When I blogged Dover (1978) Greek Homosexuality, I started off by quoting the author's own assessment: “That female homosexuality and the attitude of women to male homosexuality can both be discussed within one part of one chapter reflects the paucity of women writers and artists in the Greek world and the virtual silence of male writers and artists on those topics.” But the "paucity" of material isn't the only factor at play here. The more focused one's topic, the more scope there is for uncovering meaning from a deep assessment of the context that material exists within. But when a historian defines their scope of interest at a broader level, there is a tendency for the result to reflect the proportions of topics in the data, rather than aiming for a balanced coverage of the target subject itself.
In a sense, this is why the field of women's history and the field of queer history and especially the intersection of those two topics are so essential. A study of history that assumes that the past exists as a reflection of the proportions of subjects covered in the surviving artifacts is a study of history that perpetuates and amplifies the biases and erasures of past societies. While it's certainly been the case that historians have often been seduced into operating from the viewpoint of the voices that dominate their source material, a good historian recognizes that temptation and acts to counter it. Until all historians are self-aware enough to recognize and account for their own biases in this line, we need to treasure and cherish the works that begin from a principle that it is vital to put in the work of addressing marginalized topics. Boehringer's study is just such a work to be cherished--and I say that even not having read it in its entirety yet.
My very personal hope is that I will come out of this book with the same sort of brain-bending re-understanding of women's homosexual experiences in classical Greece and Rome that I had for men's experiences from Williams 2010. I want that shifting of ground where I feel like I've been allowed a glimpse of how a different culture understood their own sexual and romantic experiences, even when--especially when--that understanding feels alien to me. A history of homosexuality in any era--even as recent as the mid-20th century--will trip up if it is a quest to find exact correspondences with contemporary identities and experiences. (I often point out that the lesbian experience of the '70s when I came out is already an alien culture to 21st century understandings.) But we needn't entirely abandon the desire to find connection with people in the past. And a more diffuse “history of the varieties of gender/desire/affection” still allows us to make those connections between historic and modern experience while allowing past societies their distinct particularity and individuality.
I keep coming back to the metaphor of translating prepositions between different languages. We all share the same physical experience of up/down, near/far, contact/separtion, movement/stasis. But even apart from bundling the multitude of spatial relationships differently across languages, we assign different priorities, defaults, and cultural meanings to those basic physical relationships. Learning a language means letting go of the idea that prepositions (or whatever form spatial language takes) will translate precisely from one language to another. It doesn't mean letting go of the assumption that we live in the same physical world, but it may give us an entirely new way of thinking about that world.
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