GAY SEXUALITY AND HEALING THE EARTH

By James Thornton and Martin Boroson

Would the social acceptance of gay sexuality help humans live sustainably upon the Earth? We write in what is still a young field. Relatively little has been written about why Western Europe, which valued homosexuality into the fourteenth century, became hostile to it, and what all this may have to do with environmental problems.

Rather than making an argument, we offer a meditation. It will follow a series of associations from Greece through the Renaissance, from the experience of American Indians to that of tobacco company executives.

What emerges is the thought that there was a deep shift in the consciousness of Western Europe that began in the late Middle Ages, and has continued into our own culture. It is a shift that has allowed both the despoilation of the Earth and the repression of gay people. The shift involves valuing reason above wisdom, the abstract above the embodied, the quantified above the intuited, the archetypally masculine above the archetypally feminine.

The Acceptance of Homosexual Behavior in Premodern Europe

The connection between environmental problems and the repression of gay people, women, and native peoples is strong, and has only recently become visible. We focus in this article on the experience of gay people, but we are aware that complementary lines of analysis, focusing on the experience of other repressed groups, are needed for a view of the whole.

Most people today, including most gay people, assume that the gay rights movement is asking for something new, when it asks for equal treatment. It isn't. In most non-Western cultures, and in Premodern Europe, homosexual behavior was considered completely normal, and was publicly and openly accepted. (1)

The modern Western mind is deeply homophobic. We have conditioned ourselves to think of homosexuality as a "perversion," a "crime against nature", and incompatible with essential social roles such as military service and teaching children. Liberals are tolerant of gay people. But gay people often feel that even liberals still consider them marginal players on life's stage. And most gay people have overheard a liberal privately admit to disgust at homosexual behavior. Gay people too have internalized homophobia in a way that is one of the great challenges to full psychological integration in each gay person's life.

From this perspective of deeply ingrained homophobia, it becomes difficult to appreciate that it was not always so. Homosexuality was idealized in the ancient world as the natural sexual preference for the macho male. Alexander the Great, hardly a sissy, openly had a male as his principal consort. (2) The same is true of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, one of Rome's greatest generals, and one of the so-called Five Great Emperors. (3) The military genius Julius Caesar was known in Rome as "every man's wife and every woman's husband." (4)

This association between being a warrior and homosexual love was institutionalized in Sparta, the most military of the Greek city states. In Sparta, it was expected that a soldier have a male lover. (5) Perhaps the most admired military organization in the Greek world was the Sacred Band of Thebes. It was formed exclusively of pairs of male lovers, under the theory proposed by Plato that a man fighting at the side of his lover would be the most valiant of warriors. The Sacred Band went undefeated until the massacre of the Greeks at Chaeronea by Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. (6)

But it was not just in the martial culture of Greece and Rome that homosexuality was accepted. Ordinary Greek and Roman citizens openly included homosexual behavior in their repertoire of experience. Marriages in the ancient world were in large part arrangements for the inheritance of property. (7) It was assumed that men would have another relationship for romantic love--and frequently these relationships were with other men. Men often had both a wife and a male lover. Plato was among these. (8)

Ancient Europe was not simply tolerant of the sexual preferences of emperors and great talents. Difficult as it is for us to understand it, given our cultural context, homosexuality was not stigmatized, and it was often idealized, in the ancient world. It is well established, for example, that among Romans, same-sex marriages were both legal, and popular. Some ancient writers argued that a homosexual relationship was likely to be more stable than a heterosexual one. (9)

Even if we are willing to believe that ancient European society had a different view of homosexual behavior, it seems comfortably remote, millennia away, from the entrenched prejudices of our time. What is stunning to realize is that homosexual conduct was considered normal in Europe down through the Middle Ages. A seminal new book by Yale historian John Boswell, Same-sex Unions in Premodern Europe, is helpful here. Boswell has carefully gone through Church records across Europe, and found that what he calls same-sex unions were commonplace down through the Middle Ages. Not only that, they were sanctified in the Catholic Church.

Boswell has turned up Church manuscripts in libraries across Europe containing ceremonies that solemnize same-sex unions. These ceremonies are precisely parallel to the Catholic heterosexual marriage ceremonies of the time in all important particulars, and like the heterosexual ceremonies were attended by friends and family, and celebrated with banquets. (10)

Boswell's work is brilliant, and will be controversial. The New York Times, for example, published an article opining that even though same-sex partners promised to live together, to be faithful to each other until death, and so on, perhaps the ceremonies were just a friendly pastime, something that medieval men enjoyed doing with their pals, not their lovers. It is difficult to see a different reality through the lens of five hundred years of blinding prejudice.

