Gay men

Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum nose-kissing

The first record of a possible homosexual male couple in history is commonly regarded as Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, an ancient Egyptian couple, who lived around 2400 BCE. The pair are portrayed in a nose-kissing position, the most intimate pose in Egyptian art, surrounded by what appear to be their heirs.[13] At around of 1240, the Coptic Egyptian Christian writer Abul Fada'il Ibn al-'Assal compiled a legal code known as Fetha Nagast. Written in Ge'ez language, Ibn al-'Assal referred his laws from apostolic writer and former laws of Byzantine Empire. Fetha Nagast was written in two parts: the first dealt with the Church hierarchy sacraments and connected to religious rites. The second concerned laity, civil administration such as family laws.[14] In 1960, when the government enacted the civil code of Ethiopia, it cited the Fetha Nagast as an inspiration to the codification commission.[15] More recently, the European colonization of Africa resulted in the introduction of anti-sodomy laws, and is generally regarded as the central reason why African nations have such stringent laws against gay men today.[16] Three countries or jurisdictions have imposed the death penalty for gay men in Africa. These include Mauritania and several regions in Nigeria and Jubaland.[17][18][19]

Pre-Columbian ceramic of two men engaging in oral sex

As is true of many other non-Western cultures, it is difficult to determine the extent to which Western notions of sexual orientation apply to Pre-Columbian cultures. Evidence of homoerotic sexual acts between men has been found in many pre-conquest civilizations in Latin America, such as the Aztecs, Mayas, Quechuas, Moches, Zapotecs, the Incas, and the Tupinambá of Brazil.[20][21][22] The Spanish conquistadors expressed horror at discovering sodomy openly practiced among native men and used it as evidence of their supposed inferiority.[23] The conquistadors talked extensively of sodomy among the natives to depict them as savages and hence justify their conquest and forced conversion to Christianity. As a result of the growing influence and power of the conquistadors, many Native leaders started condemning homosexual acts themselves. During the period following European colonization, homosexuality was prosecuted by the Inquisition, sometimes leading to death sentences on the charges of sodomy, and the practices became clandestine. Many homosexual men went into heterosexual marriages to keep appearances, and some turned to the clergy to escape public scrutiny.[24]

During the Mexican Inquisition, after a series of denunciations, authorities arrested 123 men in 1658 on suspicion of homosexuality. Although many escaped, the Royal Criminal Court sentenced fourteen men from different social and ethnic backgrounds to death by public burning, in accordance to the law passed by Isabella the Catholic in 1497. The sentences were carried out together on one day, 6 November 1658. The records of these trials and those that occurred in 1660, 1673 and 1687, suggest that Mexico City, like many other large cities at the time had an active underworld.[24][25]

Two young men about to have relations. Qing China, date unknown.

In East Asia, same-sex relations between men has been noted since the earliest recorded history. Homosexuality in China, known as the passions of the cut peach and various other euphemisms, has been recorded since approximately 600 BCE. Male homosexuality was mentioned in many famous works of Chinese literature. The instances of same-sex affection and sexual interactions described in the classical novel Dream of the Red Chamber seem as familiar to observers in the present as do equivalent stories of romances between heterosexual people during the same period. Confucianism, being primarily a social and political philosophy, focused little on sexuality, whether homosexual or heterosexual. Ming dynasty literature, such as Bian Er Chai (弁而釵/弁而钗), portray homosexual relationships between men as more enjoyable and more "harmonious" than heterosexual relationships.[26] Writings from the Liu Song Dynasty by Wang Shunu claimed that homosexuality was as common as heterosexuality in the late 3rd century China.[27] Opposition to male homosexuality in China originates in the medieval Tang Dynasty (618–907), attributed to the rising influence of Christian and Islamic values,[28] but did not become fully established until the Westernization efforts of the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China.[29]

The Death of Hyacinthos by Jean Broc (1801)

The earliest Western documents (in the form of literary works, art objects, and mythographic materials) concerning same-sex male relationships are derived from ancient Greece. These relationships were constrained between "normal" men and their young male lovers. Relationships between adult men, however, were still largely considered taboo in Ancient Greek culture. Given the importance in Greek society of cultivating the masculinity of the adult male and the perceived feminizing effect of being the passive partner, relations between adult men of comparable social status were considered highly problematic, and usually associated with social stigma.[30]

This stigma, however, was reserved for only the passive partner in the relationship. According to contemporary opinion, Greek males who engaged in passive anal sex after reaching the age of manhood – at which point they were expected to take the reverse role in pederastic relationships and become the active and dominant member – thereby were feminized or "made a woman" of themselves. There is ample evidence in the theater of Aristophanes that derides these passive men and gives a glimpse of the type of biting social opprobrium and shame ("atimia") heaped upon them by their society.[31]

