Boomers Didn't Invent Teh Gay

Oh, alright, fine, we didn't invent sex, either. Although we did vastly improve it.

Seriously, it's long past time we all acknowledged that as long as there have been cocks, mouths, cunts, fingers and assholes, human beings have found an infinite number of ways to combine them to create sexual pleasure.

Yet historians of early America continue to insist - in increasingly shrill tones - that our forefathers in long-term same-sex situations remained celibate. And Larry Kramer is fed up with it.

No, there was no right word for it that you wanted to use for it if you were doing it. Buggery and sodomy connoted anal penetration and thus were, in many places, punishable by death.

That does not mean that men did not know they were gay (to use today's word), know what to do with their cocks, know when they were smitten with other men, know where to go to find them, know what it meant to get violently rejected, or the reverse, find a friend, in other words, the whole gestalt, to use another of today's terms. A penis has never been something that you pick up and put down and put away idly without consideration.

When both US News and the New Yorker ran pieces on the 400th anniversary of Jamestown in 2007, they were both so annoyingly ignorant of the fact that almost all of its inhabitants were men that I submitted my thoughts to both magazines.

Read the whole thing.

It's long, but well worth your time. I have only a couple of complaints:

1) At times, Kramer veers dangerously close to arguing that everyone in history who is not categorically and undeniably heterosexual is ipso facto homosexual, a tendency that undermines his otherwise strong case, and

2) Kramer appears to be guilty of the same denial of which he accuses historians when he fails to even mention the likelihood of homosexual sex between women in pre-20th-century America. Gertrude Stein was a pioneer in many ways, but in physically loving another woman I imagine she was upholding a longstanding New World tradition.

But Kramer's larger point, that what we now call "being gay" has been an integral part of American society and culture for 400 years, and that denying the historicity of gay Americans feeds and supports fear, hatred and marginalization of gays, is solid and important.

It's just sex, people. As long as it happens between consenting adults, and avoids harm to other adults, children, animals and antique furniture, it's legal, Constitutional and historical.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....