Juvenal vs. the queer guys

Nobody is surprised that Christianity from its beginning has, true to its Jewish heritage, treated homosexual acts as an abomination. But few people seem aware anymore that there were ancient pagan writers whose denunci-ations of homosexuality are consistently ignored today, if they are known at all. One clear example, as Leland D. Peterson, Emeritus Professor of English and Latin at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, points out in his article, "Homosexuality & Same-Sex 'Marriage,'" in the New Oxford Review (Jan. 2004), pp. 34-36, is the first century satirist, Juvenal. Juvenal's second satire, which is omitted from school texts of Juvanal and translated with omissions even in the Loeb edition of Juvenal, begins as a discourse on the homosexuality of those who seem to be masculine heterosexuals:

Appearances are deceptive:
Every back street swarms with solemn-faced humbuggers.
You there -- have you the nerve to thunder at the vice, who are
The most notorious dyke among all our Socratic fairies?
Your shaggy limbs and the bristling hair on your forearms
Suggest a fierce male virtue; but the surgeon called in
To lance your swollen piles dissolves in laughter
At the sight of that well-smoothed passage.

We will not find in the popular press today, says Peterson, what we find in Juvenal: "He alone presents us with a graphic, incriminating anal imagery to expose the practicing homosexual. Juvenal refers to morbus (disease), and observes symptoms of anemia among the homosexuals, as in the harlot denuncing the 'detestable perversions' of men who are 'giving tongue to each other's parts.... Your lawyer-philosopher obliges young men both ways, his versatile efforts/Turning him doubly anemic.'"

Juvenal regards same-sex "marriage" is seen as the ultimate, even blasphemous, perversion:

And what about
That noble sprig who went through a "marriage" with some common Horn-player or trumpeter -- and brought him a cool half million
As a bridal dowry? The contract wa signed, the blessing
Pronounced, and the blushing bride
hung round "her" husband's neck
At a lavish wedding breakfast. Shades of our ancestors!
Is it a moral reformer we need, or an augur
Of evil omens?

Juvenal finds repulsive that a former priest of Mars now "decks himself out in bridal frills, assumes/The train and veil!" He can only wonder "whence came/This prurient itch upon them? A wealthy, well-born/Man is betrothed in marriage to another man/And you [O Father of our City] do nothing." Clearly, as Peterson acknowledges, the speaker is "homophobic," if by that we mean one who condemns anal intercourse -- and the more he knows, the more he condemns it.

Juvenal envisions same-sex "marriages" becoming commonplace, as a friend confides:

"I must go down-town tomorrow
First thing: a special engagement."
"What's happening?" "Need you ask?"
I'm going to a wedding. Old So-and-so's got his boy-friend
To the altar at last...."

He foresees the time, notes Peterson, when male brides "will yearn for a mention/In the daily gazette," just like the major U.S. dailies are now formally announcing same-sex engagements and "marriages."

Same-sex "marriages" then as now had the problem of sterile intercourse. Of course, on the one hand, this fits in quite comfortably with the "culture of death" that is contracepting itself to death. But just as women in their 40s are now discovering that they would like to have children, so homosexual couples are seeking ways to adopt or otherwise have children. That homosexual unions are sterile is seen by Juvenal as Nature's wisdom, though male brides "sample foreign nostrums/Guaranteed to induce conception" or else try magical fertility rites. "Long before the invention of the microscope and precise knowledge of feminine ovaries," writes Peterson, "it is possible that male brides in Juvenal's time could have believed that the colon used as a vagina might have feminine properties."

Juvenal's second satire concludes by asking the reader to imagine the next-life in the underworld: "even among the dead/Rome stands dishonored." Peterson writes: "Primitive tribes in northern Europe conquered and captured by the Roman legions find abhorrent the sexual vices practiced in Rome, proof that homosexuality flourishes only in morally anarchic luxury. Foreigners who stay long enough in Rome will eventually 'catch her deadly sickness,' which Pter Green, our translator, makes explicit from the earlier morbus, which is obviously a venereal disease."

"As Juvenal recognized in the secularized, godless Rome of his deay, same-sex 'marriage' is not merely a crime against Nature and a corruption of marrige and family, not merely a symptom of moral decline, but a function of a morally sick society that includes a disease primarily transmitted by anal intercourse." In the middle of the second satire, he writes that

Infection spread this plague,
And will spread it further still, just as a single
Scabby sheep in the field brings death to the whole flock,
Or the touch of one blighted grape will blight the bunch.

Susanna Braund, in her commentary on these lines in her Juvenal: Satires Book I, Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (Cambridge University Press, 1996), says that "the centre of the poem presents an image of disease and rot spreading uncontrollably from the centre outwards in images drawn from farming ... and viticulture. The 'disease' here mentioned is homosexuality, not hypocrisy; contagio recalls morbum, from a context describing overt homosexuals." The associations with AIDS are obvious -- that lethal epidemic now annually claiming the lives of some 16,000 young men in their prime years in the U.S. alone, and millions throughout the world.