Some scholars argue that there are examples of male homosexual love in ancient literature, such as Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad.[32] In Ancient Rome, the young male body remained a focus of male sexual attention, but relationships were between older free men and slaves or freed youths who took the receptive role in sex. The Hellenophile emperor Hadrian is renowned for his relationship with Antinous, but the Christian emperor Theodosius I decreed a law on 6 August 390, condemning passive males to be burned at the stake.[33][34]

During the Renaissance, wealthy cities in northern Italy—Florence and Venice in particular—were renowned for their widespread practice of same-sex love, engaged in by a considerable part of the male population and constructed along the classical pattern of Greece and Rome.[35][36] But even as many of the male population were engaging in same-sex relationships, the authorities, under the aegis of the Officers of the Night court, were prosecuting, fining, and imprisoning a good portion of that population.

From the second half of the 13th century, death was the punishment for male homosexuality in most of Europe.[37] The relationships of socially prominent figures, such as King James I and the Duke of Buckingham, served to highlight the issue,[38] including in anonymously authored street pamphlets: "The world is chang'd I know not how, For men Kiss Men, not Women now;...Of J. the First and Buckingham: He, true it is, his Wives Embraces fled, To slabber his lov'd Ganimede" (Mundus Foppensis, or The Fop Display'd, 1691).

An illustration from the 19th-century book Sawaqub al-Manaquib depicting homosexual sex between young men

In ancient Sumer, a set of priests known as gala worked in the temples of the goddess Inanna, where they performed elegies and lamentations.[39]^:285 Gala took female names, spoke in the eme-sal dialect, which was traditionally reserved for women, and appear to have engaged in homosexual intercourse.[40] The Sumerian sign for gala was a ligature of the signs for "penis" and "anus".[40] One Sumerian proverb reads: "When the gala wiped off his ass [he said], 'I must not arouse that which belongs to my mistress [i.e., Inanna].'"[40] In later Mesopotamian cultures, kurgarrū and assinnu were male servants of the goddess Ishtar (Inanna's East Semitic equivalent), who dressed in female clothing and performed war dances in Ishtar's temples.[40] Several Akkadian proverbs seem to suggest that they may have also engaged in homosexual intercourse.[40] In ancient Assyria, male homosexuality was present and common; it was also not prohibited, condemned, nor looked upon as immoral or disordered. Some religious texts contain prayers for divine blessings on homosexual relationships.[41][42] The Almanac of Incantations contained prayers favoring on an equal basis the love of a man for a woman, of a woman for a man, and of a man for man.[43]

A pink triangle was worn by gay men during the Holocaust.

Gay men were one of the primary victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Historically, the earliest legal step towards the Nazi persecution of male homosexuality was 1871's Paragraph 175, a law passed after the unification of the German Empire. Paragraph 175 read: "An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex... is punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights might also be imposed." The law was interpreted differently in Germany until April 23, 1880, when the Reichsgericht ruled that criminal homosexual acts involved either anal, oral, or intercrural sex between two men. Anything less (such as kissing and cuddling) were deemed harmless play.[48]

Franz Gürtner, the Reich Justice Minister amended Paragraph 175 to address "loopholes" in the law after the Night of the Long Knives. The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 declared "expressions" of homosexuality as prosecutable crimes. The most important change to the law was the definitional shift of male homosexuality from "An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex" to instead "A male who commits a sex offense with another male." This expanded the reach of the law to persecute gay men as a people group, rather than male homosexuality as a sexual act. Kissing, mutual masturbation and love-letters between men were now seen as legitimate reasons for the police to make arrests. The law never defined a "sex offence," leaving it to interpretation.[49]

Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals under the Nazi regime, of whom some 50,000 were officially sentenced. Most of these men served time in prison, while an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 were incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps. Rüdiger Lautmann argued that the death rate of homosexuals in concentration camps may have been as high as 60%. Gay men in the camps suffered an unusual degree of cruelty by their captors and were regularly used as the subjects for Nazi medical experiments as scientists tried to find a "cure" for homosexuality.[50]

