Lesbians and gay men have always existed in every historical period Essay Example

the behaviour of sexual intercourse with people of the same sex and/or consummate love between two people.

Of course we all know it is existing right now. But how about in the past? During the period of Nazi Germany (1933-1945), there had been a gay rights movements. However, the gay communities were removed soon because of the Nazi party. "After solidifying his power, Hitler would include gay men among those sent to concentration camps during the Holocaust. " (Wikipedia, 2005) Homosexuals were suppressed during that period of time, and were believed that these behaviours had to be eliminated. "Hitler believed that homosexuality was 'degenerate behavior' which posed a threat to the capacity of the state and the 'masculine character' of the nation.

Gay men were denounced as 'enemies of the state' and charged with 'corrupting' public morality and posing a threat to the German birthrate. "(Wikipedia, 2005). The prohibition of gay mem might suggested that homosexuals were existed. However on the other hand, there were not much articles that clearly wrote about the lesbians and gay men. For a long period of time until 1975, being homosexual was seemed as having mental disorder according to the DSIM from the American Psychology Association and seemed as people who is deviated from the norm.

Because of this, lesbians and gay men were afraid to stand out and speak for themselves. And most of them were just like the "normal" people who got married and had children while might still having a homosexual relationship outside the marriage secretly. For example Vivien Ng had searched for lesbians in Chinese history and she found [o]ne noteworthy example is Qiu Jin's relationship with Wu

Zheying, who was a poet, renowned calligrapher, and reformer in her own right. The two met in 1903 shortly after Qiu Jin's arrival in Beijing with her husband, and quickly became inseparable.

Both lamented the fact that they had met too late and their time together was too short ... on the seventh day of the Chinese New Year, Qiu Jin and Wu Zheying exchanged a formal pledge of eternal friendship, and occasion that Qiu Jin marked with a poem called "Orchid Verse. " The next day, Qiu Jin appeared before Wu Zheying in a man's suit and presented her with a pair of shoes and a skirt, explaining to her dear friend that "These items were part of my trousseau. Now that I have decided to wear men's clothes, I have no need for them. Please keep them in remembrance of me after we part. " ...

June Chan, a Chinese American lesbian activist in New York City, includes pictures of Qiu Jin in her famous slide show on Asian lesbians. However, historian Mary Rankin, who has written the most extensive biography for Qiu Jin in the English language, does not explore the nature of the Qiu-Wu friendship. ... No other historian of modern China has dared to address the possibility of a lesbian relationship between Qiu Jin and Wu Zheying. (Ng Vivien, in Duberman Martin, 1997: 201) This article is rather ambiguous and leaves a question mark for the relationship between Qiu Jin and Wu Zheying.

As what Vivien found was secondary information, a lots of them could not be proved and had past already, we just never know. In the past, many homosexual couples kept

their relationships secretly might be because of people always wanted to stay in the majority group and did not want to look odd with the others so they keep their sexuality under. Especially in a country like China in the past which was rather not open, everything was quite absolute where people were not allowed to even talk about sex ("normal" sex) in public.

It is like in Freud's period, people repressed about sex and had to deny if they were homosexuals to avoid being odd or diagnosed as mentally disordered. In my opinion, I believe that the bebaviour of love-making with people of the same sex have always existed. The words "lesbians", "gay men", "homosexuals", "heterosexuals", "bisexuals", etc are really labels given to distinguish between different behaviours and make the minority groups of behavours look weird or a part from the "norm". However, why do we need these labeling?

McInhtosh Mary (1968) had suggested two reasons for this. Firstly, to have a fixed identity so that it would not be easy to drift from one behaviour to another. Secondly, "the labeling serves to segregate the deviants from others, and this means that their deviant practices and their self-justifications for these practices are contained within a relatively narrow group". These gradually became an identity rather than a description. As the behaviours are now generally accepted, it is becoming like a role more then simply describing the sexual behaviour parttern.

Some adolescent fall into the role and act as homosexuals where they do not really know that what sexual orientation they have. This is often called "latent homosexual" or "pseudo homosexual" (McIntosh Mary, 1968). In my experiences when I

was in secondary school in Hong Kong where I m was studying in a single-sex school, a lot of my school mates claimed that they were lesbians and then reclaimed that they were heterosexuals after graduated from the school. This might be caused by the social environment that people having.

For example when there is only one kind of sex people around you and you have not much chance to get into touch or get to know the opposite sex of people, you might suspect yourself to be homosexuals. Does this imply that pseudo homosexuals are socially constructed? And how society treats them? Although homosexuals are now generally accepted by society and people but yet not legislatively, there are only four countries accept same-sex marriages, they are Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Canada.

In the United Kingdom, the government yet has invented a separation category for the same-sex relationships that these couples can only have civil partnerships but not marriage like the different-sex couples. If the society sees homosexuals as a normal behaviour now, why do we still distinguish them in the laws? It is really the same kind of partnership as the heterosexuals having. We are all just choosing a partner among the human beings, why does the gender thing matters so much? Hopefully this would be changed in future, just like the idea or meaning for the term "homosexual" has been changing a lot over time.

The earliest descriptions for the term are not really the same as the modern conception that we are having now. It was emphasized on effeminacy where now in contrast more like "fag, queer, gay, bent" (McIntosh Mary, 1968). In conclusion, the

homosexual behavour should have always existed in every historical period and across all cultures. However, it is not easy to prove for the past as we usually have to rely on secondary evidences but not on primary information or direct observations.

The reliability and validity of such information are often questionable as the sources are usually have been processed by others (the writers or the researchers) and the material would have been subjected to the writers' schema or expectations. There is also a problem of temporal validity, as meaning of word might change over time and the social expectation is also changing. We could not subjectively using the knowledge and expectations that we are having now to interpret the past information. But, nevertheless, the existence of homosexual behavour in the past and over different cultures can not be disproved as well.