Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz

most American antisodomy laws.
    Can we say, then, that the United States has finally begun to follow the ancient Greek example, allowing its millions of gay citizens to take their rightful place as social equals to heterosexuals? Not at all. Even now, a man caught engaging in the type of homosexual sex admired in ancient Greece (i.e., older men taking adolescent boys) will do extensive jail time. If he manages to serve his sentence without being killed by other prisoners, he faces a lifetime of ankle bracelets, residence restrictions, and inclusion on public lists of sex offenders. No one but the most strident of civil libertarians would defend him, much less talk to him. He would be known forever as a pedophile, the worst sort of social deviant.
    By contrast, the same-gender conduct decriminalized in the twentieth century by Western courts, that of two adults engaging in “sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle,” would have been revolting to most ancient Greeks. “Homosexual lifestyles” as such did not exist, nor did the concept.
    Again, the key distinction for the Greeks (as well as for other ancient societies) was in the taking and giving. To be the active partner was to embody male qualities—powerful, principled, in charge. The partner in the passive role was simply female , even if he had a penis. Thus there were no explicit prohibitions against same-sex relations, but, depending on one’s age, class, and position in bed, homosexual sex could be risky indeed. To make the wrong male into a female was a potentially life-threatening gamble, made even more treacherous by the city’s confusing web of laws and customs.
    Greek attitudes toward homosexuality resulted in part from a cultural belief in the origins of the sex drive. Plato traced it back to humanity’s initial division into three genders: male, female, and both at once. Originally, humans had two faces, two sets of genitalia, four legs, and four arms each. The original body design of these proto-people worked so well that they grew uppity in the face of the gods, which prompted Zeus to chop them all in two. The result was human beings as we know them: creatures condemned to a lifelong search for their missing halves. Those who came from androgynes craved the opposite sex. Women hewn from double-females sought women, and those cut from double-men were attracted to males. The relief people feel when they conjoin with others in the same lonely condition is a key aspect of what Plato called love.
    Plato himself made no secret of his preferences. Those cut from double-males “are the best of their generation,” he said, “bold, brave, and masculine.” Naturally, they had no interest in marrying women, “although they are forced to do this by convention.”
    These ideas carried some weight as late as the turn of the twentieth century, when Oscar Wilde referenced The Symposium to the jury presiding at his first trial for sodomy. In a packed London courtroom, he intoned Plato in defending the “love that dare not speak its name,” describing it as “the noblest form of affection” and stating that “there is nothing unnatural about it.” 7 (See Chapter Eight.)
    Not all of Greece agreed with Plato’s ideas, of course, but many Greek communities incorporated male-male sex into their educational systems. In Crete, men symbolically kidnapped boys and took them to the countryside for manly outdoor training. After a few months, the boys were given military kits and welcomed as adults. The process was conducted along strict guidelines, and the boys had a duty to report whether or not their teachers pleased them sexually; if they did not, the boys were permitted to get rid of them.
    Spartan boys were entrusted to the care of respected men at the age of twelve. Penalties awaited men who refused to provide such tutelage, or who did so poorly. The relationships were definitely sexual, as attested by the twenty-six-hundred-year-old carved inscriptions