After writing a blog yesterday about art quilts, I began to think about all of the artists and creative people I know who are “gay.” I considered how the word, “gay” has changed since the 1960s, when I was a teenager. The first song I ever wrote, at that time, had the following words, “I sing cuz I’m happy, I sing cuz I’m gay, I sing to chase them ole blues away, I sing cuz I ain’t got nothin’ else to do, I’m singin’ all the time.”
“Gay,” of course, meant “happy, lighthearted.” Now, I could never sing that song today because I am the furthest thing from “gay” that you could imagine, according to the word’s current meaning. Yet in the innocence of youth, being 14 years old, the song was okay. In high school, concurrently, I was reading a novel titled, “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay.” The book had nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality.
This morning, I “Googled” the words “History of Gays” and came up with some interesting sites. The first wikipedia site has a lot of detailed information, although much of it is unsupported by scholastic citations. At any rate, they date homosexuality to 12,000 BCE. In 5,000 BCE, an erotically-engraved rock suggests dancers who encircle two “cavorting” males. As early as 27 BCE, the first same sex marriage is celebrated. Not until the 4th century is there a law that prohibits same-sex marriage. By the 16th century, King Henry VIII, who seemed to have a penchant for beheading everyone, even his own wives, passed a law in 1588 making homosexuality a crime to be punished by death. It was not until 1861 that the punishment was amended to a prison sentence of ten years to life.
In the 17th century Virginia Colony, Richard Cornish was hanged for sodomy, and at Plymouth (“Plimouth”) Plantation, the first known conviction for lesbianism occurred. Fast forward to 1928 when a published book, The Well of Loneliness, brings homosexuality to public awareness. Throughout the 20th century, homosexuality is decriminalized and re-criminalized in many countries. In the 1930s, it is considered a mental illness. Police arrest homosexuals. In Nazi Germany, thousands of targeted homosexuals are murdered. In the 21st century, we see both the repeal of sodomy laws, and the institution of laws against “homosexuality,” a word that first appeared in print in 1869.
More recently, “same sex marriage,” “civil unions,” and “civil partnerships,” have been recognized, and in some cases in the United States, the status carries the same weight of commitment and legal privileges enjoyed by heterosexual married couples. These same-sex arrangements are a long way from being universally-accepted, yet seem to be “safer” situations than indiscriminate, multiple “encounters.”
Christians point to the Bible and decry homosexual acts based on the report that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because the people who lived there engaged in sodomy. Ironically, a well-known, successful, evangelical preacher, whose custom was to rail weekly against the perversity of the homosexual behavior of others, was a closet homosexual all along, hiding this fact from his wife and children. When the truth finally came out, as truth has a way of doing, he and his family made an appearance on the Oprah Show, centered on his “fall from grace,” and was subsequently interviewed on a special news program.
As you can see, thousands of years of both discrimination and endorsement of “gay” practices has passed. The topic has been considered from a moral standpoint, from a psychiatric viewpoint, and consistently, has been a topic dealt with by Kings, the courts, the police, countries and states, towns, vigilantes, health officials, parents, church members, and the general public.
Many homosexuals, who were famous people, chose to keep that personal information, “personal.” The public was not aware of their preferences until after their deaths, in some instances. As you might agree, people are people, and the way they behave is their own business. Part of the “hatred” of homosexuals arises from blame placed on them for the AIDS epidemic. We have not even begun to see the tip of the iceberg of that problem in the United States. HIV/AIDS is most prevalent in Africa, where I learned this week, many grandmothers are raising their grandchildren because their own children have died of the disease.
Everything has a history and I thought that some of you might be interested in reading this short summary. For more details please do the same Google search I did and you will come up with more sites and more information than you really want to know. This is a topic that I am sure I, personally, do not fully understand. However, I have learned that it is better to accept PEOPLE as people, first and foremost, and to get past the prejudices that potentially can isolate us from each other. Luckily, our only Judge is not of this world, and only after our own deaths will it be proved whether we are worthy to sit “at the right hand of the Father,” the Creator of the Universe, the Author of Life Itself.
Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications
