Free Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz Page B

Sodom, has been invoked time and again to support antihomosexual laws. Yet gay sex had nothing to do with the story. Lost in all the talk of fire and brimstone was Lot’s invitation to his townsmen to rape his virgin daughters. Later, when Lot and the girls were hiding in a cave, they got their father drunk and had sex with him. ©TOPFOTO

    The myth of Sodom and Gomorrah was picked up by England’s most important legal authority, William Blackstone, who commented, in the eighteenth century, that “the infamous crime against nature” was a “disgrace” so revolting that it should “not . . . be named among Christians,” and should be punished by death, as God had shown his disfavor by working “the destruction of two cities by fire from heaven.” Modern American courts have been no less ready to embrace the story as truth. One Alabama court dealing with a 1966 sodomy case wrote: “We cannot think upon the sordid facts contained in this record without being reminded of the savage horror practiced by the dwellers of ancient Sodom from which this crime was nominally derived.” In 1968, the North Carolina Supreme Court, when passing on charges against a man for homosexual sex, referred to the “famous Biblical lore in the story of the destruction by fire and brimstone of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah where the practice was prevalent.” By this time there was, of course, doubt as to how the two cities were destroyed, but there was still total certainty that “the practice” of sodomy was the cause of God’s anger. 19
    As the “good man” in one of sex law’s most powerful fables, Lot was still a rather dodgy character. His readiness to offer up his virgin daughters for rape showed badly misplaced priorities, even by ancient standards. But all of that is now beside the point. For at least two thousand years, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah has been enough for lawmakers to justify the monstrous treatment of same-gender sex. Had Jewish law not become the cornerstone of Christian morality, the myth of the Cities of the Plain would have remained confined to a small, gay-bashing Near Eastern religion. But that was not how matters turned out. The ancient Hebrews’ antihomosexuality mania became the foundation for generations of intolerance.
    But before that would take place, another set of cultural traditions would take hold in the Mediterranean, going on to shape Western culture no less than early Judaism. Just across the water from Palestine, the Greeks were organizing themselves under a set of assumptions that had nothing to do with God or Hebrew law. No one disagrees that Greek arts and culture reached the limits of the sublime, but few Greeks thought much about such things. Most were simply trying to get through the day, and many were involved in a lesser-known Greek obsession: litigation. Greek law was played out in public, in trials that involved thousands of people—and the Greeks loved nothing more than a good sex trial.

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    HONOR AMONG (MOSTLY) MEN: CASES FROM ANCIENT GREECE
     
    N EITHER THE SEX slave nor the wife ever had a chance. On every Athens street corner, every statue of the god Hermes, his penis erect, pointed to female powerlessness. The slave could not hope for loyalty from her owner, Philoneos—not when he could sell or torture her on a whim. Nor did the wife of Philoneos’s friend have any right to demand fidelity from her husband. The dust of the city’s streets was stamped everywhere with the prints of prostitutes’ studded sandals, beckoning with messages like “Follow Me,” and nothing prevented men from pursuing these trails directly to the city’s houses of pleasure. So when Philoneos decided to sell his slave to a brothel, and when his friend began to lose interest in his wife, the two women were left with few options to keep their men. They were desperate.
    One evening, when the two men were drinking together at the husband’s house, the wife called the slave over. In