January Posting Meme: History of Christians and Lesbians for alexseanchai

A day late, alexseanchai asked this: Historical Christian attitudes towards lesbianism? I specify lesbianism because I can't think of a Bible verse specifically prohibiting it, while everyone knows about the "to lie with a man as with a woman is abomination" and the arsenokoites.

And I'm sorry I missed your birthday!  This has been a helluva week.  (Two deaths in the congregation means two funerals, in addition to grief work.)

But the thing about historical Christian attitudes towards lesbianism is that there ... really isn't much.  For several reasons.

First, the whole way we understand sexuality is a modern phenomenon.  As in, the word homosexuality did not exist until the 19th Century, and there were no words that covered the same concept, because the idea of being attracted to the same gender as a state of being ... nobody really got that, it just wasn't a category people thought in.  As they understood it, everyone was attracted to the opposite sex, but some people had appetites so huge and so kinky that the opposite sex wasn't enough.  Which is why "what the Bible says about homosexuality" is a lot trickier to talk about than "what the Bible says about" almost anything else--we're really comparing apples to carrots.  They're not even both fruit.

So what was sex about, for historical Christians?  Sex was, in no particular order, about power, about marriage, about money, about children, and about sin (as in, Augustine's theory that sinfulness is inherited through sex and the act of conception).  In particular, sex was about penetrating and being penetrated.  The one who did the penetrating was masculine and male and had the power, and the one who was penetrated was feminine and female and had no power.  Without that aspect of power and penetration, it wasn't really sex.  And women can't penetrate one another (well, they can with fingers and dildos, but there isn't an organ to do it with) so while they were at least aware of male homoerotic behavior (i.e. men having sex with men), they weren't very aware of the possibility of female homoerotic behavior.  And even when they were, well, it's not like a woman could take her female lover's virginity (as they understood the concept of female purity and virginity), she couldn't get her pregnant, she couldn't make her any more feminized than she already was, she had no status to lose ... no big deal.  (And remember, for most of the history of Christianity, homosexual behavior was no morally worse than adultery or gluttony, it wasn't until the 19th Century that it went from "frowned upon" to "THE WORST THING EVAR WITH JAIL TIME."  And even then, Lesbians mostly got overlooked--Queen Victoria wasn't the only one who simply didn't believe it was possible even when people tried to explain it to her.)

So what did lesbians do?  Some of them got married because they had to, for security or because it was necessary to continue the family.  (But remember that marriage wasn't about "being in love" it was about family and security and money and property and heirs and curbing the sexual appetite.)  Some of them never married and carried on longstanding affairs with "friends" or "companions."  Some of them set up spinster households ... but since women couldn't live alone, really, it's very difficult to tell from the historical record when you have a lesbian couple or just two women who never got asked to marry a man and couldn't/didn't want to live at home.  The thing is, they would get crap for being spinsters and get general misogyny thrown at them, but not really any anti-lesbian stuff, because it wasn't so much a concept and even if they had understood themselves as lesbians and tried to explain it, people would not have understood and probably shrugged and gone about their business.

All of the stuff I've been talking about is cultural, because there wasn't really a religious aspect to it; Christianity really didn't have much (if any) understanding of it.  Which is not to say that lesbian couples were welcomed with open arms (they got the same religiously-justified misogynistic crap that all women got), it just wasn't directed at lesbians specifically.

Of course, then you get into the 19th Century and our understanding of sexuality changed and the whole idea of a sexual identity developed and homosexuality became criminalized, and that's the point at which homosexuality goes from "one of many possible sexual and venal sins" to "a special kind of sin" and something that merited jail time.  But even so, it was mostly directed against men, and not women.

January Posting Meme: My First Fandom, for thady

thady wanted to know about the first fandom I participated in and did I have fandoms before I went online.

And yes, I had fandoms before I went online!  I just didn't have many people besides my parents and brother to gush over them with.  My parents raised me on Star Wars and Star Trek: The Next Generation; I watched the shows, but also I was an avid reader.  And, at that time (in the late 80s/early 90s), there wasn't much YA SFF that got into our small town public library.  I DEVOURED books.  I was bitterly upset that the library would only let one check out 20 books at a time--with YA books, I'd go through that in a week by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade.  I've always been a fast reader.  I can still remember the day when the librarian led me to the adult SFF section and showed me the shelf of Star Trek books--I was in heaven!  I read all of them and then started working my way through the rest of the section.  And I got my parents to take me to a (very small) local con at which James Doohan was appearing.  Basically, it was "Jimmy Doohan signing autographs, and oh, yeah, there's a few dealers and other stuff, too."  So that was my first fandom.  Classic Trek wasn't on TV for me to watch, but TNG was; I watched TNG and read TOS novels.*  Even then, worldbuilding was WHERE IT'S AT for me.  I LOVED Diane Duane's books for that reason.  I still have a notebook with a geneology of Spock's kids and their families--his daughter was a priestess and in line to take over from T'Pau and married to a human starship captain.

*BTW, the 80s and early 90s had some AWESOME TOS novels--most were written by either fanfic authors or professional authors who were fans.  You could really tell it wasn't just work for hire--they knew Star Trek and they LOVED it.  Some of it was pretty cracky, there were lots of really obvious author-insert characters, but at the same time there is so much love and so much fun.

In my senior year of High School, second semester (i.e. after I had gotten in to the college I wanted) I dropped Honors Physics in favor of a period as a library aide.  (Such a slacker!)  The librarians were both old-school SF lit geeks, and we'd talk about that.  But I would also spend time fooling around on the computers when there was no work, and it was then I found a Star Wars fanfic archive.  I was in love!  (It's been vanished into the aether for well over a decade; it's the archive that taught me to SAVE FAVORITE FICS ON MY OWN COMPUTER because otherwise they will VANISH INTO THE MISTS OF TIME.)  I set out to read the archive, by which I mean EVERY STORY IN IT, and my Aspergers makes me anal enough that it was a while before I realized that I could ... skip fics that didn't interest me or that weren't well-written.  And even longer than that before I could bring myself to actually skip fics without reading them.

Eventually I found other archives and LJ, and the rest is history.

NINE DAYS LEFT ON THE MEME!