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In 19th and early 20th century Britain you were a homosexual if you liked to be penetrated by men, but if you were the one doing the penetrating you were not considered homosexual. This is similar to the culture of the Roman empire, which saw nothing wrong with man penetrating another man but considered being penetrated to be shameful. All that to say, the conception of the "gay man" as being someone who wants to have any kind of sexual activity with other men is historically quite recent.
I don’t think it’s quite true that gay topping was even remotely socially acceptable in Victorian England.
Who ever said it was acceptable? It wasn’t: sodomy was a sin and a crime, both for the sodomizer and the sodomized. It’s just that the sodimizer wasn’t considered to be homosexual. He’s just a guy who stuck his penis in the wrong place, like someone who commits beastiality. They wouldn’t consider someone who shtups sheep a zoophile with a sexual identity, he’s just a guy who did a sex crime.
The most famous case, Wilde, involved someone who was probably a top (impossible to prove from the historic record, but my impression is that he was relative to Lord Douglas).
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Unacceptable like cannibalism, or "unacceptable" like adultery?
Turing was sterilised, wasn’t he? Although I never heard of that happening to anyone else.
I think it was a case of ‘unacceptable like adultery’ unless it was absolutely proven in the public eye in which case it became ‘unacceptable like paedophilia”.
I think OP’s point is that Turing was sterilized specifically for being a bottom and not for being “gay” in general. In other words, had he been a top or celibate he might’ve been considered an oddity but that would’ve been the extent of it.
Take this for what you will but I’ve never heard anything about him being a top or bottom. I’ve never seen or read anything that would indicate this was a factor in Victorian Britain.
If he’d been celibate that would have been fine as long as he didn’t go on about it.
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I'm pretty sure I could find a Victorian committing suicide over the fallout of their adultery if I worked at it. "Much closer to adultery than cannibalism" would be my intuition, at any rate.
Dudley and Stephens were shipwrecked mariners who killed and ate the ship’s boy after he fell gravely ill. They got six months’ imprisonment and this was widely felt to be far too harsh.
By which I mean you can find different treatments for all sorts of things, but I have never heard any evidence that points to OP’s “Victorian society didn’t think you were a sodomite as long as you were on top”.
And wasn't Oscar Wilde imprisoned because he sullied the marquess of queensbury's lad? Maybe it's just the height and age and my own ignorance of gay customs but I assumed Wilde was the top. Unless he was a power bottom.
IIRC confirmed victorian executions for sodomy were usually of tops with a much younger partner.
I seem to recall somebody looking into some specific cases behind the "N Victorians executed for gayness" statistic and finding that a high percentage would be more aptly framed as "child molestation" than "executed for being gay" -- no source that I can recall at the moment, but I definitely read it somewhere -- and the English are very good about court records...
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There was a researcher from the mid twentieth century whose name I forgot said this is basically supported by the psychological research.
Being the top or bottom is more than a preference, they’re really more like two separate sexualities in which very few people naturally gravitate towards both.
Tops are much more likely to be bisexual using modern terminology.
I understand the objection to “gay” as a label in this context, although I have no dog in this fight. People also use the term “gay” to essentially bind extremely disparate people whose behaviors vary wildly into one essentialist unit of cultural and political valence, which I imagine some “Men who have sex with men” would object to.
I’m sympathetic to this because I suffer from a mental disorder but I find attempts at building cultural and political solidarity amongst people who suffer from my disorder or a cluster of related ones to be absolutely abhorrent; I’m not a member of a “community” with proscribed political and economic interests, I’m just someone with a fucked up brain.
This is one of the few things Freddie deboar gets 100% right.
I think basically how we moderns think about identity is fundamentally harmful and stupid, getting in the way of understanding behavior which is the real interesting and functional bit with regards to how individuals interact with society writ large.
It’s DeBoer; he’s (nominally) a Dutch/Afrikaans farmer, not a swine.
I almost don’t want to correct it, it’s too good.
It would have been better if I misspelled it DeBoor drum roll
The English word boor is indeed cognate to the Dutch/Afrikaans boer; both etymologically come from roots meaning “peasant farmer”. The English word villain comes, via the French, from a Latin word with the same meaning.
Today I learned. That’s fascinating :)
When I went on a student trip to South Africa in the early noughties, there was a visible argument going on about whether "Boer" used while speaking English (in Afrikaans it just means "farmer") should be treated as a punishable racial slur. We were warned that the word could get you beaten up by townies in Stellenbosch.
Really? I just heard it used as an identifier, like ‘Dutch’.
"Dutch" used to describe an Afrikaaner was definitely a slur. They see themselves (in my view, correctly) as having by now become indigenous to South Africa.
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