Torso, August 1999
John Lauritsen.
A
Freethinker's Primer of Male Love.
Pagan Press 1998.
Reviewed by Ian Young
The
advent of AIDS in the early '80s seriously weakened the gay movement
and, in spite of the bold face it puts on, it is still convalescing.
John
Lauritsen, a gay activist since the '60s, believes the movement has
“lost its bearings”, becoming “mired down in
identity politics, masochistically committed to the cult of
victimhood, and futilely striving for a simulacrum of respectability
while unreformed sodomy laws sit on the books.”
A
Freethinker's Primer of Male Love presents “a defence of
male love from a secular humanist perspective” as well as a
brief history and critique of the gay movement. A compelling case is
made that the roots of the taboo on homosexuality lie in
Judeo-Christian religious prohibitions which have “crippled the
male psyche” for many centuries. Lauritsen's sympathies are
“wholly with the Greeks” (“the wisdom of Athens”)
and against the Hebrew and Christian traditions (“the folly of
Jerusalem”), whose hegemony he regards as an historical
calamity.
In
a section called “Paradigms for Gay Liberation” Lauritsen
traces the course of modern gay movements and offers astringent
critiques of the Medical, Minority, and Popular Front Models, as well
as of contemporary feminism and the current promotion of the word
“queer”.
There
are a few holes in the fabric of Lauritsen's thesis: the most
virulently antigay regimes of the modern world have been neither
Jewish nor Christian but Islamic, atheist (the U.S.S.R.) and pagan
(Nazi Germany), a fact glided over rather swiftly here. Even so,
there is a great deal of common sense and simple historical truth in
the little 95-page “primer” — and lots of food for
thought on everything from Orpheus' fate at the hands of the Thracian
women to the nature of male beauty. The critique of some of the
idiocies of the current crop of gay spokespersons is particularly
welcome.
Lauritsen
offers a simple “way out of the thicket”, beginning with
the abolition of all antigay laws, and continuing with “restoring
male love to a place of honor in society”. And there is an
excellent, briefly annotated bibliography.
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