Directory:The Wikipedia Point of View/The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality

There is no entry in Wikipedia for The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, which is remarkable given that so much of material in Wikipedia is actually sourced from it. The Encyclopedia claimed to be a definitive reference work whose purpose was to connect and to synthesise the sometimes contradictory information currently available on male and female homosexuality and bisexuality. The work was massive, including over 770 articles by 84 'experts' on a broad range of topics. It was published in 1990 by Garland Publishing, Inc.

Sales were steady until May of 1995, when the publishers abruptly withdrew the encyclopedia from sale. The reason given was that a number of articles in the Encyclopedia were signed with the name of Evelyn Gettone. Gettone was one of a number of pseudonyms employed in the work. (In fact, of the original four editors, two names were pseudonymous-Warren Johansson and Stephen Donaldson). According to Dynes, the editor, Garland 'caved in to a pressure group of leftist and feminist activists who viewed the Encyclopedia as lacking in political correctness'. Dynes does not say why it was thought the work was 'politically incorrect', nor what exactly was being censored.

Dynes claimed that 'In the entire fracas no one ever discovered serious errors in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. The attacks were a pretext for suppression of views regarded as politically undesirable. As such they were a shameful effort to impose censorship'.

There are some leading themes or theories that run throughout this massive work, one of which is to blame Christianity for all of the problems encountered by modern homosexuals. This puts this work in opposition to John Boswell's theory that the Catholic church was slow to adopt a hostile attitude. Homosexuality is taken as a given, and all hostile theories are refuted.

• Portal on William Percy's website.
• Pederasty (Warren Johansson)
• Pedophilia (Joseph Geraci and Donald H. Mader)
• Philosophy (William Percy)
• Christianity (Vern L. Bullough)
• Peter Damian (William Percy)
• Monasticism (Warren Johansson)

Authors

Warren Johansson

Warren Johansson was born in 1934, in Philadelphia, as Philip Joseph Wallfield, to a Jewish family. Later he changed his name to the Nordic "Warren Johansson," apparently to express the horror he had developed of Jewish homophobia. His first venture into gay scholarship was to co-author Greek Love (1964) with the numismatist (and, much later, the convicted paedophile) Walter Breen.

Johansson believed that there was copious and compelling evidence that the Roman Catholic Church (against the assertions of John Boswell) maliciously persecuted homosexuals from the earliest times, impeded at times by only its own disorganisation, while maintaining double standards at every level within the church. Much of the content of the encyclopedia reflects this view.

• Johansson Obituary [1] (Solgan 53, p 15)

Vern Bullough

Vern Leroy Bullough (July 24, 1928 – June 21, 2006) was an American historian. He was a distinguished professor emeritus at the State University of New York (SUNY), an Outstanding Professor in the California State University, a past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, past Dean of natural and social sciences at the Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York, one of the founders of the American Association for the History of Nursing, and a member of the editorial board of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia.

Pedophilia

The article on Pedophilia was written by Joseph Geraci and Donald H. Mader. They define pedophilia as "mutually consensual affective relationships between adults, on the one hand, and pre-pubertal children, those undergoing puberty, and adolescents, on the other, occurring outside the family, and which include a sexual component" (p. 964).

It contains the startling assertion that child pornography does not involve the abuse of children.

Child pornography" is the sharpest point of attack on pedophilia and pedophiles. Included in this attack are the imputation that children are always abused in the production of such images, and the fear that such images will stimulate the abuse of children. It has been shown that this issue has been exploited for political purposes, and the statistics on the amount of such material exaggerated beyond proportion." (p 968).

and points out that "Pedophile organizations have linked their arguments to support of the rights of children".

Philosophy

The article on Philosophy has to be one of the strangest histories of the subject. It begins with a long disquisition on the beginnings of philosophy in Ionia, interspersed with eccentric 1066-like comments on pederasty.

Greek philosophy itself-like its close ally Greek science under the Ionian physicists-began in Ionia, on the coastal fringes of Anatolia, just when pederasty was introduced there and to the Ionian islands from Crete and Sparta.

