Dante and Homophobia

A conservative friend of mine protested my recent post that used the term “homophobia” to refer to persons who disapprove of same-sex sexual relationships. He noted that such disapproval is not necessarily “phobic”: It could simply be based on some perfectly rational theory of sexual morality. As a theoretical matter, I tend to think that my friend is correct: Disapproval of homosexuality is not necessarily phobic, as a matter of logical necessity. But much – probably most -- modern disapproval is, in my view, probably phobic as a matter of fact. In any case, my friend’s comment gives me a pretext to share my enthusiasm for the Hollanders’ new translation of Dante’s Commedia, about which I’ll say more after the jump.

By “homophobic” disapproval, I mean disapproval of others’ desires motivated by fear that one shares in those desires. The disapproval of others serves as what Freud would call a “counter-attitude,” a way of repressing one’s consciousness of what one shares with the object of disapproval. Such disapproval, therefore, can serve its phobic function only if the disapproving persons want to believe that they lack the desires that they condemn in others.

With this account of homophobia in mind, turn to the Hollanders’ translation of Dante’s Commedia for an example of non-phobic disapproval. (Indeed, that’s the real point of this post -- to introduce the Hollanders’ extraordinary Princeton Dante Project website, to those who have not already discovered it. The website contains in searchable form the entire parallel Italian text and Hollanders’ recently published English translation of the Commedia, complete with Robert Hollander’s line-by-line commentary).

In Canto XXVI:31-35 of the Purgatorio, Dante and Virgil enter the terrace where the lustful burn off their sins by walking through fire in concentric circles, with the sinners in different circles giving each other a chaste kiss as they pass each other. Homosexuals and heterosexuals are all lumped together: “There I can see that every shade of either group/ makes haste to kiss another, without stopping, / and is content with such brief salutation….” As Robert Hollander notes, “[t]his remarkable simile, a rare medieval manifestation of a moment of fraternal affection between heterosexuals and homosexuals, is striking.” Dante the Pilgrim plunges right into the fire with the rest of the lustful, homosexual and heterosexual alike, acknowledging the essential similarity of his desire with theirs.

To the Medieval mind, in short, lust is lust, whether same-sex or opposite-sex. (To be sure, Hollander disputes modern glosses that “sodomy” does not get a special punishment in Canto XV of the Inferno as “violence against nature.” But I am not sure why Hollander treats “sodomy” – anal sex -- as a sin peculiar to same-sex intercourse in his commentary on Inferno XV:104-114. Latini Brunetto is guilty of violence against nature because he copulated in a sterile way – anally – and, therefore, is punished by running on a burning, sterile desert for eternity. Anyway, for amateur Dante fans like myself, the debate is nicely summarized by Deborah Contrada, "Brunetto's Sin: Ten Years of Criticism (1977-1986)" in Dante: Summa Medievalis 192-207 (Charles Franco & Leslie Morgan eds. 1995)).

To approximate Dante’s attitude towards sex, modern critics of homosexuality would have to condemn all “barren” non-procreative sex – which means rejecting all contraception, heterosexual oral and anal sex, masturbation, etc., as violence against nature. But this broad rejection of recreational sex is virtually non-existent in today’s America. One does not often hear anyone who condemns homosexuality declaring, “I struggle with homosexual and other non-procreative sexual desires just like everyone else – but I suppress those desires because I know that they are immoral.” The critics of homosexual desire are, therefore, fundamentally different from critics of adultery or extra-marital sex, because the former never concede, like Dante, that they share in the sinful desire that they condemn.

It is this sense that modern condemnations of homosexuality really do seem phobic to me. One could imagine someone’s impartially condemning all non-procreative sexual intercourse. Such a person would not be guilty of phobic beliefs. They would merely be regarded as deeply eccentric by most voters.