3 4 T n o vam b e r 2 1 , 1097 ▼ ju s t out
T he D ykes of A ntiquity
New scholarship shows that lesbianism was known—
and denounced—by early Christian writers
▼
survivors
You do have
rights.
Even if your
abuse occurred
decades ago, you
might still be
entitled to
compensation.
by Gip Plaster
ernadette J. Brooten’s book Love Be
tween Women got someone’s atten
tion—it earned the 1997 Lambda Lit
erary Award in Lesbian Studies and an
award from the American Academy of
Religion—but it was ignored by much of the
lesbian and gay media.
Its subject matter, though, has been ignored
and misunderstood for centuries.
The central argument of the book, whose full
B
ooks
h
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title is Love Between Women: Early Christian
Responses to Female Homoeroticism, is that both
Christian and non-Christian writers in the Roman
world were aware of sexual love between women,
and nearly all rejected it. Christians and non-
Christians alike condemned woman-to-woman love
because they believed that women were by nature
passive and should subordinate themselves to men.
So what does this mean to us?
Many of today’s scholars believe that lesbian
orientation and relationships were unknown to
ancient writers. If lesbian
love was condemned,
though, it must not have
been unknown. That
means that some current
scholars are wrong, but it
also means much more.
In
1980,
John
Boswell’s book Chris
tianity, Social Tolerance
and Homosexuality laid
much of the framework
for gay Christian studies.
Today writers like Mark
Jordan, who wrote The
Invention o f Sodomy in
Christian Theology, at
tempt to correct and ex
pand Boswell’s work.
Little, though, is pub
lished about how lesbian
women were viewed in
the early C hristian
church. That is perhaps
in part because many
scholars believe that early
thinkers considered sex
to be about physical penetration. Since women are
incapable of penetrating each other according to
that line of thought, scholars conclude that woman-
to-woman sex was not identified in ancient cul
tures.
Brooten’s book re-examines this argument and
suggests that not only did early Roman thinkers
know about women who were sexually attracted to
women, but that they condemned these women in
their writing.
This rejection, she says, is a result of ancient
active/passive sexual roles.
“Roman-period writers presented as normative
those sexual relations that represent a human so
cial hierarchy. They saw every sexual pairing as
including one active and one passive partner, re
gardless of gender, although culturally they corre
lated gender with these categories: masculine as
active and feminine as passive,” Brooten says.
“Males could be either active or passive.. .whereas
females were always supposed to be passive.”
To further clarify her point, Brooten said in an
interview, “Roman-period writers sometimes ac
cepted sexual love between males, especially when
such relations were unequal, such as between a
free-citizen male and a male slave or an older man
and a youth. In such relations, the natural social
hierarchy was preserved.”
If people violated this hierarchy, their behavior
was deemed “contrary to nature.” From this, she
says, the biblical writer Paul concluded that homo
sexual sex was unnatural. We can conclude, then,
that if those roles are removed, the condemnation
fades away too.
Brooten says her book is an important addition
to four fields of study. First, her work contributes
to ancient history in general because of the number
of previously untranslated and never-before-col
lected sources she presents. Second, the evidence
she uses to support her conclusion that lesbian love
was condemned by the early church creates a
tapestry of documentation that is woven into
women’s history.
“[My book] contributes to women’s history by
documenting the existence of woman-woman
marriage, of the brutal surgical procedure of selec
tive clitoridectomy for women who displayed ‘mas
culine desires, ’ and of women seeking out magical
practitioners to help them attract other women,”
Brooten says.
She points out that her work also provides
much new research on the history of sexuality: “by
analyzing the differences between the cultural
conceptualizations of female and male
homoeroticism in antiquity, by documenting the
concept of a long-term
or lifelong erotic orien
tation in ancient astrol
ogy and ancient medi
cine, by demonstrating
that 19th-century medi
cal writers were not the
first
to
classify
homoerotic behavior as
diseased, by analyzing
the interplay between an
cient religious views and
understandings of sexual
behavior, and by delin
eating the gendered char
acter of Roman-period
understandings of the
erotic.”
Finally, and perhaps
most importantly for
many readers, the book
contributes to New Tes
tament Bible studies by
clarifying that the con
demnation of homosexu
als in the early church
involved societal beliefs
of the period about gender roles, and by providing
a new background for current discussions about
same-sex love.
As you can guess, the news for lesbians in the
ancient world wasn’t good.
“Medical writers prescribed mind control and
clitoridectomy to control female homoeroticism,”
Brooten says. “Astrologers described it as caused
by the stars and yet nevertheless unnatural and
impure. Early Christians called sexual love be
tween women unnatural and deserving of death,
imagined that women engaged in such love would
suffer horrific tortures in hell, and warned nuns
against it.”
But at least there was news, according to
Brooten, and not the void that many scholars think
existed. And when we remove the ancient cultural
rules, the news for lesbian Christians today seems
even better.
Brooten’s work, like much research about
women, has been ignored to some degree. But to
miss it is to miss an important piece of the puzzle,
rooted in the ancient world, from which we as
semble the modem lesbian and gay community.
Love Between Women: Early Christian
Responses to Female Homoeroticism by
Bernadette J. Brooten. University o f Chicago
Press, 1996; $34.95 cloth.