In this revelatory examination of homosexual love and its place in society throughout history, British novelist and journalist Colin Spencer cuts through an extraordinary amount of myth and misunderstanding about the place of same-sex love in society. This wide-ranging, constantly surprising, and often deeply moving account of like searching out like throughout history fills a clear need for the general reader.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
There may once have been a use and a market for a book that brings together, with little analysis or effort to assimilate, extraneous bits of information on homosexuality around the globe and throughout the ages. But that time has passed. With books as seriously good as John Boswell's Same Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe, on homosexual marriage in the Middle Ages, there is little room in the gay and lesbian sections of bookstores and libraries for the work in hand. At times a disjointed compendium of facts, at times an attempt at brief exposition of idiosyncratic opinion put forward as definitive analysis, the book provides only the occasional tidbit of interesting information (the origin of the name of the Mattachine Society, for example, or a particularly poignant story of a gay Vietnam vet). While discussing his notion that same-sex coupling is useful either as an effective method of birth control or as a way of purging unwanted genes from the human race, Spencer (The Heretic's Feast: A History of Vegetarianism) confusingly introduces a footnote to the effect that Critobulus, a character from Plato's Symposium, loved older and younger men, and was also married. This arbitrary and nonsensical technique is characteristic of the entire book. Benefiting from only a cursory though broad sort of research (basing entire sections on reports from a single source), the book never achieves authority.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This rich, if eclectic, survey of homosexuality (and the intermittent social sanctions against it) from prehistory through the 1990s is simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. Novelist and journalist Spencer (The Heretic's Feast: A History of Vegetarianism, LJ 5/1/94) betrays an idiosyncratically British bent as he focuses largely on white males in Western European cultures, including only occasional examples of people of color or women. The assemblage of sometimes surprisingly absorbing stories culled from a wide variety of sources is unfortunately marred by undistinguished prose, gross generalizations, shallow interpretation, and unsubstantiated declarations; it is further undermined by simplistic explanations of such topics as sadomasochism, AIDS, and transgender issues. Inconsistently citing almost exclusively secondary sources, using an unsatisfactory combination of starred footnotes and numbered endnotes, and providing a barely adequate index and incomplete bibliography, this wide-ranging overview of male homosexuality across time and (some) geography ultimately fails as the history it is intended to be.?James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Spencer is trying to write a history of homosexuality that is not philosophical like Foucault's opus. He traces what I would call gayness from the BC era to the present day. This would be a good book for those unfamiliar with gay history. However, this book felt Eurocentric to me; he mentions little about well-researched areas of same-sex love in Asia or Native America. Also, Spencer's work is cursory; other authors have gone into depth in many of his topic areas. I liked Neil Miller's book on gay and lesbian history since the invention of the word "homosexuality" in the mid-1800s better than this book. This book is also male focused and may rub lesbian and bisexual women the wrong way. Still, for first-time readers of gay studies, this may be a good, initial, comprehensive book.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
To cover such a vast stretch of historical distance between persons, places and events over a wide range of notable homosexual milestones in human history was surely a daunting task and is handled here surprisingly thoroughly. There's enough complexity for experts in the subject to be impressed, yet the material is simple and understandable enough even for rank amateurs and newcomers to the subject to benefit.
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