Homosexuality is the sexual, affective, emotional and sentimental interaction or attraction towards individuals of the same sex . To refer exclusively to male homosexuality, the term Gay was popularized in English .
Etymologically, the word homosexual is a hybrid of the Greek homós (which actually means “equal” and not, as might be believed, derived from the Latin noun homo, “man”) and the Latin adjective sexualis, which suggests a sentimental and sexual relationship. between people of the same sex.
History
No one knows exactly how homosexuality entered human history. It is believed that practices related to erotic attraction between people of the same gender have been present since the dawn of humanity. The earliest records of homosexual behavior appear to be found in ancient pagan religious practices, as some pagans included homosexual practices in the worship of certain gods. Whether the use of these practices in the cult was due to the fact that homosexuality was something common in their societies, or if it was the cult that introduced homosexual practices into society, it is something impossible to determine, although some interpretations of the letters of Saint Paul , in the first century, defend this last version
Humans began worshiping many gods very early in human history. These early gods were frequently associated with fertility , agriculture, and war . One of the goddesses of the Assyrians – who would later spread through the area known as Canaan – was Asherah , who was worshiped as the goddess of fertility. Often the cult of this goddess included orgies and sexual practices. Asherah was worshiped in the form of a tree with many female breasts carved into the trunk, and these trees constituted the center of a forest where worship took place. The goddess could be invoked or appeased to acquire fertility for oneself, the tribe, or the clan.
When polytheism – the worship of many gods – ruled the Earth , the gods could be both male and female. These gods were not considered to be infallible or all-powerful as in the Christian concept of God . They were often very much like people, with individual desires and capable of making mistakes. The gods were believed to have sex with each other and to procreate. Those who practiced these religions often felt that the wrath of the gods had to be appeased for the tribe to survive. Having sex with a god – as part of the cult, or to make crops, animals, or humans fertile – was a logical extension of the concept of polytheism. Since sex was required for human fertility, having sex with a god was crucial and beneficial.
Phallic Cult
Tammuz was the deity of the Phoenicians associated with the Adonis of the Greeks. He was the husband of Ishtar, also known as Asherah by the Semites and Aphrodite by the Greeks. Followers of the cult believed that Tammuz was a beautiful shepherd who was killed by a wild beast. His wife’s longing to get him back, led her to enter Hell to rescue him from death. His cult is identified with columns, similar to the Native American Totem Poles, which served as phallic symbols or replicas of the penis. This cult was highly sexual in its practices.
Tahmuz returned from Hell every spring and returned there in the winter , so spring orgies were associated with sowing that would bring about a bountiful harvest, and in at least one culture his worship included homosexual activities. In our day, the name of Adonis is associated with the erotic literature of the homosexual community. Your supposedly perfect body is sometimes promoted as an ideal that can take on divine dimensions.
The Greek god Dionysus was worshiped and followed by men known as Satyrs , who are always depicted with an erect penis. An eastern god, Shiva, of India , is worshiped with a long linga, or phallic rod. It is said that Shiva entered the woods to watch the men as they played, so they caught him and cut off his penis. Once they understood that he was a god, to curb Shiva’s anger they replaced his penis with an artificial one.
A Babylonian god was named Baal . The name literally means “possessor”, but it came to be translated as “lord” in reference to the owner of a particular piece of land. Baal took many forms over the years. He was originally worshiped as the sun god. It was believed, therefore, that he was both benevolent – when he made the crops grow – and cruel – when he dried the earth with his heat. Due to the obvious power and influence of this god, those who believed in him had to continually appease their anger, and, in order to maintain their lives, they spent their existence in a delicate balance between fear and admiration. The various gods associated with Baal had their place alongside Asherah, his female colleague. Baal worship often included a pole, or phallic symbol, in rituals.
When the ancient Babylonians gained influence – perhaps as early as 8000 BC. n. and. – spread their religion. Babylonian cities included towers (or ziggurats ), which served many practical and religious purposes. These towers were strategic in the defense of the city. They also served as observation points for the stars for their scientific study or for their religious importance. An additional purpose of these towers was to serve as altars. The tower of Babylon supposedly had golden statues of the gods and at the top a golden bench for sexual worship.
Ziggurat appear to have been abundant in the days of ancient Babylonian influence. They also served as phallic symbols. Ancient rituals in such towers included masturbation , to allow man to spill his semen on the ground. Since the seed is sown in the earth, the earth was seen as female, and consequently male gods were invoked to fertilize it.
One of the most famous ziggurats – and the best archaeological find of its kind – is in the ancient Chaldean city of Ur , home of the patriarch Abraham. Abraham’s father had been an idol maker in that prominent town. It was Abraham who broke away from the polytheists and started monotheism (the worship of one God). Abraham is revered as the father of faith by Jews, Islam, and Christianity. Abraham was a devout monotheist and his descendants struggled with polytheism for many generations.
