Gay Studies

Anthropologists have documented a wide range of attitudes toward sexuality in tribal and small-scale societies, which tend to be more egalitarian and to tolerate a far wider range of sexual behaviors, perhaps because where there are no significant forms of inherited wealth, sex can be more easily separated from procreation. Nevertheless, many small-scale societies developed elaborate forms of sexual identities and rituals, including "third sex" figures such as the Polynesian mahu and Native American "two-spirit person" (formerly referred to as "the berdache"), and the male–male semen ingestion rituals of Melanesia. None of these phenomena, still less others such as the cross-dressed performances common in shamanic ritual or the Indian phenomenon of the hijra (a broad category encompassing eunuchs and gender-ambiguous persons), are easily interpreted within Western notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality, but all of them attest to the rich variability of human sexual desire and gender performance.

In state-level societies characterized by hierarchies of class, wealth, and power, in contrast, patriarchy was the rule. Nevertheless, some forms of same-sex love were tolerated and even encouraged, often in hierarchical forms that allowed elite males to explore their desires through rarefied aesthetics of same-sex eroticism. In imperial China, for example, one finds homosexuality among the emperors of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), and the cross-dressing gender performance of Beijing and Cantonese opera, ranked among the most esteemed of all Chinese arts. Though Neo-Confucianists worried homosexuality would threaten family stability, an epicurean aesthetic of male love was routine among dynastic aristocrats, as the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 C.E.) anthology Duan xiu pan (Records of the cut sleeve) attests. In Japan, an intergenerational tradition of sexual mentoring—not too different from Plato's—was customary and honorable between older samurai (nenja) and adolescent initiates (wakashu), and during the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) bisexual "connoisseurs of boys" (shōjin-zuki) vied for the affections of young Kabuki actors, who typically doubled as male prostitutes, mainly for the merchant classes. Japan's bisexual ethos is present even in its greatest literary classic, Tale of Genji (early eleventh century), whose rakish hero sleeps with boys as well as women, while Ihara Saikaku, famous for The Great Mirror of Male Love (1687) and The Life of a Sensuous Man (1682), is arguably the world's first author of commercially produced homosexual and bisexual erotica.