Imprisoned in the Keep of Reason

Boswell observes that:

From the fourteenth century on, Western Europe was gripped by a rabid and obsessive negative preoccupation with homosexuality as the most horrible of sins. The reasons for this have never been adequately explained. (11)

How could homosexuality have gone from something considered part of life, to be celebrated and consecrated like the rest of life, to a criminal offense for which one could be hanged, the offense so unspeakably foul that it became known as the "vice that cannot speak its name"?

One might have thought that so profound a shift in human experience would have interested historians. That it has not done so until very recently is a sign of the outcast status of homosexuals since the fourteenth century. But what happened? Whence this dramatic shift? What has shifted in our culture during the last six hundred years that would lead to the extreme social stigmatization of homosexual behavior? No satisfactory answers have yet been offered, as Boswell comments.

We would like to offer what we believe are some seeds of an answer. We need to look to a deep shift in the consensus mind of Europe. It is a shift that began to find expression in the thirteenth century, came to the fore in the high Renaissance, and has become entirely dominant in our time. When we look into this deep shift, we can ask whether the repression of gays, and our environmental problems arise from the same root.

So what happened? We fell in love--blind, unbalanced, mad love--with Reason, and did not look to the consequences.

We are schooled to think of the Renaissance as a time of liberation from superstition and prejudice. Science, art and humanism flourished, and a corrupt Catholic Church lost some of its influence. In Goya's phrase, "the sleep of Reason produces monsters." We are taught that reason triumphed over darkness in the Renaissance, and that we have been marching forward, in reason's light, ever since. But the light of reason also casts shadows, whose darkness is proportional to reason's light. Has our culture looked into those shadows?

We suggest that our infatuation with reason has also produced monsters, among them the repression of gay people, and a potential ecocatastrophe. In what follows, we wish to look into the psychological shadow of reason's triumph. We will focus first on the rise of the scientific method and the rise of capitalism.

Roger Bacon, a pioneer of the scientific method, was writing in Oxford by the mid-thirteenth century that there was a new way to know the natural world. One needs an experimental method, he argued, and one needs to apply mathematics in the understanding of all physical processes. Bacon was a pioneer, and ahead of his time. (12) His dream was to fully flower in the seventeenth century with Newton's celestial mechanics. Descartes' abstraction from experience are a natural complement.

Bacon argued lucidly for the primacy of the quantitative, rational mind by the mid-thirteenth century. The methods he began to champion have largely been the methods of Western science ever since. As experience with the scientific method has grown, the language of its inquiry has become ever more mathematical. The scientific method requires systematic quantification, and whatever is unquantifiable becomes invisible to the mind doing science.

Science seeks to remove ambiguity, to achieve a repeatable clarity. For the mind engaged in scientific inquiry, paradox is anathema. Much of quantum physics, for example, is devoted to analyzing a handful of paradoxes that inhere in quantum theory. Whatever cannot be fit within the contours of the system, must be explained away or pushed aside. It is this relentless quality of the scientific mind, that paradox must be destroyed by explanation or otherwise, that we will return to shortly.

While the scientific mind was being born, and was developing its rigorously quantified approach to the world, capitalism was also being born. Like the scientific method, capitalism brought about abstraction and quantification, this time in the realm of human relationship.

Until the rise of capitalism, human life was largely experienced as a set of relationships that were long and enduring. In Europe, there were complex and well understood reciprocal relationships between landowners and peasants. These relationships were centered on the production of agricultural commodities. And while there was always a class of artists and artisans serving the noble's courts, the professions within this class were largely hereditary as well. Unlike the modern world, one did not have a profession, and draw a salary, as the central experience defining one's place in the world. There was nothing so abstract as that--it was all a matter of the web of relationships and what they allowed and demanded.

This system of relationships was changed dramatically as capitalism rose. An important step was the beginning of large scale banking in Northern Italy during the 12th and 13th centuries. (13) Florentine bankers began to take deposits, and to lend on credit. Money became abstracted from the physical gold or silver that it had been before. With the later use of letters of credit, it became possible to trade safely over long distances. Banking became complex to deal with the newly created abstraction of wealth. (14) By the mid-fifteen hundreds, the corporation appears as an entity designed for the sole purpose of limiting investors' liability, as they invested their wealth. Risky enterprises could then be safely engaged in for the first time, since potential loss was restricted to the assets of the corporation, and one's personal worth was secure. One could undertake risky enterprises that would not have been possible in the earlier world of relationship, in which one was responsible for the outcomes of one's behavior.