ACT UP was founded by Larry Kramer to fight for medical research on the HIV/AIDS crisis.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is considered the deadliest period in modern history for gay men, and the generation of young gay men who died in the crisis is known as the "lost generation."[51] At its start, the epidemic was particularly severe in the United States. In 1980, San Francisco resident Ken Horne was reported to the CDC with Kaposi's sarcoma (KS). He was retroactively identified as the first patient of the AIDS epidemic in the US.[52] In 1981, Lawrence Mass became the first journalist in the world to write about the epidemic in the New York Native.[53] Later that year, the CDC reported a cluster of Pneumocystis pneumonia in five gay men in Los Angeles.[54] The next month, The New York Times ran the headline: "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals."[55] The illness was soon termed Gay Related Immunodeficiency (G.R.I.D.), because it was believed to only affect gay men.[56] In June 1982, Larry Kramer founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis to provide food and support to gay men dying in New York City. During the early years of the AIDS crisis, gay men were treated pitilessly in hospital quarantine wards, left alone without contact for weeks at a time.[57]

AIDS poster in D.C.

During the early years of the epidemic, there was significant misinformation surrounding the illness. Rumors swirled that being in the same room or being touched by a gay man could lead one to contract HIV. It was not until April 1984 that the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler announced in a press conference that the American scientist Robert Gallo had discovered the probable cause of AIDS, the retrovirus which would be named human immunodeficiency virus or HIV. In September 1985, during his second term in office, US President Ronald Reagan publicly mentioned AIDS for the first time after being asked about his administration's lack of medical research funding for the crisis.[58][59] Four months later, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stated, "One million Americans have already been infected with the virus and that this number will jump to at least 2 million or 3 million within 5 to 10 years."[60] Gay men, trans women, and bisexual men faced the brunt of deaths during the first decade of the crisis. Activists claimed the government was responding to the epidemic with apathy because of the perceived "social undesirability" of these groups. To address this perceived apathy, activists such as Vito Russo and Larry Kramer took more militant approaches to AIDS activism, organizing direct action through organizations like ACT UP in order to force pharmaceutical corporations and government agencies to respond to the epidemic with more urgency. ACT UP eventually grew into a transnational organization, with 140 chapters around the world,[61] while the AIDS crisis ultimately became a global epidemic. By 2019, complications related to AIDS had taken 32.7 million lives worldwide.[62]

Historically, many films have included negative sub-texts regarding male homosexuality, such as in Alfred Hitchcock's films, whose villains used implied homosexuality to heighten senses of evil and alienation.[66] In news programming, male homosexuality was rarely directly mentioned, but it was often portrayed as a sickness, perversion, or crime. In 1967, CBC released a news segment on homosexuality; however, the segment was just a compilation of negative stereotypes of gay men.[67] The 1970s showed an increase in gay men's visibility in Western media with the 1972 ABC show That Certain Summer. The show was about a gay man raising a family, and although it did not show any explicit relations between the men, it contained no negative stereotypes.[67]

With the emergence of the AIDS epidemic and its associations to gay men, media outlets in the U.S. varied in their coverage, portrayal, and acceptance of gay male communities. The American Family Association, the Coalition for Better Television, and the Moral Majority organized boycotts against advertisers on television programs which showed gay men in a positive light.[68] Media coverage of gay men during the AIDS crisis depended on the location and therefore the local attitudes toward gay men. For example, in the Bay Area, The San Francisco Chronicle hired an openly gay man as a reporter and ran detailed stories on gay male topics. This was a sharp contrast to The New York Times, which refused to use the word "gay" in its writing, exclusively referring to gay men and lesbians with the term "homosexuals," because it was believed to be a more clinical term. The Times also limited its verbal and visual coverage of issues pertaining to gay men.[67][69]

On Pose, Billy Porter plays Pray Tell, a Black gay man with AIDS in New York.

In recent years, positive representations of gay men entered mainstream television programming, however, critiques also emerged about the lack of diverse representations of gay men onscreen. Alfred Martin writes, "Popular television shows including Will & Grace, Sex and the City, Brothers and Sisters, and Modern Family routinely depict gay men. Yet the common characteristic among most televisual representations of gay men is that they are usually white."[70] Scholars have noted that intersectional representations of gay men of color are generally not present on television.[70] Additionally, when television shows do depict gay men of color, they are often used as a plot device or as some type of trope. For example, Blaine Anderson and Kurt Hummel were two important characters on the show Glee. Darren Criss, who portrays Blaine, is half-Asian, while Chris Colfer, who portrays Kurt, is white; Blaine often served as nothing more than a love-interest for Kurt's character. Gay male characters of color are also often depicted as "race neutral."[70] For example, on the ABC Family show, GRΣΣK, Calvin Owens is a Black, openly gay man; however, many of his storylines, plots, and struggles singularly revolve around his sexual identity. In an attempt to be colorblind, the show disregards his ethnic identity.[70]