Towers, poles, and rods were included in many forms of religious practice and are associated with the penis to deify masculinity. Towers similar to those of Babylonian temples were also found in ancient Egypt , and the pyramids certainly have religious significance. The Mayan culture in North America is unknown for the most part, but their culture certainly included such towers. In pantheism and animism, as is the case in ancient Native American cultures, obviously phallic totem poles were worshiped as part of the nature-god worship.
It is interesting to note that the phallic towers have survived to this day. The different Masonic orders erect towers as monuments. May Day is a festival in the British Isles where a phallic pole is decorated with streamers and colored, to perform a festive dance around; This spring rite connects directly with ancient fertility practices that seek God’s blessing on crops. As the Egyptian obelisks belong to the same category, there is a phallic tower in the Vatican Square in Rome . The meaning may have changed over the years, but these male cult symbols still exist.
Homosexuality in flux
There is a tremendous dichotomy in modern culture regarding homosexuality. On the one hand, most liberal politicians support laws that support the gay community, if not in practice, at least in theory. There is a growing acceptance of homosexuality and there is a great twist in education that shows homosexuality as a valid lifestyle. Although, for their part, most homosexual activists deny that homosexuality is an alternative, since they believe that sexual preference is not something that is chosen.
In response to increasing official acceptance, and due to AIDS hysteria , there is a growing number of hate crimes against homosexuals. Neither the government nor the church officially authorize physical abuse, but there are individuals and groups that have taken the persecution of homosexuals into their own hands. It is often seen that some men are struck by the perception that they are gay. This cruelty includes torture and death.
Bible- believing Christians have responded to the growing acceptance of homosexuality in several ways. The belief that homosexuality is sin seems to dominate within the ecclesiastical community. Evangelical Christians may see the social acceptance of homosexuality as a threat to their beliefs. Allowing homosexuals to work in positions of influence, the spread of AIDS and other diseases, the legislation that assures homosexuals equal rights, are all issues that provoke anger, rhetoric and grassroots political actions.
{{system: quote | Certainly, the time has come to turn back such an ungodly tide for the sake of decency, morality, our children and the nation, and, more importantly, because the Lord told us we had than to love good but hate evil. Dante said something like this: “The hottest spots in hell are reserved for those who do nothing in times of moral crisis” | David A. Noebel in his book The Homosexual Revolution
As you can see, fear and prejudice exist at every point of the homosexual issue. There is no doubt that many have been mistreated and persecuted for their homosexual practices. It is also true that not all Christian believers are intolerant and homophobic. Dissent is not equivalent to chasing. Calling behavior “sinful” is certainly not the same as putting someone to death. Certainly, we urgently need to open the doors to dialogue, communication and understanding between those who are homosexual and those who interpret the Bible in a way that condemns homosexual practices.
Sexual orientation
Human beings are born male or female , and depending on their sexual orientation, they can be heterosexual , homosexual or bisexual . On the other hand, transsexuality encompasses people who biologically have one sex, but are struggling with the conviction that they should have been born with the opposite sex.
Homosexuality does not describe a uniform population, since men and women with this orientation constitute a group as different from each other as heterosexuals and bisexuals from the points of view of education, occupation, lifestyles, personality characteristics and physical appearance.
Causes
There is great diversity in the definition of homosexuality in the scientific literature. The attitude toward homosexuality has ranged from acceptance in ancient Greece and tolerance in the Roman Empire , to outright condemnation in many societies, Western and Eastern.
In the 19th century, the German neurosychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing considered homosexuality a “hereditary neuropathic degeneration” that was supposedly aggravated by excessive masturbation; while pseudoscientist César Lombroso – one of the highest representatives of criminal anthropology – was based on phrenology (considered a pseudoscience since the middle of the 20th century) and supported the theory of degeneration. Thus, madmen, criminals, prostitutes, ethnic minorities and homosexuals were degraded, excluded and marginalized under the auspices of science.
The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud postulated the existence of a constitutive predisposition, although he also highlighted the determining effect of experiences during childhood (such as the lack of a parent of the same sex with whom to identify) and the frequency of male homosexual experiences during adolescence, which he regarded as sexual deviance.
Sexual orientation has also been attributed to distant and hostile relationships with parents. Men say those inclined to this theory seek a homosexual relationship to obtain the male love that they never really received from their father. Likewise, females approach other women to compensate for their mother’s lack of female love. Lesbianity has been attributed, in a similar way, to having distant parents, which made the girl unable to relate to adult men. Male homosexuality, some maintain, can also be attributed to having had overly protective mothers, who have not freed their children in the competitive male world and thus, they have not learned to fight on equal terms for women.
The most recent and popular of the psychoanalytic theories is the narcissistic one. According to her, children, in their developmental stage, are sometimes so attracted to their own charms that they look for sexual partners who resemble them.
However, all theories about homosexuality and relationships with parents seem to collapse when subjected to experimentation. The same pattern of father-mother relationships and father-child or mother-child relationships can produce homosexual children and heterosexual children, whether the relationships are intimate or distant.
False conceptions
Many of the problems that overwhelm the homosexual are created by the hostility of the society in which they live. The first reaction of a person is to deny about what they do not know, fear or do not accept. If to this we add what is coaxially established by tradition and religious canons, then we could understand the innumerable prejudices that have existed against homosexuals.
