I'm just curious (still learning) at what point after 1100 AD would Joe and Nicky been in actual danger due to homophobia? At what point would they have to start lying to people about the nature of their amazing relationship, just to stay safe? Thanks!
(This is in reference to this post, in which I skimmed over like 900 years of sociological changes in identity formation in very very broad strokes.)
So. Here’s the thing. As “western” queer people in the modern world, I think we highly associate safety with being able to be out of the closet. Can I kiss my partner in public or walk down the street holding hands without fear of encountering hate speech or physical violence? Can I tell my friends, family and coworkers about my relationship without fear of social ostracization or economic consequences?
But that’s a very modern perspective. Between “pride parade!!” and “we will definitely be murdered if anyone finds out we are lovers,” there is...A LOT of space for different kinds of historical queer experience.
So it’s not so much that Yusuf and Nicolò could be safely “out of the closet” in 12th century Baghdad but not in 19th century London. It’s not quite as far from that as you might think. But they wouldn’t have thought about it that way.
In the first few hundred years of their existence, the Islamic world was...full of contradictions when it came to homosexuality. You had a strong taboo against adult men being the receptive partner in penetrative sex, but you also had poets--like, the most famous poets of their times--writing tons of homoerotic poetry about desiring young men and boys, and that was normal and even celebrated. (If you’re familiar with the sexual mores of ancient Greece...lots of similarities here.) You had clerics writing about how there should be harsh punishments for “sodomy,” but in practice in everyday life very, very few people were ever actually disciplined in the legal system for something like that. And other forms of sexual activity between men, like kissing and various forms of non-penetrative sex, were just...not a big deal. At the same time there was kind of an unspoken “don’t ask, don’t tell” social contract around sex between men. Like, we know this thing is definitely happening, and we’re not going to talk about it, and that’s what makes it socially acceptable to continue happening. So you can have a society that in the written, religious record looks fairly intolerant toward sex between men; in practice is actually quite tolerant; where everyone sort of knows things about certain people, but where no one is really “out” in the modern sense of the terms.
At the same time, pretty much everywhere in the world at this time but definitely in the Middle East, casual touch between men was much more normalized. Two men holding hands or linking arms when walking down the street, sitting pressed up next to each other, falling asleep with your head on your male companion’s shoulder...a whole range of things that look decidedly snuggly to our modern gaze would have been totally acceptable between friends of the same gender, and would not have been considered sexual in any way. (This is still true in much of the Middle East today.)
So you can easily imagine a scenario where, like, Nicolò is lounging with his head on Yusuf’s shoulder, eating dates and listening to some saucy Abu Nuwas poem being recited, and then they go back to their private quarters and they have as much sex as they want. Are they “out”? Not really. Is anyone bothering them about how they’re living their lives? Not in the slightest. Do some people in that room see them and know? Probably, but that’s their private business and we’re not gonna talk about it. Frankly that sounds like a pretty sweet existence for a 12th century queer.
To be fair, they have a few advantages. They’re men, which means no one will really question them traveling together, without wives or families. They can easily say they’re friends or business partners and no one will really give it a second thought. I’m sure having to break off contact with their families was sad, but it’s also the case that there’s no one around asking when they’re going to get married to a woman and have children so we have someone to inherit the family business. It gives them a kind of freedom that a lot of other queer people around them wouldn’t have had.
I think once they meet up with Andy and Quynh, they do do things like pretending to be two married couples traveling together. But that’s more because of sexism, because two unmarried women traveling with two men who were not their husbands would turn some heads.
In Europe at the time, Christian theology is pretty not-into all kinds of non-procreative sex, but sex between men is not necessarily viewed as a worse sin than, say, masturbation, or sex between men and women out of wedlock. And it’s like, a category of sin that a lot of people are doing all the time, so if you were to confess such a thing to your local priest, you would be told to do penance but the consequences would be fairly mild. And many of the same things regarding casual touch hold true. Various rituals of kissing, including men kissing men on the mouth, are used as greetings, to seal contracts, and as part of mass.
Medieval Europe also had a concept variously called passionate, romantic, or chivalric friendship--close relationships between two people of the same gender that could be long-lasting, physically affectionate, emotionally intense in a way we would today read as romantic, and (allegedly) celibate. Were some of these passionate friendships actually queer relationships with a sexual component that just wasn’t talked about? Probably. Were some of them what we would define as queerplatonic or homoromantic asexual relationships today? Probably. Is it even useful to try to stuff these experiences into modern relationship categories? Debatable. The point is...the borders between what was defined as friendship, romance and love were different. Two men who traveled together, slept in the same bed, shared resources, were emotionally intimate with each other, and otherwise entwined their lives would not necessarily have been assumed to be sex partners in medieval Europe. And (I think this is the important part) Yusuf and Nicolò would not necessarily have seen being perceived as passionate friends as “hiding” the true nature of their relationship or as assigning some lesser value to it.
In terms of how they are perceived in public, I think things really don’t start to change until the early 20th century. It’s a gradual process, but over the first half of the 20th century, more or less, affectionate touch between men becomes defined as “gay” and a mainstream (straight) masculinity that is concerned with defining itself as “not gay” emerges. Affectionate touch, and then any show of loving emotion between men, gradually becomes less and less acceptable, to a degree that probably seems absurd to two 900-year-old Mediterraneans. (The absurdity is really well-expressed in the van scene, which is literally like “Bro is it gay to [checks notes]...express concern about the well-being of the person you were just violently kidnapped with?”)
Like, on the one hand, you have queer people talking openly about their sexuality in ways that were not an option at earlier times in their lives. But at the same time you have to be careful holding hands walking down the high street now because someone might chuck an empty beer bottle at you. Must’ve been a real wild transition for them.
