Customer Reviews

One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love (New Ancient World Series)

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Halperin's work is essentially ideological, as I suspect he would admit. He believes first and then argues. His reading of the primary sources reflects his biases, and his arguments based on Greek vocabulary are weak and based on a lot of semantic trickery. If you are interested in sexuality in the ancient world, you have to read Halperin, but only those that start from his own ideological assumptions will be convinced he has said anything important.

This was given to me by a friend. I have found it to be indespensible in my readings as a great place to start looking for information on Greek Homosexuality. The bibliography is top-notch. Highly recommended for any historian or philosopher of the Greek era, and any gay person interested in the history of homosexuality.

This book is a canonical gay studies text. Halperin is a respected academic in both the classics and gay studies. The term "homosexuality" was invented a little over a century ago. Thus, anything before that time has to be analyzed in perspective. Halperin looks at the classic writings of ancient Greek "homosexuals" and puts them into deep analysis. Halperin avoids a lot of the "essentialist" mistakes that John Boswell fell into with his Social Tolerance book. Dover's book has more cool photos in it, but Halperin's book is very worthwhile. It's a must-have for classics and gay readers.

David Halpern "is Professor of Literature in the School of
Humanities and Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology" . . . and it shows. This book is a complex
treatment of a complex subject.

I don't like to divulge the endings of novels - let the reader
find out for himself . . . but this is no novel, and this has
no final conclusion. It deals with societal characteristics (East
and West) from about 500 BC to present, maintains that
"homosexuality" is pretty much a POOR psychological category
used only in the LAST 150 years, and, as such, has many
failings . . . as a valid classification of human behavior.

The author investigates both the NATURE (are there genetic
homosexuals?) and NURTURE (are there socially produced homosexuals?)
sides of the question: "WHAT PRODUCES SAME SEX BEHAVIOR?"

By the time you finish the book you will be an expert on
Ancient Greek History (Athens). . . at LEAST.

In summation I believe the author "feels", as do I, that
sex is a strong undifferentiated, biological drive
channeled to target by MANY environmental elements.

This book should be required reading for all undergraduates.

Halperin's book highlights the absurdity of social constructionism. If homosexuals first appeared in the English speaking world when the word was first attested in 1892, then they must by that logic have appeared in the German speaking world in 1869, when Kertbeny coined the German equivalent. We homos also must have not yet appeared among speakers of such languages that do not yet have the term - even if some of those speakers know English. This exaggerated form of social constructionism ignores the habitual, exclusive sodomite known to medieval and early modern Europeans, as well as to the Greeks and Romans whose authors often satirized such queens in terms all too familiar today.
Halperin should give up on history and theory and go to work studying cowboys, now that he has relocated from the Hub to Australia and then to the mid-west - not far from the Wild West. His expertise seems to extend from Gilgamesh and Enkidu to the Lone Ranger and Tonto!
John Addington Symonds, who was as familiar or more familiar than anyone else with German scholarship about inversion, must have known about the German neologism in 1869 long before 1892. In Halperin's twisted, tainted logic did he therefore become a homo avant le mot anglais? The same must also apply to gay if indeed "gay" in that sense was another neologism, as many claim.