Historical evidence suggests that homosexual behavior was successfully integrated in many precapitalist cultures. The most famous example is ancient Greece, where sexual relationships between older men and teenage boys were heralded as one of the highest forms of love. These relationships, however, were encouraged between wealthier, older, and powerful “betters” and their subordinates who were younger, poorer, or conquered. For the early Greeks and Romans, status and power between lovers were central to their conception of same-sex relations and they held starkly different views of those who played the penetrative role in sex and those who were penetrated. Plutarch, the Greek-born historian of the first century explained, “We class those who enjoy the passive part as belonging to the lowest depth of vice and allow them not the least degree of confidence or respect or friendship.”4
Many American Indian tribes embraced transvestite men and women, known as berdaches, who adopted the gender roles of the “opposite” sex and are sometimes referred to today as “two-spirited” people. A multiplicity of sexual and gender arrangements existed from tribe to tribe, according to anthropologists. Some male berdaches had sex exclusively with other men, though not other berdaches, while some remained celibate, had partners of both sexes, or had exclusively heterosexual sex.5 Gender variance, not sexual preference, defined the berdache, and rather than deriding them for their gender nonconformity, American Indian tribes saw berdaches as valuable members of their society. One Crow elder explains: “We don’t waste people the way white society does. Every person has their gift.”6
Even the Roman Catholic Church, until the twelfth century, celebrated love between men. When it ended priestly marriage and enforced chastity, homosexuality was prohibited as well.7 However, in these societies, it was homosexual actions that were tolerated, lauded, or pilloried, not an identifiable category of people. Economic and social conditions had not yet developed in ways that allowed for large numbers of people to acknowledge, express, or explore same-sex desire as a central feature of their lives or their identities.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault challenged modern society’s attempts to superimpose its sexual outlook on the ancients. He argues:
The Greeks did not see love for one’s own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior…. Were the Greeks bisexual then? Yes, if we mean by this that a Greek [free man] could, simultaneously or in turn, be enamored by a boy or a girl…. But if we wish to turn our attention to the way in which they conceived of this dual practice, we need to take note of the fact that they did not recognize two kinds of “desire”…. Their way of thinking, what made it possible to desire a man or a woman was simply the appetite that nature had implanted in man’s heart for “beautiful” human beings, whatever their sex.8
Whereas previous class societies prohibited certain sex acts, the rising capitalist state and its defenders in the fields of medicine, law, and academia stepped in to define and control human sexuality in ways previously unimagined. These nineteenth-century professionals—almost entirely white men—reflected the interests and prejudices of the rising middle class. With economic growth and development came the need for higher levels of education for more kinds of jobs, which extended adolescence and removed teenagers from many occupations, thus reducing social interaction between unrelated adults and children. Medical professionals aiming to legitimize their field pathologized masturbation, while legislators encouraged age-of-consent laws and pressed for higher minimum ages for marriage. Homosexual relations between adults and “innocent minors” were outlawed and juveniles were rendered asexual.9 No less a figure than Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychiatry at the turn of the twentieth century, theorized and popularized the “problem of homosexuality” while transforming heterosexuality into “the norm we all know without ever thinking much about it.”10
Our conceptions about gender roles have changed radically from one society to another and from one historical period to the next. Even our bodies have been radically transformed by our changing material conditions. Modern female athletes such as forty-one-year-old Olympian and mother Dara Torres, whose lean and muscular body is capable of beating professional male and female swimmers half her age, would have been inconceivable a generation ago. Advances in nutrition, training, and civil rights for women created the potential not only for a middle-aged American woman to compete and win three silver medals at the 2008 Summer Olympics but for her androgynous appearance to be accepted and even valorized in the pages of the New York Times.11 In contrast, the earlier onset of puberty among girls in the United States, particularly low-income African-American girls, is thought to be the result of diet, environmental chemicals, inactivity, and other factors that are features of modern industrial society.12
Medical science has long acknowledged the existence of millions of people whose bodies combine anatomical features that are conventionally associated with either men or women. These intersex individuals, estimated at one birth in every two thousand in the United States alone,13 are legally operated on by pediatricians who force traditional norms of genital appearance on newborn infants, often rendering them incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure later in life. The physical reality of intersex people calls into question the fixed notions we are taught to accept about men and women. Intersex people challenge not only society’s construction of gender roles, but compel us to examine the concept that sex itself is constructed, confined, and forced to fit into a tidy male/female binary. It appears that even our physical sex—not just how we comport ourselves—is far more ambiguous and fluid than previously imagined. The imposition of surgery on perfectly healthy infants in order to force their bodies to conform to societal sex norms is a blatant form of state-sanctioned physical abuse. These acts of sexual mutilation must be opposed by everyone who believes that self-determination should include the right of individuals to control and experience pleasure from their own bodies, as well as define themselves as whatever gender they choose.
Socialists argue that what humans have constructed they can also tear down. If the contention of this book is accurate—that capitalist society has transformed how people express themselves sexually yet simultaneously has aimed to restrict human sexuality as a means of social control—then a fundamentally different kind of society, based on human need and not profit, could put an end to modern sexual and gender definitions and limitations. A socialist society must be one in which people are sexually liberated—that is, all would have the freedom to choose whether, how, when, and with whom to engage in whatever sexual gratification they desired so long as no other person were harmed.
The changing family
The roots of homosexual identity and its subsequent repression can be found in the ever-changing role of the family. The family—that supposedly sacrosanct institution exalted by right-wingers and surreally depicted in countless laundry detergent commercials—has changed radically throughout human history. In fact, the family itself has not always existed.
Karl Marx’s closest collaborator, Frederick Engels, employed the anthropological research of Lewis Henry Morgan in his groundbreaking nineteenth-century work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Anthropology was then a new science; nevertheless, Engels’s theoretical conclusions have been substantiated by more recent anthropological research.14
Engels argued that although modern human beings have existed as a species for more than a hundred thousand years, people only began living in family units in the last several thousand years—when previously egalitarian societies divided into classes. Pre-class human social organization was based on large clans