polly Halliday's restaurant in New York, Herterodoxy, becomes a feminist luncheon club for lesbians. Helen Hull, Katharine Anthony, Dr. Sara Josephine Baker, Elisabeth Irwin, and Mabel Dodge Luhan all eat there. 1914- Portland, Oregon: A dictionary of criminal slang is published. The first recorded use of the word "faggot" to describe homosexual men is defined in the dictionary. 1916- New York City: Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village is the first major off-Broadway theater. One of its first plays was Charles Busch's Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. 1917- Montreal: 19-year-old Elsa Gidlow starts an artists salon in her parents home. Roswell George Mills becomes her mentor. 1919- Newport, Rhode Island: The US Navy uses a squad of young enlisted decoys under the command of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to initiate a search for "perverts" at the Newport Naval Training Station. 20 sailors and 16 civilians are arrested.

1920-1935- New York City: The Harlem Renaissance included gay works by Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alain Locke, Bruce Nugent, and Ethel Waters. 1924- Illinois: Henry Gerber helps found the Society for Human Rights in Illinois, the first homosexual rights organization. They publish Friendship & Freedom. 1926- Humphrey Bogart's wife Helen Menken stars in the lesbian play, The Captive. William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate, uses the play to promote intolerance. The Captive is raided and shut down. 1927- Wade "Padlock" Law enacted to prevent homosexual depictions on Broadway, one of its first victims is The Captive. - Mae West writes the play The Drag, the first gay male play that debuts in Connecticut. 1929- New York City: Publisher Covici-Friede convicted of obscenity for publishing Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Conviction is appealed and then overturned. 1930- Hollywood's Motion Picture Production Code prohibits homosexual references in any of its motion pictures. This code is supported by the Catholicled Legion for Decency. were dressed as women, and according to the accounts of the neighbours shared the same passion. Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs. The Spaniards commonly used their dogs in fighting against these naked people, and the dogs threw themselves upon them as though they were wild boars on timid deer. [16] East Asia

A woman spying on a pair of male lovers, Qing Dynasty. Chinese Sexual Culture Museum in Shanghai. In East Asia same-sex love has been referred to since the earliest recorded history. Early European travelers were taken aback by its widespread acceptance and open display. None of the East Asian countries today have specific legal prohibitions against homosexuality or homosexual behavior. Homosexuality in China, known as the pleasures of the bitten peach, the cut sleeve, or the southern custom, has been recorded since approximately 600 BCE. These euphemistic terms were used to describe behaviors, but not identities (recently the Chinese society adapted the term "brokeback," 斷背 duanbei, due to the success of Chinese director Ang Lee's film Brokeback Mountain).[17] The relationships were marked by differences in age and social position. However, the instances of same-sex affection and sexual interactions described in the Hong Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber, or Story of the Stone) seem as familiar to observers in the present as do equivalent stories of romances between heterosexuals during the same period. Homosexuality in Japan, variously known as shudo or nanshoku, terms influenced by Chinese literature, has been documented for over one thousand years and was an integral part of Buddhist monastic life and the samurai tradition. This same-sex love culture gave rise to strong traditions of painting and literature documenting and celebrating such relationships. Similarly, in Thailand, Kathoey, or "ladyboys," have been a feature of Thai society for many centuries, and Thai kings had male as well as female lovers. While Kathoey may encompass simple effeminacy or transvestism, it most commonly is treated in Thai culture as a third gender. They are generally accepted by society, and Thailand has never had legal prohibitions against homosexuality or homosexual behavior. The teachings of Buddhism, dominant in Thai society, were accepting of a third gender designation. Europe Further information: Homosexuality in ancient Greece, Homosexuality in ancient Rome

