The term has it's origins in the Leviticus actually. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah at first had nothing to do with homosexual relations. Over time the original meaning was drastically altered. It occurred through the translations of the Leviticus and other sacred texts from dead languages; colloquial terms left without definitions found new meanings. Also, religious leaders took phrases out of context, and expanded on them from their own personal context. They spread these new sayings among their followers, and bits and pieces of it reached the bible and the Church all over the place.
As you can imagine, the original meaning of any religions drawing their sacred texts from the Leviticus have since been lost. Only through heavy study and research could it be pieced back together again (if at all). This is why one can say the term sodomite as referring to homosexual relations is a term which has nothing to do with the church and everything to do with the cuture(s) in which it developed and came from. Only, it inserted itself into the religion through complex pathways. Isn't funny how these things work?
It's my understanding that Sodom's actual sin was one of a lack of hospitality and only later was the meaning of Sodomy to mean same-sex penetration (or, even more broadly, non-reproductive sex regardless of the genders of the participants).
Translations are a huge deal to anyone conversant in more than one language. I speak/read/write English and French fluently (and enough Spanish to get by) and understand how subtlety of meaning can easily get lost in translation. Then, of course, there are the cultural biases that the translator imposes on a text, inevitably and most especially with religious books.
Anyone who insists that sexual normatives were assigned in the 19th century has obviously never read the Marquis de Sade, where one encounters every sort of sexual act ever conceived by mankind :wink:. His works were obviously meant to provoke a serious response from society and they responded by jailing him for the majority of his adult life.
I've yet to read a Sadian character who was exclusively opposite-sex oriented, though if one exists it's probably in
Justine, which I haven't read in a bit now and is hazy in my mind.
Philosophy in the Bedroom,
120 Days and
Juliette are virtual odes to unfettered bisexuality and anal penetration. One can only imagine what was destroyed either by Napoleon or Sade's own family once he died
I've frequently said that Sade is the best writer of unreadable books ever to have existed. Even now, in the 21st century there are things he wrote that remain completely, unspeakably unacceptable to civilization, yet I practically know them by heart. My own work pales in comparison, yet remains largely unpublishable; I've been chased off of/banned from different message boards merely for offering a link describing actual events conducted by consenting adults as I've chosen to describe them, usually in a Sadian voice.
There's also the work of
John Rechy, which remains ghettoized and marginalized even today, though enormously influential to me, both as a man and as a writer.
City of Night remains his masterpiece, but I'm currently rereading
The Sexual Outlaw, which I found at a thrift store and am reading for the first time since the late 70s. Those two, along with
Rushes and
Numbers remain must-reads for anyone trying to understand how sexual orientation was perceived in the mid and latter parts of the 20th century. His entire bibliography is extraordinary.
