Most reliable contemporary research on homosexuality shows that although being gay is as old as humanity itself, homophobia is not and in fact, open anti-gay bigotry is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Much of the history of homosexuality sees repression mostly at certain specific times though in the main, homosexual behavior was tolerated and never so consistently repressed and proscribed by established political and religious institutions as in the modern era. One LGBT website cites the “confluence of Church and State” which though occurring quite early in history took a long time to have an overall effect on society given how widespread open homosexuality was and its consequent popular acceptance. It would take some time for a regularized repression of homosexuality. And along with this, the social construction of a new minority based on sexual preference and behavior would emerge. It is thus that the systematic persecution of homosexuals is a structural feature of modern times.
The author of the above linked piece views the growing intolerance of the high middle ages, specifically toward those the Church viewed as heretics, and the repression and expulsion of Jews and Muslims during the Spanish Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. From the early 14th century until the final quarter of the 15th century when the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile were unified and the office of the Spanish Inquisition was established by the post-unification Spanish Royal Court, violent intolerance grew during the “Reconquista” and the Spanish Inquisition, which lasted for 350 years until the early 19th century tortured and murdered thousands of heretics and suspected heretics. It was this setting that the authors believe provided the “incubation” period for what developed into modern homophobia. Some early Church fathers, such as John Chrysostom, made efforts to officially oppose homosexuality but, as the some LGBT researchers state, “...it wasn’t to become influential for a long time. The reason is simple – homosexuality was so common in this period, and practiced so openly, that the public at large regarded these doctrines as a bit extreme...”
But it wasn’t until the late 12th century when the tide of the Reconquest turned strongly in favor of the Christians that the Church began to legally attack homosexuality, a practice that had been widespread within the Church and its monasteries for centuries. The authors state;
By the latter half of the 12th century, an increasingly conformist Europe found minorities of all kinds, including homosexuals, to be irritating. Tracts against them began to appear, and propaganda intended to incite anger became common...The rise of intolerance did not subside...as the years ticked by, it actually increased...The Muslims and Jews were, of course, not the only ones to feel the heavy hand of the Inquisition. Sexual minorities were particular targets, as the pressure to conform increased. Social critics began to single out gay people for special persecution. Peter Cantor (d. 1197) was the first to argue that Romans 1:26-27 referred specifically to gay people. The term “sodomy” came, for the first time and against all theological precedent, to refer exclusively to homosexual sex. At Cantor’s urging, the Lateran III Council of 1179 became the first to rule specifically on homosexual acts, along with money lending, heresy, as well as the arch-heresies of Judaism and Islam...It passed into the permanent collections of canon law in the following century, and became the basis of the Catholic ban on homosexuality.
The final centuries of the Reconquista are often viewed as a turning point in western history during which modern institutionalized prejudices such as racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia began to develop into their current forms. The protracted violent upsurge that completely transformed Spain during the high middle ages also gave rise to modern forms of prejudice and discrimination in the very process of creating the modern Spanish Christian nation. The creation of modern Spain released new waves of intolerance, enforced conformity, social conservatism and repression in an effort to establish new forms of consciousness regarding racial and national identity, ethnicity and sexual orientation. It should be remembered that not only did anti-gay Church canonical law emerge during this tumultuous time but two other milestones in institutionalized bigotry.
During this same period The Leya de Sangre Limpieza (laws of pure blood) banning converted Jews from public service, certain occupations or land ownership came into existence as well as the Church’s papal bull Dum Diversas on 18 June, 1452 by Pope Nicholas V. authorizing Alfonso V of Portugal to reduce any “Saracens (Muslims) and pagans and any other unbelievers” to perpetual slavery giving rise to the early Portuguese slave trade from West Africa which grew into a 400 year criminal enterprise. All such persecution was linked to the growing intolerance of the Church energized by the creation of Spain as a modern nation-state and the opening up of the “New World” to colonization, slavery, exploitation, pillage and the rise of merchantile capitalism based on new agro-export oriented plantation agriculture for profit.
The newly forged Church-State alliance that created new labor repressive production systems and nation-state forms of political organization produced and reenforced homophobia mostly as a bi-product of the intense social conformity and intolerant reign of terror needed to facilitate the emergence of this new political and economic order. But Marxist scholar Sherry Wolf sees the emergence of homophobia under modern industrial capitalism as a more contradictory process than one which more naturally facilitates such oppression. She writes;
The oppression of gays and lesbians-and all sexual minorities-is one of modern capitalism’s infinite contradictions. Capitalism creates the conditions for men and women to lead autonomous sexual lives, yet it simultaneously seeks to impose heterosexual norms on society to secure the maintenance of economic, ideological and sexual order.
