Homosexuality and Crime - Cross-cultural Conceptions, Western Traditions, Modernity, Anglo-american Law Reform, The Global View
variation societies crimes women
A glance through anthropological and historical records reveals immense cross-cultural variation in the acceptance and repression of homosexual relations between men and between women. So great is this variation that some societies in some eras have imposed capital punishment on men engaging in homosexual acts, while others have held sexual friendships between men to be a social ideal of the most honorable, and even heroic, men. The treatment of homoerotic relations between women has often not been symmetric to those of men, being valued or constrained as much by gender conformity as by sexuality per se. Given this immense variation, the question, especially for western societies, is: How did homosexuality become criminalized, then medicalized, and then, to varying degrees, emancipated from the control of church, government, and other social institutions and reform movements? Today the relevant issue in democratic societies is less about crime and more about how best to assure that law works to guarantee the freedom and equal participation of all, including homosexually interested members of society, in the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Homosexuality and people identified as homosexuals—lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people—today confront a patchwork of legal injunctions, depending on jurisdiction, that range from unreformed criminal labels to inclusion in antidiscrimination codes.
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Anthropological records tend to be uneven in documenting sexual customs and practices around the world, typically reveal more about
male attitudes than female, and show a wide range of social attitudes regarding homosexuality. What emerges from the anthropological record is that at least some indigenous societies on every inhabited continent have socially valued relationships that include a hom…
The roots of the political and philosophical traditions of the West are in a society deeply affirmative of homosexual relations of the mentoracolyte model. Indeed, most of the heroes of ancient Greek mythology had male lovers; the founding of political democracy is attributed to the male couple Harmodias and Aristogeiton, who slew the tyrant Hyppias in 514 B.C.E. (Halperin; Foucault). And Socrates…
The seeds of an alternative to the old order germinated in the Enlightenment, when scientific and humanist thinking, and a rediscovery of the ancient Greek legacy of democratic politics and aesthetics, grew into a countermovement to theocracy. Socio-economic changes occurring in the world system were, at the same time, undermining the aristocratic, landholding classes of Europe and the church that…
A thaw in the repressive climate of the post–World War II period occurred on several fronts in the late 1950s. In Britain, as in most western European countries and the United States, gay and lesbian people began to organize in small, cautious groups in major cities. These homophile groups attempted to provide mutual support in an environment characterized by fear and harassment. Criminal l…
At the turn of the twenty-first century, criminal penalties for homosexual acts remained part of legal codes primarily in three sets of countries: (1) post-colonial governments of south Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean (many still preserving British laws now abandoned by the United Kingdom itself); (2) mainly southern and Rocky Mountain states of the United States; and (3) Islamic governments of th…
In the last decades of the twentieth century, many governments took steps to rectify discriminatory regulations imposed on citizens' freedom to form the sexual and affective relationships of their choosing. As justice, rather than crime, has come to define public discourse around homosexual relations, governments have increasingly recognized their gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered p…
Today gay and lesbian movements and scholars continue to grapple with the legacy of modern and premodern paradigms of sexuality that continue to contend for supremacy in many places. A queer theory school of thought, manifested briefly in the early 1990s as a queer nation movement, critiques the historical peculiarity of the modern homosexual, calling for its deconstruction. Concepts of sin, crime…
——. The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement. New York: Twayne, 1995. International Lesbian and Gay Association. http://www.ilga.org. …
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almost 3 years ago
April 20, 2009
To Whom It May concern:
In New York city/State homosexualty hould be a crime and I have the case file tio support this actual fact. This life is an evil. They set people-up, went they what them sexually. In New York City, Michael R. Blomberg and the Probation Department have our youths preforming oral sex on each other and spreading HIV to the females in the community and I can forward to you the documents to support this truth. I am a Muslim, beacuse I cannot be in the Christian and support the evil works of the devil (homosexuality), wherefore, Islam was the only faith in which to workship the creator, free from this evil life. Thank you,