Roman man and youth in bed, middle of the 1st century AD. Found in Bittir (?), near Jerusalem The earliest Western documents (in the form of literary works, art objects, as well as mythographic materials) concerning same-sex relationships are derived from ancient Greece. They depict a world in which relationships with women and relationships with youths were the essential foundation of a normal man's love life. Same-sex relationships were a social institution variously constructed over time and from one city to another. The practice, a system of relationships between an adult male and an adolescent coming of age, was often valued for its pedagogic benefits and as a means of population control, and occasionally blamed for causing disorder. Plato praised its benefits in his early writings,[18] but in his late works proposed its prohibition.[19] In Rome, the pagan emperor Hadrian allegedly practiced homosexuality himself, but the Christian emperor Theodosius I decreed a law on August 6, 390, condemning passive homosexual people to be burned at the stake. Justinian, towards the end of his reign, expanded the proscription to the active partner as well (in 558), warning that such conduct can lead to the destruction of cities through the "wrath of God". Notwithstanding these regulations, taxes on brothels of boys available for homosexual sex continued to be collected until the end of the reign of Anastasius I in 518. During the Renaissance, rich cities in northern Italy, Florence and Venice in particular, were renowned for their widespread practice of same-sex love, engaged in by a considerable part of the male population and constructed along the classical pattern of Greece and Rome.[20][21] But even as the majority of the male population was engaging in same-sex relationships, the authorities, under the aegis of the Officers of the Night court, were prosecuting, fining, and imprisoning a good portion of that population. The eclipse of this period of relative artistic and erotic freedom was precipitated by the rise to power of the moralizing monk Girolamo Savonarola. In northern Europe the artistic discourse on sodomy was turned against its proponents by artists such as Rembrandt, who in his Rape of Ganymede no longer depicted Ganymede as a willing youth, but as a squalling baby attacked by a rapacious bird of prey. The relationships of socially prominent figures, such as King James I and the Duke of Buckingham, served to highlight the issue, including in anonymously authored street pamphlets: "The world is chang'd I know not how, For men Kiss Men, not Women now;...Of J. the First and Buckingham: He, true it is, his Wives Embraces fled, To slabber his lov'd Ganimede;" (Mundus Foppensis, or The Fop Display'd, 1691.) Love Letters Between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr. Wilson was published in 1723 in England and was presumed to be a novel by some modern scholars. The 1749 edition of John Cleland's popular novel Fanny Hill includes a homosexual scene, but this was removed in its 1750 edition. Also in 1749, the earliest extended and serious defense of homosexuality in English, Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplified, written by Thomas Cannon, was published, but was suppressed almost immediately. It includes the passage, "Unnatural Desire is a Contradiction in Terms; downright Nonsense. Desire is an amatory Impulse of the inmost human Parts."[22] Around 1785 Jeremy Bentham wrote another defense, but this was not published until 1978.[23] Executions for sodomy continued in the Netherlands until 1803, and in England until 1835. Between 1864 and 1880 Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published a series of twelve tracts, which he collectively titled Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love. In 1867 he became the first self-proclaimed homosexual person to speak out publicly in defense of homosexuality when he pleaded at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich for a resolution urging the repeal of anti-homosexual laws. Sir Richard Francis Burton's Terminal Essay, Part IV/D appendix in his translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885–86) provided an effusive overview of homosexuality in the Middle East and tropics. Sexual Inversion by Havelock Ellis, published in 1896, challenged theories that homosexuality was abnormal, as well as stereotypes, and insisted on the ubiquity of homosexuality and its association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Appendix A included A Problem in Greek Ethics by John Addington Symonds, which had been privately distributed in 1883. Beginning in 1894 with Homogenic Love, Socialist activist and poet Edward Carpenter wrote a string of pro-homosexual articles and pamphlets, and "came out" in 1916 in his book My Days and Dreams. In 1900, Elisar von Kupffer published an anthology of homosexual literature from antiquity to his own time, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur. His aim was to broaden the public perspective of homosexuality beyond it being viewed simply as a medical or biological issue, but also as an ethical and cultural one. Middle East, South and Central Asia Further information: Homosexuality and Islam Among many Middle Eastern Muslim cultures, homosexual practices were widespread and public. Persian poets, such as Sa’di (d. 1291), Hafez (d. 1389), and Jami (d. 1492), wrote poems replete with homoerotic allusions. The two most commonly documented forms were commercial sex with transgender males or males enacting transgender roles exemplified by the köçeks and the bacchás, and Sufi spiritual practices in which the practitioner crossed over from the idealized chaste form of the practice to one in which the desire is consummated. In Persia homosexuality and homoerotic expressions were tolerated in numerous public places, from monasteries and seminaries to taverns, military camps, bathhouses, and coffee houses. In the early Safavid era (1501–1723), male houses of prostitution (amrad khane) were legally recognized and paid taxes. A tradition of art and literature sprang up constructing Middle Eastern homosexuality. Muslim—often Sufi—poets in medieval Arab lands and in Persia wrote odes to the beautiful wine boys who, they wrote, served them in the taverns. In many areas the practice survived into modern times, as documented by Richard Francis Burton, André Gide, and others. In the Turkic-speaking areas, one manifestation of this same-sex love was the bacchá, adolescent or adolescent-seeming male entertainers and sex workers. In other areas male love continues to surface despite efforts to keep it quiet.

The prevailing pattern of same-sex relationships in the temperate and sub-tropical zone stretching from Northern India to the Western Sahara is one in which the relationships were—and are—either gender-structured or age-structured or both. In recent years, egalitarian relationships modeled on the western pattern have become more frequent, though they remain rare. South Pacific In many societies of Melanesia, same-sex relationships are an integral part of the culture. Traditional Melanesian insemination rituals also existed where a boy, upon reaching a certain age, would be paired with an older adolescent who would become his mentor and whom he would ritually fellate over a number of years in order to develop his own masculinity. In certain tribes of Papua New Guinea, for example, it is considered a normal ritual responsibility for a boy

to have a relationship in order to accomplish his ascent into manhood. Many Melanesian societies, however, have become hostile towards same-sex relationships since the introduction of Christianity by European missionaries.[24] Homosexuality can refer to both attraction or sexual behavior between people of the same sex, or to a sexual orientation. When describing the latter, it refers to enduring sexual and romantic attraction towards those of the same sex, but not necessarily to sexual behavior.[1] Homosexuality is contrasted with heterosexuality, bisexuality and asexuality. Etymologically, the word homosexualis a Greek and Latin hybrid with homo (often confused with the later Latin meaning of "man", as in homo sapiens) deriving from the Greek word for same, thus connoting sexual acts and affections between members of the same sex, including lesbianism.[2][3] In the English-speaking world, the term gay had been used within the subculture for decades before becoming popularized by the gay rights movement in the 1970s.[citation needed] In a narrow sense, gay refers to male homosexuality, but it often is used in its broadest sense, especially in media headlines and reports, to refer to homosexuality in general. Lesbian, however, always denotes a homosexual woman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality#_note-apahelp September 28, 2007 4:10 pm