#anyway love how often someone writes a long essay on how queer accepting this or that historical culture was

[ladyluscinia]

One day queer people online will be able to discuss historical attitudes toward homosexuality as something that engaged with cultural misogyny and not as "well they were really behind on women's rights, obviously, but queer acceptance was amazing before they were introduced to homophobia." Like my guy in a culture where the accepted female lifestyles of daughter / wife / whore were all variations on the same level of un-personhood that told men all the women in their lives were about as mentally and socially engaging as the family dog or maybe a decently non-ugly vase, the idolization of deep male/male homosocial and homosexual relationships and experiences is a feature, not a bug 🙄

[brett-the-brett]

The Branches of Brett

Hi, I'm Brett! This is a brief introduction to who I am, however, I will elaborate on my personal views and ideas via essays that I will be posting here. Also, my weird ass likes to think of myself as a tree because I have many "branches".

Haha, get it?

. . .

Anyway, here's a little about me:

I am an extremely political person. Everything I do or say here will be political in some way because EVERYTHING is political. I'm an anarchist, first and foremost, a communist, feminist, etcetera, etcetera, you get the picture. I will talk more about my politics later.

How I racialize myself is much more complicated. I don't believe in the concept of race (there is no evidence for it and it's stupid in general) but I do believe in racism. In the context of discussing racism, I am a light-skinned black person. Otherwise I am African-American with distant European-American descent (my great grandfather is mixed race).

I am gender-fluid, but this is less of an idea and more of a basic description of my gender identity because I don't believe in the concept of gender at all. (I am a gender abolitionist.) I use any pronouns though, but I do prefer they/them pronouns.

I am pansexual. But if gender is a social construct, so is sexuality. I'm not attracted to genitalia nor gender, I am attracted to the person. (like literally everyone should, imagine telling someone you're attracted to them because they have a penis lol)

I am an Anti-theistic, Agnostic, Satanist. My beliefs are based on the writings of The Satanic Bible. 99.9% sure a God doesn't exist, but I'm 100% sure it wouldn't be a good one. Anyone who believes that they need to believe in a God (or, many say, relationship with one) will get an instant side eye from me.

I am both nuerodivergent (autistic) and physically disabled (toe walking). I have autistic family members on BOTH sides of my family. My brain got double penetrated. (DOUBLE PENETRATION RABID FIRE THROUGH YOUR SKULL- Takyon by Death Grips)

I am an interdisciplinary artist, meaning I delve into multiple art types.

I am a writer and I write fan-fiction (that I will be posting here), erotica, and I'm beginning to write horror. I am currently writing a fantasy series and I will be posting about it. I also write social commentary and political essays.

I write lyrics and I plan to learn music theory.

I am a 2-d traditional artist. I mostly draw character concepts.

I am learning and practicing how to belly dance.

Alongside being an artist, I love art. I prefer stylistic art styles to realistic ones but I accept all style types. (Except A.I., A.I. Imagery sucks.)

People often say they like reading but never specify what they like. Personally, the genre of fictional books don't matter to me because I like character driven stories. What matters to me is the story itself, not the genre. My favorite book of all time is She's Come Undone. I like trivia books, graphic novels, and art books. I also like erotic fan-fiction. (As long as it's moral and the characters are of age.)

I don't know what genre it's called but I'm obsessed with movies about a group of people having to work together to survive a horror situation. Movies I like like this are: Cube (1 and 2, Cube 3 sucks), the Saw Series, Elevator, Would You Rather, the Final Destination Series, Exam. I guess I like survival movies in general. I do like female-centered coming of age films, like Mustang (2015) and Katie Says Goodbye. I do like queer films but wish there were more slow burn and had more diversity. A hilarious gay comedy I like is called Straight-Jacket. (The intro song is a bop.)

But my all-time favorite movie is Jack and the Cuckoo Clock Heart. So heartfelt, so creative, so underrated. I am currently writing an entire fanfic about it. There's also a book and album made by the same people, you should definitely check it out.

I watch anime sometimes but my favorite will always be Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Jonathan and Giorno is best bois. Dio is best villain.

My favorite bands are Ministry, Ho99o9, Death Grips, and the french band Dionysus. I like Rio Romeo (underrated), fka Twigs (unfortunately she's a colorist prick), and a bunch of other artists I'm too lazy to name.

My fav flower is the Sunflower. My favorite bush is the Boxwood Shrub. My favorite tree is the Stripped Maple. And I like Aloe Vera plants. Unfortunately I can't plant any of these because I'm allergic to pollen.

I LOVE children because I like people and I might become a foster parent one day. I also like amphibians and I might keep a frog/turtle as a pet.

I'm a philomath; I like studying religion, sociology, psychology, and sexology. I'm a natural hair enthusiast, nudist, minimalist, solarpunk, polygamous, and a conditional pacifist.

So, that's it, that's who I am. (Gat damn this is a long ass post.)

[qqueenofhades]

I want to hear about gay knights. Please.

