Born to be Gay

ALTHOUGH it ranges over continents and thousands of years, from Inspectors of the Pharaoh's manicurists in the third millennium BCE to ‘Thai psychiatrists in the 1990s’ (p. 251), the story Naphy tells is nevertheless a simple one: ‘[I]n the context of human history and culture, it is the (Judaeo-)Christian response to homosexuality that is abnormal and unnatural’ (p. 269). There is lots of stuff therefore about happy homosexuals in distant times and places, or, at least, those people about whom ‘there is no reason to assume that they engaged in same-sex practices, nor is there any reason to declare categorically that they did not’ (p. 130), and about women dressing up in men's clothes. And, on the other side, ‘the spread of Judaism's unique ideas about sex’ (p. 45), which infected first Christianity (and, less efficiently, Islam), and then, via colonialism, the rest of the world, leaving us, most ironically, in the position we find ourselves in today, when cultures with long, complicated traditions of accommodating same-sex attractions have come to see any such accommodation as a symptom of the degenerate influence of the post-colonial West. For gay people in the developing world, it would seem, western cultural imperialism has been both far too successful and not nearly successful enough

Archaeology · Christianity · Clothing · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Ethnology · Homosexuality · Islam · Sociology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies

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