Columns
Stonehenge to Stonewall
Stonehenge to
Stonewall
Or Gay History In A Nutshell
Do You, Adam, Take Steve...
by Charles Emond
I had planned to write on eunuchs and celibacy this month, but in view of the gay marriage debate swirling around me, I decided to hold off. This seemed a much more pressing topic, especially given the idiotic historical statements from our opponents. One particularly inane example, that marriage as we know it was instituted by God six thousand years ago, even ignores Biblical evidence!
So if you were anxiously anticipating stories about castrati in the papal choir or Erasmus misbehaving in Paris, you will just have to wait.
You can dress them up…
To begin with, check out Genesis 2:18-25, often touted as God’s institution of marriage. God clearly makes us male and female, but there is not a ring, a bouquet, or a fancy cake in sight. If you have forgotten the story here, God takes out one of Adam’s ribs and creates Eve, who immediately wrecks everything with that apple business. God is unhappy about this turn of events so he dresses them up and tosses them out of Eden. (Some fundamentalists would have you believe that they were wearing a tuxedo and a white bridal gown at the time!)
In the Christian Bible, since Christ will come again soon, you are encouraged not to bother with marriage. The best response to Christianity has always been celibacy (like Christ), with monks and nuns winning the heavenly sweepstakes. Heterosexual marriage was a compromise with the material world, and the less physical contact, the better. In the Middle Ages, St. Etheldreda made her continued virginity a condition of her two marriages, and the Third Council of Constantinople stated that “the spirit of unity is superior to the joining of bodies.”
Hugh of St. Victor argued that the ideals of Christian marriage were “most fully realized when the marriage was never physically consummated: only then did it properly symbolize the spiritual union between God and the soul.” So much for being fruitful and multiplying!
Those quirky rituals
In many European cultures, marriage was much more informal than today. To quote Boswell, “No marriages in ancient societies closely match their modern equivalents.” Marriage ceremonies in the Christian church were not authorized, nor did marriage become a sacrament until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215! Even then the focus of the marriage ceremony was the priest’s blessing of the bride on her change in status, much like you have your dog blessed on the feast of St. Francis.
So for the first 1200 years of Christianity, marriage didn’t have much going for it – despite the wild claims of the fundamentalists.
Also, marriage back then was a private arrangement made by the families of the bride and groom. The emotional ties or personal preferences of the “happy couple” were decidedly secondary. So were religious issues. Love might develop once two people were married, but this was not necessary. Sex beyond the perfunctory production of heirs, often involved slaves, prostitutes, or concubines. (Remember that Roman who said to his wife on their wedding day, “My sex life is none of your business!”)
Incidentally, the Fourth Lateran Council also authorized the tossing of the bridal bouquet, that business with the garter, and the tapping on the wine glasses as a signal for the couple to kiss. (Just kidding!)
More than Brothers
John Boswell’s book on same-sex unions was responsible for quite a stir (and a series of Doonesbury cartoons) when it came out. He discovered that for hundreds of years, Catholic and Orthodox churches had performed gay marriages. His detractors figure he had just come across some sort of fraternity rite, but Boswell is convinced these were actual marriages. He spent 12 years looking for evidence and found plenty of it.
For example, he found prayers in 16th- and 17th-century missals for a “Wahlbruder” ceremony, in which the priest asked of two men in turn, “Do you take x to be your brother?” They each replied, “I do.” Then they were asked if they truly wished to be joined together, and if they believed in the Trinity and the gospel. The priest then read from the gospel and declared that they were henceforth “more than Brothers.”
Since the ceremony usually took place on the feast of Christ’s beloved disciple, St. John the Divine, the two men were called “young Johns.” Another manuscript, found in a small monastery near Rome, describes a ceremony between two men and uses the Greek word “gamos,” meaning marriage. This seems like pretty clear stuff to me.
His book includes a number of same-sex marriage ceremonies, complete with bible readings and prayers. He also reports that these marriages were considered holier than marriages between men and women, which were actually legal affairs dealing with property and inheritance. These took place outside the church, while gay ceremonies took place in the church because they were about love.
Be My Life’s Companion
In 1578, the French writer Montaigne writes of a ceremony at “…the Church of St John of the Latin Gate, in which some Portuguese some years before had entered into a strange ‘brotherhood.’ Two males married each other at Mass, with the same ceremonies we use for our marriages, taking Communion together, using the same nuptial Scripture, after which they slept and ate together.” Unfortunately, not everyone thought this wedding was a good idea, and many of the participants were later burned at the stake.
In 1620, Alberto Fortis witnessed two women getting married in a church in Dalmatia. “The happiness that shone in their eyes after sealing this sacred bond demonstrated to the onlookers [a] tenderness of feeling.”
Boswell concludes, after presenting many other carefully researched examples of same-sex marriages, “Recognizing that many – probably most – earlier Western societies institutionalized some form of romantic same-sex union gives us a much more accurate view of the immense variety of human romantic relationships and social responses to them than does the prudish pretense that such “unmentionable” things never happened.”
I happen to agree with Boswell. There is certainly enough historical evidence to convince me that this current struggle is not a struggle to gain something new but rather to regain something that was once ours.
Next time: You either got it or you ain’t!
For More Information: This gay history column is the 17th in a series that began in prehistory. Much of my research for this column comes from John Boswell’s Same-Sex Marriage in Pre-Modern Europe, which you really must read if you are interested in Christianity and/or gay marriage.
Charlie Emond has a bachelor’s degree from Queens College and master’s degrees from both Dartmouth and Keene State. He teaches college history courses in Springfield and White River Junction. This January he will be teaching a course he developed - Hidden History: Homosexuality in Western Civilization - for the Community College of Vermont on line.