Ahaha. So this is me finally getting, post-holiday, to the subject that was immediately clamoured for, when I volunteered to discuss the historical accuracy of gay knights if someone requested it. It reminds me somewhat of when my venerable colleague @oldshrewsburyian​ volunteered to discuss lesbian nuns, and was immediately deluged by requests to do just that. In my opinion, gay knights and lesbian nuns are the mlm/wlw solidarity of the Middle Ages, even if the tedious constructionists would like to remind us that we can’t exactly use those terms for them. It also forces us to consider the construction of modern heterosexuality, our erroneous notions of it as hegemonically transhistorical, and the fact that behaviour we would consider “queer” (and therefore implicitly outside mainstream society) was not just mainstream, but central, valorized, and crucial to constructions of medieval manhood, if not without existential anxieties of its own. Because medieval societies were often organized around the chivalric class, i.e. the king and his knights, his ability to make war, and the cultural prestige and homosocial bonds of his retinue, if you were a knight, you were (increasingly as the medieval era went on) probably a person of some status. You had a consequential role to play in this world, and your identity was the subject of legal, literary, cultural, social, religious, and other influences. And a lot of that was also, let’s face it, what the 21st century would consider Kinda Gay.

The central bond in society, the glue that made it work, was the relationships between soldiers, battlefield brotherhoods, and the intense, self-sacrifical love for the other that is familiar to anyone who has ever watched a war movie, and dates back (in explicitly gay form, at least) to the Sacred Band of Thebes. Medieval society had a careful and contested interaction with this ideal and this kind of relationship between men. Because they needed it for the successful prosecution of military ventures, they held it up as the best kind of love, to which the love of a woman could never entirely aspire, but that also ran the risk of the possibility of it turning (homo)sexual. Same-sex sexual activity was well-known in the Middle Ages, the end, full stop. The use of penitentials, or confessors’ handbooks, as sources for views or practices of queer sexual behaviour has been criticised (you will swiftly find that almost EVERYTHING used as a source for queer history is criticised, shockingly), but there remains the fact that Burchard of Worms’ 11th-century Decretum, a vast compilation of canon law, mentions same-sex behaviour among its list of sins, but assigns it a comparatively light penance. (I don’t have the actual passage handy, but it’s a certain amount of days of fasting on bread and water.) It assigns much heavier penalties for Burchard’s main concern, which was sorcery and the practice of un-Christian beliefs, rituals, or other persistent holdovers from paganism. This is not to say that homosexuality was accepted, per se, but it was known about, it must have happened enough for priests to list in their handbooks of sins, and it wasn’t The End of The World. Frankly, I am tired of having to argue that queer people existed and engaged in queer activity in the Middle Ages (not directed at you, but in general). Of course they did. Obviously they did. Moving on!

Anyway. Returning to gay knights specifically, the fact remained that if you encouraged two dudes to love each other beyond all other bonds, they might, you know, actually bang. This was worrisome, especially in the twelfth century, as explored by Matthew Kuefler, ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’ and Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179-214 and 273-86. I have written a couple papers (in the ever-tedious process of one day being turned into journal articles) on the subject of the Extremely Queer Richard the Lionheart, some material of which can be found in my tag for him. Richard’s queerness has been argued over for a long time, we all throw rotten banana peels at John Gillingham who took it upon himself to deny, ignore, or minimize all the evidence, but anyway. Richard was a very masculine and powerful man and formidably talented soldier who could not be reduced to the stereotype of the effeminate, weak, or impotent sodomite, and the fact that he was a prince, a duke, and a king was probably why he was repeatedly able to get away with it. But he wasn’t alone, and he wasn’t the only one. He was very much part of his culture and time, even if he kept running into ecclesiastical reprisals for it. It happened. If you want a published discussion that covers some of my points (though not all of them), there is William E. Burgwinkle, ‘The Curious Case of Richard the Lionheart’, in Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050-1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 73–85. Also on the overall topic, Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 

Peter the Chanter, a Parisian cleric, also wrote De vitio sodomitico, a chapter of his Verbum abbreviatum, fulminating against “men with men, women with women [masculi cum masculis […] mulieres cum mulieribus]” which apparently happened far too often for his liking in twelfth-century Paris (along with cross-dressing and other genderqueer behaviour; the Latin version of this can be found in ‘Verbum Abbreviatum: De vitio sodomitico’ in Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: 1855), vol. 205, pp. 333–35). Moving into the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries, this bond only grew in importance, and involved a new kind of anxiety. Richard Zeikowitz’s book, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), explores this discourse in detail, and points out that the intensely homoerotic element of chivalry was deeply embedded in medieval culture – and that this was something that was not queer, i.e. unusual, to them. It is modern audiences who see this behaviour as somehow contravening our expected stereotypes of medieval knights as Ultra Manly No Homo Men. When we label this “medieval queerness,” we are also making a judgment about our own expectations, and the way in which we ourselves have normalized one narrow and rigid view of masculinity.

