Same-sex partnership across cultures and centuries

John Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe documented liturgical manuscripts from the eighth through the sixteenth century containing rites for the union of two men. The ceremony, called adelphopoiesis in the Greek east and ordo ad fratres faciendum in the Latin west, was performed in churches by priests and included readings, prayers, the binding of hands, sometimes a cloth wrap, and often a kiss. The two men became, after the rite, spiritual brothers with recognized standing — they could inherit from each other, be buried together, and present themselves publicly as a pair. Whether the rite was "marriage" in the modern sense, with sexual consummation assumed, is debated. That it was a publicly sanctioned, ecclesiastically performed same-sex union is not.

Greek pederastic mentorship, particularly in Athens, Sparta, and Crete, was a structured social institution with its own ritual elements. The Cretan version included a ceremonial abduction of the younger partner, a period of cohabitation in the wild, gift exchanges, and a public return. The Athenian version organized the relationship between an older erastes and a younger eromenos within philosophical, athletic, and political mentorship. These bonds were not marginal; they were how aristocratic Greek men formed their social and intellectual networks. Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus are not deviant outliers in Greek literature; they are central documents of a culture that took same-sex eros seriously as a vehicle of philosophical formation.

Roman literature records same-sex marriages performed with full ceremony, including those of the emperors Nero and Elagabalus. The legal status of these unions is contested by historians, but the social fact of them — public weddings, dowries, household formation — is in the record. Suetonius, Tacitus, and Cassius Dio describe these marriages, sometimes with disapproval but never with the bewilderment that would indicate they were unintelligible. Roman law was eventually adjusted to forbid such unions, which itself is evidence they had been common enough to require legislative attention.

In the Ming and early Qing dynasties, the southern Fujian region developed an institution of male marriage, qixiongdi or "bound brotherhood." Two men, typically of similar age, would undergo a ceremony, set up a household, and live as partners. Wealthier couples might adopt sons to continue the line and provide for old age. Chou Wah-shan has documented the ceremonies, the popular literature surrounding them, and their eventual decline under the combined pressure of Qing legal reform and twentieth-century modernization. The Fujian tradition shows that even in a strongly patrilineal society with intense pressure to produce biological heirs, same-sex partnership found institutional shape.

Japan's wakashudo, "the way of youth," organized erotic and mentorship bonds between adult samurai and younger partners as a recognized institution of warrior culture from the medieval period through the Tokugawa era. The bond was ceremonial, often involving a written oath, and it carried obligations of mutual loyalty in war and peace. The Ihara Saikaku stories of the seventeenth century treat these bonds as a normal feature of samurai life, sometimes celebrated above bonds with women. The institution declined under Meiji modernization but survived in folk memory and modern Japanese literature.

In dozens of sub-Saharan African societies — Igbo, Nuer, Kikuyu, Lovedu, Zulu, and others — a woman of means could marry another woman, paying bride-price and assuming the social role of husband and father. The "female husband" did not necessarily have a sexual relationship with her wife; in many cases the institution was about lineage continuation in the absence of a son, or about the senior wife's social standing. But in some cases the relationship was both social and erotic. The Lovedu rain queen, by tradition, married many women. These institutions were not exceptions; they were named, recognized, and woven into the kinship law of the societies that practiced them.

Will Roscoe and Sabine Lang have documented the wide range of indigenous North American gender and partnership systems that are now reclaimed under the umbrella term two-spirit. From the Lakota winkte to the Navajo nádleehi, the Zuni lhamana to the Crow boté, dozens of nations recognized third- or fourth-gender persons who often partnered with members of their birth sex without anyone considering the partnership unusual. The Spanish chroniclers who first encountered these arrangements in the sixteenth century recorded them with horror and proceeded to attempt their elimination. The reclamation work of the past forty years has been about recovering what colonial violence tried to erase.

In Polynesian societies — Tahitian, Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan — third-gender roles such as the mahu in Tahiti and Hawaii, and the fa'afafine in Samoa, were recognized social categories with their own partnership patterns. Mahu and fa'afafine often partnered with men who did not consider themselves to be in a same-sex relationship in the modern Western sense, because the gender system did not divide the world into the binary Western categories. The romantic and erotic lives of these communities were structured by a different map of gender, with its own coherence.

The fragments of Sappho's poetry, surviving from the seventh century BCE on Lesbos, document a tradition of women's same-sex eros so durable that the word "lesbian" still carries her island's name twenty-seven centuries later. The Roman poet Sulpicia, the Heian Japanese tradition of women's romantic friendships, the medieval beguinages where unmarried women lived together for life, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "Boston marriages" of New England all form a continuous if often quiet record of women partnering with women. Lillian Faderman's archival work pulled much of this out of the silence into which Victorian medical sexology had pushed it.

Foucault's famous argument that "the homosexual" as a species was invented in the late nineteenth century is overstated as a claim about identity but correct as a claim about classification. Before the medical sexology of Krafft-Ebing, Ulrichs, and their successors, same-sex acts were sins or crimes one committed, not categories one belonged to. The reorganization of same-sex love into a medical-pathological identity coincided with the criminalization of "sodomy" in modernizing legal codes across the West and its colonies. This reorganization is what made the twentieth-century closet possible. It is also what made the twentieth-century gay-rights movement necessary.

The British Empire, in particular, exported anti-sodomy legislation to its colonies in a uniform code that long outlasted British rule. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, imposed in 1860, was the template; similar sections appeared in colonial law from Jamaica to Nigeria to Singapore. Many of the societies these laws criminalized had previously had their own indigenous traditions of same-sex partnership, now buried under imperial legal frameworks. The contemporary spectacle of post-colonial governments defending "African values" or "Asian values" by enforcing colonial-era sodomy laws is one of the bleaker ironies in legal history.

The record proves that same-sex partnership has appeared in nearly every documented society, in forms ranging from informal pairings to elaborate liturgies. It does not prove that any society has been a paradise for same-sex love, or that historical forms map cleanly onto modern identities. Greek pederasty was age-structured and would not pass contemporary ethical inspection. African woman-woman marriage was often about lineage rather than romance. Adelphopoiesis remains debated among Byzantinists. The point is not that every society did it well; the point is that the design space has always been wider than the conjugal heterosexual default, and that the modern repressive consensus is itself a particular historical phenomenon rather than a timeless norm.

The legal recognition of same-sex marriage in dozens of countries since 2001 — beginning with the Netherlands, spreading through Europe, the Americas, and pockets of Asia and Africa — is sometimes presented as a radical break with tradition. It is better understood as a partial restoration of the older, wider design space, conducted through the legal vocabulary of the modern conjugal household. Whether that vocabulary can carry the full weight of the older variety is another question. But the recognition itself is not new under the sun; it is the return of something that was unevenly present for most of human history and was driven underground for a particular, recent stretch of it.

1. Boswell, John. Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. New York: Villard Books, 1994. 2. Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. 3. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. 4. Eskridge, William N. The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized Commitment. New York: Free Press, 1996. 5. Chou, Wah-shan. Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies. New York: Haworth Press, 2000. 6. Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. 7. Lang, Sabine. Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. 8. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: William Morrow, 1981. 9. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 10. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005. 11. Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. 12. Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1990.