One Hundred Years of Homosexuality

Summary

Halperin addresses the constructivist-essentialist debate on gay history from a constructivist point of view. He supports the social constructionist school of thought associated with Foucault, although he admits that the social constructionist view would be proven false if it could be shown that sexual orientation is innate. Social constructionists argue that the categories of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" have emerged from the social, political and scientific debate over sexuality that has taken place since the late 19th century, and that their application to people in effect makes them "homosexual" or "heterosexual".

Halperin believes that the appearance of the English translation of the first volume of Foucault's The History of Sexuality in 1978, together with the publication of classical scholar Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality the same year, marked the beginning of a new era in the study of the history of sexuality. Halperin suggests that The History of Sexuality may be the most important contribution to the history of western morality since Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).

In Halperin's view, the introduction of the term "homosexual" in the 1892 English translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psycopathia sexuallis by Charles Gilbert Chaddock marks an important change in the treatment and consideration of homosexuality. Discussing Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium, he argues that Aristophanes did not recognize a category of "homosexual" people but only the separate categories of men-loving men and women-loving women. According to Halperin, Aristophanes divided men-loving men into two different kinds, youths who loved adult men and adult men who loved youths.

Reception

One Hundred Years of Homosexuality was praised by numerous scholars. Classicist Jasper Griffin gave the work a mixed review in The New York Review of Books, calling Halperin's work learned but suggesting that he exaggerated ideas drawn from Foucault. Griffin wrote that Halperin did not "succeed in disproving the natural reading of a number of Greek texts, which is that some forms of sexual activity were discountenanced, and that some people were categorized by their sexual activities." Halperin responded that it was not his aim to demonstrate that sexual stigma did not exist in Ancient Greece. Griffin in reply accused Halperin of inconsistency on the issue. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum reviewed One Hundred Years of Homosexuality positively in The Times Literary Supplement. Gay writer Neil Miller commended Halperin's book for its lucidity, while English professor Leonard Barkan called it "brilliant". One Hundred Years of Homosexuality received a negative review from literary critic Camille Paglia, who accused him of poor scholarship, careerism, and over-valuing Foucault's ideas. Paglia found the work pretentious and confused, and expressed her dismay at Nussbaum's positive review. Paglia criticized Halperin for implying that homosexuals and homosexuality did not exist until the word "homosexuality" was coined and for drawing conclusions about the views of classical Athenians based on Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium, noting that "Aristophanes is a literary characters and not the real-life man on which he was based". Paglia contrasted One Hundred Years of Homosexuality unfavorably with John J. Winkler's The Constraints of Desire (1990), though she also criticized Winkler's book.

Philosopher Edward Stein called Halperin's reservations about scientific research "provocative and highly contentious". Sociologist Gary W. Dowsett wrote that Halperin, like Foucault in The History of Sexuality redraws "the terms of our understanding of ancient male-to-male sexual activity and man-boy love", and that he does so with a "view to the politics of the late twentieth century". Dowsett saw Halperin's views as following those of both Foucault and the poet and literary critic John Addington Symonds, maintaining that all three present a censored and overly idealized picture of homosexuality and sexual activity in general. Neuroscientist Simon LeVay wrote that the title of One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, "encapsulates...the notion that homosexuality was brought into existence by the invention, in the late nineteenth century, of the word used to define it." LeVay criticized Halperin's social constructionist arguments, arguing that the concept of homosexuality can exist without the word and that homosexuality itself exists independently of the concept. LeVay found Halperin's interpretation of the Symposium strained, noting that while according to Halperin Aristophanes divides men-loving men into youths who love adult men and adult men who love youths, Aristophanes represents the two kinds of love as "different stages on a single life course." LeVay suggested that Halperin's form of social constructionism replaces consciousness with "a highly linguistic self-consciousness".

Psychologist Jim McKnight wrote that Halperin is one of several critics of evolutionary explanations of homosexuality who "argue that homosexuality is not an innate but rather an acquired behavior and that Darwinistic explanations are spurious or ultimately misguided". McKnight granted the possibility that Halperin and the other critics may be correct. Nussbaum credited Halperin with providing a good discussion of the relevance of the idea that homosexuality is a cultural construct to ancient Greek culture. Jurist Richard Posner described Halperin's view that homosexuality was "invented" by European psychiatrists as a thesis representative of social constructionism. Classicist Bruce Thornton, writing in Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (1997), endorsed Paglia's criticisms of Halperin and Winkler. Author Timothy F. Murphy wrote that while Halperin claims that erotic preferences are no more fundamental than dietary preferences and should therefore be explained in cultural rather than biological terms, dietary habits themselves can be explained partly in terms of inherent human needs for proteins, fats, and sugars. He criticized Halperin for claiming that the discovery of a gene for homosexuality would refute his ideas about the cultural determination of sexual object-choice, since social constructionism can be interpreted as claiming that sexual orientation is inevitably influenced by social forces and thus does not rule out scientific investigation of the origins of homosexuality. In The Mismeasure of Desire (1999), Stein wrote that Halperin's views about the development of contemporary categories of sexual orientation are not universally shared: while Halperin maintains that the word "homosexual" was coined by Karl-Maria Kertbeny in 1869 and attaches significance to this event, others, such as John Boswell, argue that the concept the word refers to has existed for centuries.