HOMOPHOBIA

A historical survey of opposition to same-sex relations—primarily those between men—since antiquity.

In the opening pages, Fone (English professor emeritus/CUNY; ed., The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, 1998) proposes that fear of and antagonism towards sodomy is “especially virulent in, and perhaps even unique to, Western culture.” For the next 400-plus pages he attempts to wrestle this broad, indefinite subject into manageable size by focusing on legal and literary evidence and by adhering to chronological progression from the Hellenic era up through the 20th century. Fone examines sources both canonical and (to use the proper term from fashionable academia) marginal—such as Plato’s Laws and the Pentateuch to J.A. Symonds’s Problem in Greek Ethics. He distills a great deal of the history of Western law and letters into this volume, which has the same invigorating effects as a well-researched and well-written biography whose chronology permits glimpses into tangents and peripheries: moments in times and places as widely separated as Corinth during the late Roman Empire and the London of Oscar Wilde are thrown into high relief. Ultimately, the implications of the title crystallize into a fascinating survey of the antipathy to sodomy through the centuries, which Fone plunges across like a determined conqueror. The thoroughgoing scholarship supporting Fone’s study, while reflective of its author’s biases (Fone backs his statements with references to respected if similarly ideological works by academics like Martin Duberman and the late John Boswell), is impressive. One problem, however, dodges Fone’s ambitious task from the beginning: definitions of and attitudes toward and against homosexual behavior (as with the concept of heterosexuality, for that matter) have varied from time to time and place to place. A thematic organization might have served Fone’s agenda better than chronological sequence, but he has written a book that will be of interest—and service—to a wide range of readers.

Readable and provocative history for both nonacademics and scholars.