The Ionians conceived nature as operating in a non-mythological, impersonal manner. Reflecting the maritime setting of Greece, Thales thought water the basic element, which Anaximander expanded to air, earth, fire, and water. The Persian conquests ended such speculations and apparently also finished institutionalized pederasty, as when the conquerors crucified Polycrates of Samos in 521, with the consequent flight of the pederastic poets Ibycus and Anacreon who had been drawn to his court.

Pythagoras returned to Southern Italy ca. 530 and founded his brotherhood at Croton, something between a college and a cloister, being pederastic, stressing form rather than matter.

Another refugee from Ionia, Xenophanes of Colophon, who attacked Homer and Hesiod for their anthropomorphic conceptions of the immortals, founded the Eleatic school at Elea in southern Italy, the first metaphysical school: "But if oxen or horses had hands, oxen would make gods like oxen and horses would make gods like horses." His eromenos (beloved) Parmenides of Elea (d. ca. 480) regarded the cosmos as eternal, uncreated, and imperishable.

The philosophical parts are essentially correct. But the view that Xenophanes was the lover of Parmenides is mere speculation. According to Lesher Xenophanes probably did not even know Parmenides. (A similar claim that Parmenides was the lover of Zeno is suspect - Plato write in the Parmenides, 127B 'Zeno was of good height and handsome to see; the story goes that he had been Parmenides' young lover'. This is possible but not otherwise attested. 'Even if the setting of the Parmenides is historically plausible, the notorious unreliabality of Plato's reports on earlier philosophers makes it unwise to take much else of what he says on trust. .

At the end of this summary, an extraordinarily sweeping statement shows the reason for all this:

The significance of these advances in philosophy is that they broke decisively with the notion of a universe created by the gods [...]. The incompatibility between the divinely created universe of [the Abrahamic] revealed faiths and the mechanistic model of the cosmos, which evolved into the world picture of modern physics and astronomy, predetermined the conflict between religion and science that reached its peak in the late nineteenth century and still echoes in the antagonism between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the secular ideals of the gay liberation movement a hundred years later.

I.e. the mechanistic atheistic view of the universe began with pederasts, its development was impeded by the influence of the Judaeo-Christianity, but came into full flower with the growth of the gay liberation movement.

The fact that Aristotle was probably not a pederast is a problem for Percy, but he explains this away by Aristotle's middle-class origins.

Not hailing from the pederastic high society of Athens, as Plato did, but from the provincial bourgeoisie, Aristotle was less inspired by the pederastic lyrics of Ibycus, Anacreon, Theognis, and Pindar, and being more biologically oriented, felt that pederasty, natural to some, was a vice acquired by others and limited the teleological potential of reproduction.

Aristotle's great influence on the medieval scholastic tradition (which far outweighs that of Plato) presents a difficulty, but Percy rather skips over that, as we shall see. Percy ends the classical period with a short discussion on the Stoics and Epicureans, who were also pederasts.

Not one of these pagan philosophers failed to practice pederasty, except perhaps Musonius Rufus (ca. A.D. 30-101), the only one to condemn it in his writings- if one excepts the Laws, the last of Plato's dialogues, which so contradicts the Phaedrus and the Symposium, where he had Eros alone excite knowledge and virtue.

We pass to the Middle Ages. Like many modern historians, Percy over-emphasises the contributions of the Islamic philosophers, although he adds the discovery that they were in fact pederasts:

During the Renaissance of the twelfth century ideas flowed into Catholic Europe from Spain and other Muslim lands, often through Jewish translators. While Christians languished in ignorance and proscribed homosexuality, Muslims kept philosophy (and pederasty) alive: al-Kindi (d. 8701, Alfarabi (d. 950), Avicenna of Baghdad (d. 1037), and Averroes of Cordoba (d. 1198)-knowing nearly all of Aristotle's and several of Plato's extant works.

He has almost nothing to say about the great developments in science, metaphysics and logic that began with the Renaissance of the twelfth century, continued through the thirteenth and fourteenth century, and which (in the hands of late scholastics like Francisco Suarez and Domingo Soto) was the foundation of early modern philosophy and science, apart from some brief remarks about Anselm.

St. Anselm, promoted from Abbot of Bec in Normandy to Archbishop of Canterbury in 1110, recommended light penalties, especially for young sodomitical clerks in opposition to the growing homophobia fanned by Peter Damian. As a philosopher Anselm logically explained why God became man (Cur deus homo).