aya link sajarah perhomoan! :)) R

http://www.androphile.org/index.html

Gay History = Human History
Brief gay history survey and guide to highlights

History is written by the victors. They choose what will be
remembered, and what covered up. So it has been with male eros.
Looking at any history textbook, one would think that never has a
society praised love between men, never has a painter, a poet or a
pope shared his bed and his heart with another male. Evidence of
same-sex love has been either quietly suppressed, as with the Greeks
and Romans, or quickly destroyed, as is still done with newly
unearthed Inca and Mayan art. The result of this deception has been a
needless polarization of society and untold suffering for those people
who happen to fall in love with others of their own sex.

Uncensored, the historical record reveals an opposite reality: the
male love instinct is a universal constant. Death of Hyakinthos, Jean
Broc, oil on canvas, 1801, Musée des Beaux-Arts,Only society's
attitude towards it has varied. All cultures have regulated male love,
weaving varied tapestries of ritual around it. And a few have tried -
to no avail - to regulate it out of existence.

As a rule, male love was part of the social and religious fabric. From
the city states of ancient Greece and Rome with its emperors (Trajan
and Hadrian among others), to the Siberian shamans and Native American
two-spirit medicine men, from the African tribesmen to Chinese
emperors and scholars, people the world over understood and made space
for men's vulnerability to the beauty of other males. They accepted
that - whether married or not - men fell in love with men or youths,
dreamt about them, wrote about them, fought over them, and took them
to bed. And they usually understood that boy children were excluded
from the game of love, to the same degree that they understood that
girl children were excluded as well.

In Ancient Greece love between males was in many ways analogous to the
marriages of the time, seen as equally important in the life of the
individual, and enshrined in Greek mythology. Muhammad Qasim 1627 -
Wine Pourer - Illuminated miniature of Shah Abbas I (1571-1629) of
Persia, embracing his wine boy - Louvre, ParisIt was the cornerstone
of a cultural tradition that 2500 years ago provoked the awakening of
democracy, theater, philosophy, mathematics, history, and so on. Male
love was thought to bring out the best qualities in a youth,
especially manliness and courage. In warfare soldiers often fought
side-by-side with their beloveds, as in the renowned Theban band;
later, led by Alexander the Great and his boyfriend Hephaestion, the
Greeks conquered the known world. Greece, of course, was no Utopia:
prostitution and rape, often attended by slavery, were common.

In Japan,apprentice Samurai paired up with older warriors to be
trained in love and war, and even the shogun had - besides his
concubines - many boyfriends, their "nanshoku" loves recorded by
writers and shunga painters who immortalized "shudo," the Way of the
Young. They likewise immortalized the hard lives of the "tobiko" or
fly boys, traveling young kabuki actors who had to labor on stage by
day and please their clients in bed by night.

In the Moslem lands, famous Iranian and Arab poets such as Hafiz
i-Shirazi and Abu Nuwas praised and rued the charms of boys (whom they
sometimes plied with wine and seduced). Sufi holy men from India to
Turkey sought to find Allah by gazing upon the beauty of beardless
youths. Storytellers enshrined gay love tales in the Thousand and One
Nights. Artists like Riza i-Abbasi amused kings and princes with
exquisitely wrought Persian miniatures and calligraphies. Miyakawa
Choshun (1682-1753) - The Go Game - Individual panel from an shunga
painting of silk done at the end of the eighteenth century, reprinted
in The Love of Samurai, A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality by
Tsuneo Watanabe and Jun'ichi IwataMullahs and censors railed against
male love, but men of all walks of life, from Caliphs to porters,
delighted in it and all looked forward to being attended by "unaging
youths as beautiful as pearls" once in paradise.

In North America and Siberia, shamanic traditions dating back to the
stone age recognized the special spiritual powers of those men and
women drawn to same-sex love, as we still see in the Native American
two-spirit tradition, which survives to this day.

In the pre-modern west, male love survived mostly underground, visible
only when the lovers were unlucky enough to get caught, or when hinted
at by artists brave enough to flout convention. Many writers,
musicians, painters and poets depicted male love, but always in coded
form:
        gay history     




gay history
Michelangelo, who adorned the Sistine Chapel with vibrant male nudes;
Shakespeare, who serenaded his darling boy in his sonnets; Blake who
railed against priests "binding with briars my joys and desires;"
Whitman, who sang the body electric. The list of luminaries, artists,
statesmen, men of the cloth, knights and knaves who felt the pull of
male love - by itself, or alongside the love of women - is endless.

The big lie that same-sex love is "against nature," a fiction which
flies in the face of both Domenico Cresti (called Passignano)
1560-1638 - Bathers at San Niccolo - Private collection.biology and
history, depends on censorship for its survival. We at the Androphile
Project, gleaning the work of scholars in gay studies, aim to undo
that censorship by publicizing gay love's role in man's spirit and
culture: its successes, its failures, and the controversies it has
given rise to over the millennia. We hope the prose and poetry,
religion and mythology, art, philosophy and history collected here
from around the world will serve to deepen understanding of male
love's place in human nature. As this is being written (winter 2004),
it could also illuminate the growing debate about gay marriage, a
tradition documented the world over for thousands of years, but
nowhere as widely or as recently as in North America, where it was
practiced and honored by many of the First Nations.

The documents gathered here are the footprints of the Gay Muse, who
has inspired men and women on every continent since the dawn of time.
They bear witness to the fact that male love is irrepressible. Where
forbidden, it has prevailed over stonings, burnings, lobotomies,
schoolyard homophobia, the gallows and the gaol. Where welcomed, it
has openly blossomed into the highest achievements of the human mind.

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