England then had two queer kings in the 14th century, Edward II and Richard II, both of whom ended up deposed. These were for other political reasons, but their queerness was not irrelevant to assessments of their character and the reactions of their contemporaries. Sylvia Federico (‘Queer Times: Richard II in the Poems and Chronicles of Late Fourteenth-Century England’, Medium Aevum 79 (2010), 25–46) has studied the corpus of queer-coded historical writing around Richard, and noted that while the Lancastrian propaganda postdating the usurpation of Henry IV in 1399 obviously had an intent to cast his predecessor in as unfit a light as possible, the accusations of queerness started during Richard’s reign, “well before any real practical design on the throne […] and well before the famous lapse into tyranny that characterized the reign’s last few years. In poems and chronicles produced from the mid-1380s to the early 1390s, and in language that is highly charged with homophobic references, Richard II is marked as unfit to rule”. E. Amanda McVitty (‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77) examined how the treason trials of high-status individuals centred on a symbolic deconstruction of his chivalric manhood, demoting and exiling him from the intricate homosocial networks that governed the creation and performance of medieval masculinity.

This appears to have been a fairly extensive phenomenon, and one not confined to the geopolitical space of England. Henric Bagerius and Christine Ekholst (‘Kings and Favourites: Politics and Sexuality in Late Medieval Europe’, Journal of Medieval History 43 (2017), 298–319) traced the use of ‘discursive sodomy’ as a rhetorical tool employed against five late medieval monarchs, including Richard II and his great-grandfather Edward II, John II and Henry IV of Castile, and Magnus Eriksson of Sweden. In all cases, the ruler in question was viewed as emotionally and possibly sexually dependent on another man, subject to his evil counsels and treacherous wiles, and this reflected a communal anxiety that the body of the king himself – and thus the body politic – had been unacceptably queered. Nonetheless, as a divinely anointed figure and the head of state, the accusations of gender displacement or suspected sodomy could not be placed directly on the king, and were instead deflected onto the favourites themselves, generally characterised as greedy, grasping men of ignoble birth, who subverted both social and sexual order by their domination of the supposedly passive king. 

None of this polemic produced by hostile sources can be read as direct confirmation of the private and physical actions of the kings behind closed doors, but in a sense, this is immaterial. The intimate lives of presumably heterosexual individuals are constructed on the same standards of evidence and to much greater certainty.  In other words, queerness and queer/gay favourites could not have functioned as a textual metaphor or charged accusation if there was not some understanding of it as a lived behaviour. After all, if the practice did not physically exist or was not considered as a potential reality, there could have been no anxieties around the possibility of its improper prosecution.

This leads us nicely into the deeply vexed question of adelphopoiesis, or the “brother-making” ceremony argued by some, including John Boswell, as a medieval form of gay marriage. (Boswell, who died of AIDS in 1994, published the landmark Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality in 1980, and among other things, controversially argued that the medieval Catholic church was a vehicle for social acceptance of gay people.) Boswell’s critics have fiercely attacked this stance, claiming that the ceremony was only intended to join two men together in a celibate sibling-like relationship. A Straight Historian who participated in a modern version of the ceremony in 1985 actually argued that since she had no sexual inclinations or motives in taking part, clearly it was never used for that purpose by medieval men either. (Pause for sighing.) 

The problem is: we can’t argue intentions or private actions either way. We can understand what the idealized and legal designation for the ceremony was intended to be, but we cannot then outrageously claim that every historical individual who took part in it did so for the party line reason. Maybe medieval men who joined together in brother-making ceremonies did live a celibate and saintly life (this would not be surprising). It seems ludicrous to argue, however, that none of them were romantically in love with each other, or that they never ever ever had sex, because surprise, formulaic documents and institutional guidelines cannot tell us anything about the actions of real individuals making complex choices. Even if this was not always a homosexual institution (and once again with the dangerous practice of equivocating queerness with explicitly practiced and “provable” sexual behaviour), it was beyond all reasonable doubt a homoromantic one, and one sanctioned and organised according to well-known medieval conventions, desires (for two men to live together and love each other above all) and anxieties (that they might then have sex).

The medieval men who took a ‘brother’ would probably not have seen it as a marriage, or as the kind of household formation or social contract implied in a heterosexual union, but as we have also discussed, the definition of marriage in the Middle Ages was under constant contestation anyway.  The church was constantly anxious about knights: their violence, their (oftentimes) lack of religiosity, their proclivity for tournaments, swearing, drinking, and other immoral behaviour, the possibility of them having sexual affairs with each other and/or with women (though Andreas Capellanus, in De amore, wrote an entire spectacularly misogynistic handbook about how to have the right kind of love affair with a woman and dismissed same-sex relationships in one sentence as gross and unworthy, so he was clearly the No Homo Bro Knight of his day). So, as this has gotten long: gay knights were basically one of the central social, religious, and cultural concerns of the entire Middle Ages, due to their position in society, their necessity in a warlike culture, the social influence of chivalry and their tendency to bad behaviour, their perceived influence over the king (who they may also have given their Gay Cooties), their disregard of the church’s teachings, and the ever-present possibility that their love wasn’t celibate. So yes. Gay knights: Hella Historically Accurate.

The end.