They weigh stereotypes, even when it is scientifically proven that mannerism or mannerisms do not constitute a determining element in sexual orientation. Physical appearance has nothing to do with homosexuality.
A man and a woman who respond to the generic canons according to the time in which they are framed, can be very masculine or very feminine, respectively and, nevertheless, exploit their sexuality as they deem, either in a heterosexual or homosexual way. or both inclusive.
Classifications
Obviously there has been a comprehensive hegemonic model, from science and common sense, to understand homoeroticisms (and the subjects involved in them) from the binomials “male-female”, “dominant-dominated”, “penetrator-penetrated” translated into dissimilar nominations depending on the historical and geographical context: “active-passive”, “erasta-erómeno”, “butchfemme”, “firefighter-whore”, “bugarrón-fagot”, “man-joto”, “cacorro-marica “,” Man-piglet “; in this way, the erotic role played in the relationship (assumed in the active-passive dichotomy) is related to a stratification by gender, insofar as the active role is played by a “male” subject and the passive role by one ” feminine ”, thus perpetuating the scheme of domination / subordination inherent in the current regime of regulation of sexuality.
Diversity and discrimination
The existing diversity with respect to gender in these groups is interpreted from the pair “congruence” – “incongruity” precisely because the existence of a “normality” is conceived (most of the time not questioned and presented, explicitly or implicitly as something given naturally; the minority, understood as a social product, but not discussed for this reason) that establishes how the gender projection “is” or “should be” from being born male or female: the former must be male and the latter, female. The notion of a “rule”, of a “normality and of a” should be “, and therefore of a” should not be “that functions as a transgression or insubordination of those, leads to the diverse being understood through this logic and according to this criterion,with the respective implications of evaluative positivity or negativity that arise from these.
“Fireman”, “general”, “colonel”, “macho”, “macho”, “consort”, “baseball player”, “boxer” and “active” refer to lesbians whose gender projection is considered very masculine; “Slut”, “punctual”, “whore”, “diva” and “passive” refer to homosexual women whose gender projection is considered feminine.
Subjects between the extremes are called “ambiguous” or there is simply no specific nomenclature; they are commonly called “lesbians”, “understood” or “homosexuals” without further clarification13.
Among men “crazy”, “pájara”, “crazy float”, “queer”, “is more of a woman than a mother”, “being very female”, “passive”, “passive” and “pajarita” denote considered homosexuals very feminine; and “macho”, “active”, “little boy” and “little man” point to individuals whose gender projection is considered masculine. The intermediate terms are also called “ambiguous”, “understood” or “gay” – in a sense that goes beyond homosexual orientation, and refers to the way of assuming it generically, in this case.
These classifications, on the one hand, dismantle the stereotype – based on the diversity of projections in this regard – of assuming that homosexuality is inevitably linked to the “inversion” of the socially assigned gender; In a general sense, the idea is shared that there is not necessarily separation or exclusion between homosexuality and the expected femininity or masculinity. However, they do not absolutely delegitimize the validity of this conception, but rather make it operational and “effective” for a sector of the population.
Despite the cracking of the absolutism of this judgment, there is no question – and if there is, it is minimal and desolate – towards what is conceived as “masculine” and “feminine”, nor towards the relationships established from it. The idea that homosexual orientation may or may not be expressed through certain characteristics related to gender inversion survives; that is, the notion of an “ epistemology”Of homosexuality strongly based on this criterion, which, although not applicable to all cases, does function as a symptom or sign of some that can be distinguished at first glance. There are phrases that draw attention to this: “be strong”, “have strength”, “carry the sign on the forehead”, “have affectation”, “have feathers”, “be suffocating”, “mark”, “see the nut ”(exclusive of women),“ it shows ”,“ being open ”,“ being birded ”and“ being partio ”(exclusive of men), and so on.
In this sense, the possibility of distinguishing homosexuality at first glance is reaffirmed through certain traits considered typical and typical of the other sex, and not only because of the sex-erotic preference. In this way, another split is glimpsed (not only that of congruent / incongruous) ―or perhaps it is rather part of it― that points to the idea that gender concordance or discordance is understood by the subjects as an expression of acceptance or rejection of the homosexual towards his condition of man or woman; In other words, the existence of homosexuals who assimilate and feel comfortable with “their” sex / gender (they are “men” and “women”) is conceived ―all the interviewees are assigned to this group, which for them is in a certain way the “correct” posture -,and others who feel part of the “other” sex / gender (they are imitations of men ”and“ imitations of women ”).
Obviously, this conception of “investment” makes visible or invisible, “exposes” or “conceals” homosexual subjects starting from the budget already seen and provokes divisions within these groups to the extent that some are “noticed” and therefore they are both more visible and capable of being identified (they are the ones that manifest a gender projection that is “incongruous” with what is socially expected according to their biological sex), and others “don’t notice it” (they are the “congruent”) and go more unnoticed socially.