Why it`s adaptive for us (or why was it adaptive for our ancestors) to engage in homosexual behavior (for males)

Running Head : HOMOSEXUALITY

Society 's adaptation to homosexuality and vise versa

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Society 's adaptation to homosexuality and vise versa

Gay men have been making art and building names throughout history in conditions where the public existence of homosexuality was not tolerated (and the concept of homosexuality unidentified . Leonardo da Vinci Donatello , Botticelli , Caravaggio , Cellini , Michelangelo , Christopher Marlowe and Sergei Eisenstein are among those great artists of the past said to have been actively homosexuals . The fact that their sexual orientation remained

unheard of for so long (and there is frequent argument , of coarse , as to whether this or that figure was gay or not is a consequence of pressing reality that until today , despite suppression , marginalization , discrimination and even persecution , they continue to persist throughout history ADDIN EN .CITE McNair Brian McNairStriptease Culture : Sex , Media and the Democratization of Desire2002Routle dge (McNair , 2002

Homosexuality in historical perspective

The word homosexuality was created only in the nineteenth century suggests that the consciousness of the modern nations towards the issue are historically recent . Our contemporary understanding of such behavior and its relationship to a larger cosmology , however , have evolved fairly recently . Philosophers and historians in the social constructionist school have argued that homosexuality as an identity or membership in a community (with heterosexuality as its counterpart ) has developed only within the past few centuries . Prior to this time , they suggest individuals were not socially defined in terms of their sexual behaviors (homosexual or heterosexual . Anyone might engage in homosexual behavior , but such behavior did not present an identity or community Attitudes of the modern people towards homosexuality have religious legal , and medical issues . Prior to High Middle Ages , homosexual acts appear to have hardly been accepted or ignored by the Christianity across centuries in Europe . Starting the later twelfth century , however resentment toward homosexuality began to take place , and later began to spread throughout Europe 's religious and secular institutions . Most of the early American colonies , for example , endorsed serious criminal penalties for sodomy . In the New Haven colony and elsewhere , male and female homosexual acts were persecuted by death sentence . As the nineteenth century closes , medicine and psychiatry were challenging the religious institutions and the law for jurisdiction over sexuality which leads to the discussions about homosexuality that stretched out from the realms of sin and crime to take into account the possibility of being pathology . This historical transition was fortunately considered a progress because a sick person was less blame as compared to sinners and criminals . Even within the field of medicine and psychiatry theless , homosexuality was not universally accepted as pathology Whereas Krafft-Ebing described it as a degenerative sickness ' in his Psychopathia Sexualis but Freud and Ellis both take up more accepting standpoints . Ellis urged that homosexuality be treated as a normal deviation of human behavior , like left-handedness . Although Freud believed that homosexuality represented a less than optimal outcome for psychosexual development , he nevertheless asserted in a 1935 letter that it is...