Like Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, I read this book back when it first came out and had not yet generated the intense discussion that marked its reception. (In fact, on checking the publication information, I appear to have picked up a first edition of the original hardcover.) Looking back in the context of this re-read, two things come back to me that still hold.
LHMP
Blog entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 141 (previously 42c) - Book Appreciation with Kate Heartfield
(Originally aired 2020/01/18 - listen here)
Transcript pending.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 140 (previously 42b) - Interview with Kate Heartfield
(Originally aired 2020/01/11 - listen here)
Transcript pending.
Show Notes
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about:
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 139 (previously 42a) - On the Shelf for January 2020 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2020/01/04 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for January 2020.
There are two basic parts to Boswell's book on homosexuality and tolerance: 1) that Christian society was not always and inevitable intolerant of homosexuality; and 2) that the shift to intolerance can be localized to a particular historic period and related to other significant cultural and political shifts during that period. Perhaps the present day is an opportunity for understanding just how a conjunction of unrelated forces can combine to create apparently illogical shifts in popular thinking. Or at least apparent shifts in popular thinking.
This section of Boswell's work points up some of the structural flaws of his study, in my opinion. "Structural flaws" does not necessarily mean "incorrect data and evidence" but rather that the large-scale conclusions are shaped by the ways in which that evidence is interpreted. And in his quest to find evidence for the existence of a postive gay subculture, there are times when he is deliberately credulous (such as taking politically-motivated accusations of sodomy as descriptive fact) or fails to consider the meaning of the asymmetries in the data.
In this section of Boswell's study of shifting attitudes toward (male) homosexuality under Christianity, he explores the question of "why should sexual behavior come in for judgment at all?" as well as the specific trains of thought that were used to support condemnation of homosexuality specifically. He points out that it wasn't a foregone conclusion that Christianity would take this path, and that some of the background set-up for the rise of intolerance was demographic and political rather than philosophical. This shouldn't come as a surprise.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 138 (previously 41d) - Lesbian Vikings - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/12/28 - listen here)
My discussion and criticism is mostly dispersed throughout the summaries for this work. Posting in haste because I have a podcast to record.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 41c - Things I Loved in 2019 - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/12/21 - listen here)
Calendars are arbitrary things, and yet it’s hard not to get caught up in the urge to summarize what we’ve done, what we’ve consumed, what we’ve loved when that arbitrary reference point in the Earth’s solar circumnavigation arrives.
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