The abstraction of wealth, led to a quantification in human relationships that parallels the quantification in the view of the world taking place at the same time in science. Whereas the world had been full of gods, science said that what could not be measured could not be real. Whereas the human world had been based on relationship, it came to be based on one's quantifiable productivity within a corporation.

The grammar of reason is written in numbers, and its poetry is mathematics. Western culture fell more and more deeply in love with reason as time went on. The affair deepened through the Enlightenment and reached an apex, perhaps, in the nuclear enterprise of our own century, in which defense policy was spoken of in terms of throw weights, and humans became the number of casualties per megaton.

What is the shadow side of reason? What monsters does it bring forth? What have we left out of our calculations?

The main danger of an exclusive reliance on reason is to mistake the map for the territory. What can be quantified is taken for what is real. In a tragic fallacy, the mind bound by reason then draws the conclusion that only what can be quantified is real. What cannot be counted is therefor dismissed as unreal. For the mind bound by the analytic confines of reason, therefore, the entire realm of spirit is seen as superstition; love is a matter of endocrines and pheromones; ancient forests have no value except as board feet of timber; and the work of housewives does not appear as an asset in our economy.

The Healing Power of Paradox

Life, of course, is beyond reason. Not without reason, beyond it. Life is inherently paradoxical, as zen masters have always loved to point out. Jung said it too:

Oddly enough the paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness. Hence a religion becomes inwardly impoverished when it loses or waters down its paradoxes; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life. Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible. (15)

The rational mind detests paradox, and will act relentlessly to resolve or extirpate it. This is neither good nor bad, simply a function of the rational mind, which strives to make things one-sided.

Roger Bacon's work is emblematic of a deep cultural shift toward valuing the quantitatively comprehensible. This shift might have happened in a balanced way. Instead of being rational about reason, though, we began a love affair with the rational mind in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that led to the tragic error of thinking that the only mind worth inhabiting is the rational mind. Our mistake has not been to cultivate the rational mind, but to cultivate it to the exclusion of other ways of seeing.

Because it seems to confuse gender choice, homosexuality is inherently paradoxical, and unsettles the rational mind. But therein lies its potential healing power for a culture overly identified with the rational. It was precisely homosexuality's paradoxical nature that many American Indian tribes enjoyed.

Many American Indian tribes allowed a third-gender role. The name given these people by anthropologists was berdache, although each tribe would have had its own name. If a boy began to show some feminine behavior, he was tested. If he chose a woman's role, he then started using the feminine form of language, was referred to as "she," wore women's clothing and did women's work. (16)

The berdaches were highly valued by the tribe. Because they embodied elements of both the masculine and feminine, they were thought to be especially close to the divine, and were often asked to mediate disputes between men and women. They were often reared to be a tribal shaman or healer. In tribal groups using a communal child care arrangement, people often considered it a privilege to have their children raised by a berdache.

A berdache would generally marry a man, who was in no way considered a berdache. This social arrangement is not within our modern means of conceiving gender. It was acceptable for a "biological and social" man to marry a berdache because the berdache was not considered a "man;" his gender was feminine.

It would be easy for the modern, anxious heterosexual mind to regard the man who married a berdache as an aberration. But that was not the case. Often many men in the tribe would compete for the honor of marrying a berdache. And ordinary men in the tribes enjoyed having sex with a berdache.

In our terms, the men in these cultures were actively bisexual. What seems to have been important among them was not that a "man" partner with a "woman" but that the masculine principle partner with the feminine principle. This suggests that our need for a psychological opposite is stronger than our need for a biological opposite. One could also wonder from this scenario whether most people are bisexual and some people are gay: everyone is capable of erotic desire for the same sex, but some people are specially "called" to fulfill a special role, outside of the bisexuality of the group, much like a priest might be called to serve a special role in the community.

In American Indian tribes, berdaches were both revered and made fun of. They would be lovingly teased, and would in turn tease, and flirt with, other people. The tribes had institutionalized, in the role of the berdache, a sacred oddness, a sacred weirdness, a sacred queerness. This role allowed the berdache to embody an important psychic function.

There has always been a trickster. Archetypally, according to Jung, we each have within us the force that creates accidents or surprises to bring us toward healing. In many cultures this archetype has been institutionalized into the role of court jester or trickster. A trickster is mercurial: he teases, flirts, confuses, subverts, makes you laugh, and makes you realize that your ego is a construct, and perhaps a fatuous one. The job of the trickster is to help you to step off the deadly clear path laid down by your defended ego. One hopes to respond in good humor. If he is ignored, the trickster may work strong tricks.