Wolf sees the emergence of modern industrial capitalism in the early nineteenth century as one which first allowed one to live outside the confines of the nuclear family which up until that point was one of the most basic forms of social organization. In pre-capitalist times, people were never defined in terms of their specific sexual acts. A person who engaged in gay sexual activity may have had his behavior condemned by some but was never persecuted as a gay person per se as a consequence. The categorization of people according to their sexuality is an entirely modern phenomenon.
It was capitalism that broke down the nuclear family by allowing people to earn and live independently of their relatives. Beginning in the 1860s, a flurry of laws in the UK were introduced to make homosexuality illegal. Many states in the US did the same and many states still have “anti-sodomy” laws on the books. The irony has been noted that the persecution of homosexuals actually worsened in the era of industrial capitalism as individual sexuality went from being a private matter, regardless of how it was viewed, to being a public issue legally defined and overtly governed by the state! Over the course of time a new minority emerged defined purely by their sexual orientation. Homosexuals or a gay or lesbian person eventually became a new social construct under late capitalism. But what specific benefit does capitalism glean from homophobia.
Some on the left use the “reproduction” argument in two senses. One is the crude form; the more reproduction of human beings the greater the slack in the labor force and the greater the profit for capital; a greater availability of labor lowers wages! But in another sense, the heterosexual nuclear family allows for the cheaper “reproduction” or sustainability of human labor through the care and support given through the household. One such explanation follows;
As the center of production moved from the household to the factory, so the public sphere and the private sphere became separated. The private, domestic sphere retained the responsibility for maintaining people in working condition, and for reproducing the workforce. The capitalists who benefit from this ready supply of human labour do not have to shell out and pay for it - the work is done as a labour of love, mainly by women. So the capitalists are pretty keen on 'family values'. Politicians fall over themselves competing to be lauded as the most 'pro-family'. Much of the language of homophobia is expressed in terms of defending family life, and anti-gay attitudes often coincide with traditional views on the family.
But as the author of this piece also points out, families reproduce attitudes, values and ideas. Since the patriarchal nuclear family structure tends to reenforce conservative views and attitudes, the value of preserving the nuclear family to propagate right wing ideology and beliefs friendly to free market capitalist policies becomes a more obvious benefit than the economical “reproduction” of industrial workers which alternative families can provide just as well. Still, as one writer put it, “Industrial capitalism needs the family, but it is a form of family detached from the productive roots that had defined it since the age of serfdom in western Europe.” Under industrial capitalism, the rise of factories (as opposed to the cottage industries of the old “putting out system”) distinctly separated work and home life. The separation of home and work life after the industrial revolution suddenly created sharply delineated sex roles (men at work, women in the home) to be enforced by a deeply conservative paternalistic morality. It is no accident that the conservative paternalism of the Victorian Age and the Industrial Revolution perfectly coincided in history.
Frederick Engels made a simple observation in his Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. He made the obvious anthropological assessment that once hunting and gathering tribes began to produce and store accumulated wealth beyond what was needed for immediate consumption, parts of much larger social groups broke off into individual family units for the purpose of protecting and transferring that property to their successors. But this in and of itself doesn’t explain the modern transformation of the nuclear family and its criminalization and persecution of gays and lesbians.
Noah Carlin’s research, which I linked above, noted that the concept of “personal life” emerged with the separation of home and work spheres and along with it a need to compensate perhaps for the loss of control the industrial capitalist experienced in the process. The control of women and children in particular with the sudden Victorian era criminalization and repressive institutionalizing of orphans and prostitutes was a clear effort to control the labor force beyond the factory gates. As Carlin observes,
“The very real material importance of the family in nineteenth-century capitalist society helped to marginalize and make things more difficult for those individuals who did not fit into the model roles required. The ideology of that society reinforced this by fixing the idea that the family was also the best way of satisfying the needs of ‘personal life’, in which sexuality came to feature more and more prominently.”
The nuclear family also seemed to provide the greatest means of enforcement of gender roles, sexuality and sexual behavior and the discipline of personal behavior in general for capitalists seeking to instill in a restive urban population rigid morality, social commitment to work, deferred gratification and pressures of holding one’s job. The control of the labor force through the instilling of conservative and conformist popular attitudes regarding social behavior was accomplished through the establishment of the patriarchal nuclear family. The resurgence of religion as a mode of social control is also a factor. Well documented trends in paternalistic moralizing in a plethora of repressive laws against vagrancy, vice, public drinking and sex outside of marriage aimed to create an atmosphere of conformity never before seen on such a regularized basis. It is obvious that the resulting homophobia released by these Victorian era patterns, born of the “need” for capitalist discipline, is observable to this very day.