David M. Halperin

Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World

A dream in which a man has sex with his mother may promise him political or commercial success--according to dream interpreters of late antiquity, who, unlike modern Western analysts, would not necessarily have drawn conclusions from the dream about the dreamers sexual psychology. Evidence of such shifts in perspective is leading scholars to reconsider in a variety of creative ways the history of sexuality. In these fifteen original essays, eminent cultural historians and classicists not only discuss sex, but demonstrate how norms, practices, and even the very definitions of what counts as sexual activity have varied significantly over time. Ancient Greece offers abundant evidence for a radically different set of sexual standards and behaviors from ours. Sex in ancient Hellenic culture assumed a variety of social and political meanings, whereas the modern development of a sex-centered model of personality now leads us to view sex as the key to understanding the individual. Drawing on both the Anglo-American tradition of cultural anthropology and the French tradition of les sciences humaines, these essays explore the iconography, politics, ethics, poetry, and medical practices that made sex in ancient Greece not a paradise of liberation but an exotic locale hardly recognizable to visitors from the modern world. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Peter Brown, Anne Carson, Franoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Maud W. Gleason, Ann Ellis Hanson, Franois Lissarrague, Nicole Loraux, Maurice Olender, S.R.F. Price, James Redfield, Giulia Sissa, and Jean-Pierre Vernant.

How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality

The history of sexuality is now such a respectable academic discipline, or at least such an established one, that its practitioners no longer feel much pressure to defend the enterprise—to rescue it from suspicions of being a palpable absurdity. Once upon a time, the very phrase “the history of sexuality” sounded like a contradiction in terms: how, after all, could sexuality have a history? Nowadays, by contrast, we are so accustomed to the notion that sexuality does indeed have a history that we do not often ask ourselves what kind of history sexuality has. If such questions do come up, they get dealt with cursorily, in the course of the methodological throat clearing that historians ritually perform in the opening paragraphs of scholarly articles. Recently, this exercise has tended to include a more or less obligatory reference to the trouble once caused to historians, long long ago in a country far far away, by theorists who had argued that sexuality was socially constructed—an intriguing idea in its time and place, or so we are reassuringly told, but one that was taken to outlandish extremes and that no one much credits any longer.1 With the disruptive potential of these metahistorical questions safely relegated to the past, the historian of sexuality can get down, or get back, to the business at hand. But this new consensus, and the sense of theoretical closure that accompanies it, is premature. I believe that it is more useful than ever to ask how sexuality can have a history. The point of such a question, to be sure, is no longer to register the questioner’s skepticism and incredulity (as if to say, “How on earth could such a thing be possible?”) but to inquire more closely into the modalities of historical being that sexuality possesses: to ask how exactly—in what terms, by virtue of what temporality, in which of its dimensions or aspects—sexuality does have a history. That question, of course, has already been answered in a number of ways, each of them manifesting a different strategy for articulating the relation between

Plato and Erotic Reciprocity

Friendship and love are always mutual in their fulfillment, though they may origi nate only in one person: this Plato shows, primarily in the Lysis, the Alcibiades, and then in the great dialogues on love. Convinced of this, could Plato transform Socrates into an erotic character and have him teach the mutuality of all friend ship and love if, in the passion of his own youth, he had met in him a man devoid of love?1

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bisexual

How is bisexuality defined? There is considerable disagreement among bisexuals and bisexual theorists themselves. I present 13 definitions of bisexuality and inquire into their overlaps, differences, implications and consequences. This unresolved definitional uncertainty points to a larger uncertainty about what sexuality is and how it should be understood. Bisexual theory therefore has the potential to remind us of aporias in the contemporary conception of sexuality.

Michel Foucault, Jean Le Bitoux, and the Gay Science Lost and Found: An Introduction

About fifteen years ago I arranged to meet Jean Le Bitoux in Paris. My intent was to secure the translation rights to his legendary interview with Michel Foucault, “Le Gai Savoir” (“the gay science”). The interview had been conducted on 10 July 1978. Jean Le Bitoux was already by that date a gay activist of some renown. Born in Bordeaux in 1948, he eventually moved to Nice where in 1970 he founded the local branch of the FHAR (Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire or “Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action”), a radical group that incarnated a 1960s style of Gay Liberation. In the parliamentary elections of March 1978, Le Bitoux, like Guy Hocquenghem, ran (unsuccessfully) as a “homosexual candidate.” He had recently begun a career as a journalist, and he decided to create a monthly gay magazine. This became Le Gai Pied, the first massmarket gay publication to be sold at newsstands in France. By 1982, according to Le Bitoux, it had a monthly circulation of 30,000. Le Gai Pied was already in the planning stages in the summer of 1978. Le Bitoux knew there was a good chance that the French authorities would find an excuse to ban it, and he was looking for ways to head off that possibility by making its suppression politically costly or embarrassing to them. It had been Foucault, one evening in his kitchen with Daniel Defert, Jean Le Bitoux, and Thierry Voeltzel, who had come up with the name Le Gai Pied to begin with;1 he offered to help out Le Bitoux and support the

What Is Sex For

Late one summer afternoon in 2012, I happened to find myself in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, wandering about in a tangle of streets and alleyways in a busy part of downtown, trying to locate a gay bathhouse and sex club called Spa Adam. I had the address, but the numbering of the alleys seemed to be out of sequence and I couldn’t figure out the logic of the urban plan. I was about to give up in despair when I suddenly stumbled on the place, built into a gracious old house with a balcony and clearly signposted. Once I did find it, I wondered how I could have missed it— not just because it was so conspicuous and so easy to identify but because blaring from the doorway at high volume in the small street was Adele’s current hit, “Someone Like You.”