Gay people naturally have a trickster aspect. By the nature of gay sexuality, in whatever form it appears, it threatens the absolute equation between masculine and man and between feminine and woman. The job of the trickster is a sacred job, since having one's boundaries threatened in a safe way is an opportunity for spiritual experience. Because it is so easy to take our ego identity as real, rather than as a useful, changeable construct, we need reminders that we are not who we seem to be.

This is particularly so for the person we would ordinarily think of as the oppressor: the straight white man who runs a company that engages in wholesale natural resource extraction, manufactures cigarettes, and so on. From a perspective of psychological growth and wholeness, such a man is stunted, constrained, and rigid. He is living reason's limitations.

Martyrs to Reason

While we were writing this article, Congressional attention has focused on the American tobacco companies. The executives of the major cigarette producers appeared before Congressional panels, denying that nicotine is addictive, or that smoking causes cancer. Seeing them testify, one saw martyrs to the dark side of Reason. Constrained, rigid, their minds and hearts closed, one can easily feel their pain, and sense it is likely to express itself in their lives in alcoholism, depression, heart attacks, and the other sequelae of reason's hegemony.

Let us look into the pain of the tobacco company executives, pain which they may not feel consciously. It is psychically difficult for a man identified with patriarchal values to recognize the external costs of our way of life. To do so is to experience the suffering of others--both other humans and other species--in a profound way. To experience this identification with the pain of others caused by our actions is to become culturally allied with feminine values. Any straight male whose ego-identity rests on the patriarchal value structure will be threatened by the uprush of feminine modes of perception within him, as he allows himself to live the feelings that compassion brings.

The fear of the tobacco company executive to acknowledge that cigarettes addict and kill is a fear of the feminine. And though experiencing the inner feminine need not lead a man into bisexuality, a male ego overly identified with the masculine can easily fear that it will. Such a man may feel that deeply embracing the feminine within will bring ego annihilation.

It is a potent challenge to a heavily defended straight man's masculinity that another man allows himself to experience the internal feminine. Such a man may allow himself to experience his own desire for emotional or erotic friendship with other men. To keep the flood of emotion at bay, a heavily defended straight man must keep all reminders of the inner feminine away. He will put up walls of Reason, and thereby keep his own consciousness in prison. He will also imprison and perhaps execute those in the world who deviate from his norm, and who thereby remind him of his imprisonment.

Greater integration of women and gay people in the culture as full equals and participants would immediately begin to open up the culture to models of plurality and diversity. This in turn makes it harder to hold the constricted view needed for the continued despoilation of the Earth. Put simply, a whole man, open to intuition and compassion, could not run one of today's tobacco companies.

Embodying the Reconciliation

In his valuable new book Blossom of Bone, Randy Conners notes that the appearance of gay men in a socially approved shamanic role has almost always happened in cultures in which the Goddess held a central place in the religion. He speculates that as society began to exclude gay people from playing a sacred role arising from their sexuality, this spiritual impulse was sublimated into artistic creation. (17)

There is a strong association between spirit and the masculine principle, and nature and the feminine principle. Many have commented that the ultimate source of our ecological problems is the split in our culture between spirit and nature, masculine and feminine. Our inability to reconcile these principles is reflected in our inability to tolerate the existence of people who embody the reconciliation.

The Healing of the Earth and the Expression of Gay Sexuality

We have covered much ground. Our central notion is that both the repression of gay sexuality and our environmental problems share a common root. We are suggesting that as a culture we must abandon the Keep of Reason, recognizing that it has become our prison, and march out into the vaster expanses of heart and mind. In this way, reason can become the servant of wisdom and love.

We need to recognize the pain and the fear of those who are still inside Reason's Keep. As the world's problems worsen, they will want to rely even more reflexively on a narrow and bounded reason, with potentially devastating effects. We need to experience their suffering with compassion if we are to help them leave their defenses. It is easy to think of those who abuse power as enemies, whether they repress people or despoil the Earth. But change will come more quickly and softly if we can appreciate the pain in such people, and the fear they have of opening their hearts to feel the full consequences of their actions.

We are not suggesting a retreat into an imagined Golden Age. Everything that has led us to this point in history has prepared us to begin making a deeper synthesis of human gifts than has yet been possible. The environmental crisis is a call to a more holistic approach to human life. Gay people, and the other groups that have been repressed, have much to offer in this effort.

The more richly pluralistic human experience that would result form welcoming gay people into our culture as full participants would make it more difficult to maintain the heart-hardened view needed to continue the despoilation of the Earth. The consciousness of our culture must change if we are to live sustainably upon the Earth. Equal treatment for gay people would contribute to that change of consciousness in a powerful way.