: 46 Scholar Pan Guangdan (潘光旦) came to the conclusion that many emperors in the Han dynasty had one or more male sex partners. : 32 The story of the cut sleeve(断袖) recorded the Emperor Ai of Han sharing a bed his lover, Dongxian (董賢) when Emperor Ai woke up later, he carefully cut off his sleeve, so as not to awake Dongxian, who had fallen asleep on top of it. In the story of the leftover peach(余桃), set during the Spring and Autumn Era the, the historian Han Fei recorded a anecdote in the relationship of Mi Zixia (彌子瑕) and Duke Ling of Wei (衛靈公) in which Mizi Xia shared an especially delicious peach with his lover. Chinese literature recorded multiple anecdotes of man engaging in homosexual relationships. Homosexuality is widely documented in ancient China and attitudes towards it varied through time, location, and social class. In East Asia, same-sex love has been referred to since the earliest recorded history. See also: LGBT history in the United States, Lesbian American history, and Gay men in American history East Asia Homosexual and gender-variant individuals were also common among other pre- conquest civilizations in Latin America, such as the Aztecs, Mayans, Quechuas, Moches, Zapotecs, and the Tupinambá of Brazil. While this new term has not been universally accepted-it has been criticized by traditional communities who already have their own terms for the people being grouped under this "urban neologism", and by those who reject what they call the "western" binary implications, such as implying that Natives believe these individuals are "both male and female", it has generally met with more acceptance than the anthropological term it replaced. While each Indigenous culture has their own names for these individuals, a modern, pan-Indian term that was adopted in 1990 is " Two-Spirit". Depicting a group of male warriors dancing around a male-bodied person in a woman's dress, non-Native artist George Catlin titled the painting Dance to the Berdache.Īmong Indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to European colonization, a number of Nations had respected ceremonial and social roles for homosexual, bisexual, and gender-nonconforming individuals in their communities in many contemporary Native American and First Nations communities, these roles still exist. John Boswell has countered this argument by citing ancient Greek writings by Plato, which describe individuals exhibiting exclusive homosexuality.ĭrawing by George Catlin (1796–1872) while on the Great Plains among the Sac and Fox Nation. Ī common thread of constructionist argument is that no one in antiquity or the Middle Ages experienced homosexuality as an exclusive, permanent, or defining mode of sexuality. Many male historical figures, including Socrates, Lord Byron, Edward II, and Hadrian, have had terms such as gay or bisexual applied to them some scholars, such as Michel Foucault, have regarded this as risking the anachronistic introduction of a contemporary social construct of sexuality foreign to their times, though others challenge this. However, in later cultures influenced by Abrahamic religions, the law and the church established sodomy as a transgression against divine law or a crime against nature. It was accepted in some forms in ancient Greece. Of 70 communities, homosexuality was reported to be absent or rare in frequency in 41, and present or not uncommon in 29. They found that out of 42 communities: homosexuality was accepted or ignored in 9 5 communities had no concept of homosexuality 11 considered it undesirable but did not set punishments, and 17 strongly disapproved and punished. In a 1976 study, Gwen Broude and Sarah Greene compared attitudes towards and frequency of homosexuality in the ethnographic studies available in the Standard cross-cultural sample. Societal attitudes towards same-sex relationships have varied over time and place, from requiring all males to engage in same-sex relationships to casual integration, through acceptance, to seeing the practice as a minor sin, repressing it through law enforcement and judicial mechanisms, and to proscribing it under penalty of death.