The most famous of the Achaean warriors who besieged Troy 1300 years BC, the one whose mere presence on the battlefield could change the course of the battle, not only because of his skill and power in combat, but also because of his influence on the most powerful troops beyond military or noble rank, Achilles of Phthia was, we would say today, bisexual.
Something seemingly insignificant, compared to the taking of Troy, such as the fact that Agamemnon, the chief of staff of that confederation, had demanded a slave from him, made him so furious that he retreated to his tent and refused to continue fighting. The situation became so bad for the confederation that the Trojans, supported by a part of Olympus, took the opportunity to push them back to the beach, and almost re-embark on their ships. That retreat, after ten years of siege, was in line with the dissent of Achilles, who continued, we would say today, very angry, proclaiming the end of that costly enterprise and his return to his cities.
In response to this attitude of Achilles and the divisionism introduced into his own ranks, General Agamemnon tried to withdraw late, and sent the slave back, with I don’t know how many gifts. After much negotiation with other leaders, especially Odysseus, the most political of all generals, the dissenting young general stood his ground, but agreed to return his hosts (the Myrmidons) to the battlefield, at the head of which he put his close friend Patroclus (older than him, according to scholars and illustrated by ancient ceramic vessels).
The gods who supported the other side in that war arranged for Hector, the Trojan general-in-chief, to kill Patroclus. The mourning for the death of his partner, which Aeschylus would later represent with clear homoerotic overtones, was so painful (even the horses cried, Homer said), that it dragged the hero back to the battlefield, in search of revenge. The course of the war would change.
Although cinema tries to give us other versions of Homer’s Iliad, those few weeks of Achilles’s wounded pride, and his revenge for the death of his lover, instead of the heterosexual loves of Helen and Paris, or the taking of Troy with the horse trick, are the subject of one of the greatest literary works of Western culture.
Neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans had a word for homosexual. At the beginning of the Roman Republic, certain same-sex practices were criminalized, but others were not. The differentiation was established by a power relationship. For example, with a slave it was fine.
As Luisa Campuzano told us in her Latin classes in the late 1960s, conservative Roman politicians mocked Gaius Julius Caesar’s sexual tastes in his youth.
In any case, as modern historians tell it, all emperors, including the glorious military leaders and conquerors Octavius Augustus Caesar and Tiberius Claudius, had bisexual inclinations, especially towards young men, whether they were slaves or not.
As is known, it is the Jewish and Christian churches that have made relationships between people of the same sex a taboo, that is, a sin. Regarding Islam, some historians have shown that until the first decades of the 20th century, a very varied spectrum of tolerance prevailed, which gradually retreated under Western domination and the rise of fundamentalisms.
For example, in Indonesia, where there are more Muslims than anywhere else, homosexuality has always been socially acceptable. In other words, sexual practices there participate in an established order, just as in Europe the Christian churches — both Catholic and Protestant — are part of the reigning status quo.
As I am not a historian of religions nor of sexuality, but only trying to comment on some instances of their relationship with the use of power, I have come to this point, as a “historical-political-cultural introduction.”
To dwell on some facets of this relationship among us, I return to those classes at the School of Letters at the end of the 1960s, where I read the Iliad guided by Beatriz Maggi, and the Gallic War (in Latin) under the sting of Luisa Campuzano.
At that time it was a requirement to pass an interview to enter Literature (as well as Political Science, Psychology, History, Journalism). The objective was not only to measure the applicant’s vocation, culture and political information, but also his or her sexual orientation and religious beliefs. In the red year of 1968, homosexuals could not study any of that; and the religious, as a rule, neither. Naturally, that filter was not perfect, so if he or she “didn’t show it” and met the other requirements, they could enter. So, according to the university jargon of the time, in Literature there was “a pile of hidden faggots and dykes.”
I want to make two aside comments here.
The first is that in the Pedagogical Institute, then part of the University of Havana (along with the CUJAE and Medicine), where I had previously studied two complete courses, gays and religious people, much less strictly monitored, were more visible than in the other careers. Paradoxically, the training of secondary and pre-school teachers was not so zealous of these “deviations,” perhaps due to the high demand for the profession.
The second comment refers to the logic of power associated with the exercise of surveillance. In the trios that interviewed for admission to Literature there were some teachers and student leaders who, even without being able to come out of the closet (God forbid), were also lesbians and gays.
Perhaps this duplicity (often an “open secret”) was due to the fact that, thanks to the complicity of their interviewers, young homosexuals with appreciable talent, vocation and revolutionary position, could enroll in that Dihigo building where Camila Henríquez Ureña, Vicentina Antuña, José Antonio Portuondo, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Graziella Pogolotti, Beatriz Maggi, Mirta Aguirre, Isabel Monal, among others, taught
If these examples of double standards could be interpreted as cracks in institutional discrimination against homosexuals, we must not forget the most disastrous manifestations.
The purges for “moral” reasons (sexual orientation), as well as for “ideological” reasons (religious beliefs) or “apathy” (political disaffection) did not occur, as portrayed in some novels and documentaries, as a reflection of Stalinist-type Sovietization.
In those 1960s Cuba was ideologically at odds with the USSR and China. Evidence that our homophobia did not respond to the influence of Eastern Europe is that many academics who openly questioned the preconceptions of Soviet and Chinese Marxism on socialism, inside and outside the university space, also suffered, with some significant exceptions, from what today we would call “homophobic tendencies.” And it was very explicable that it was like that.
Firstly, the cultural legacy; but not understood as that impalpable fluid that some call “identity,” but in very social and political terms. Let’s say, what leaders and those who were led drank in their pre-revolutionary education, Catholic with Hispanic roots and Protestant with northern Puritan roots, without leaving out what was practiced by Santeros, Paleros, and Abakuás. All converge in the “macho male masculine” paradigm, in charge of providing, deciding, commanding, imposing rules, both in families and in political movements.
Beyond Soviet communism (which was not homophobic in its origins), the political culture of the Cuban left, manifest in the anarcho-syndicalist currents and the revolutionary movements of the 1930s, was marked by that paradigm of uncontested virility.
It was not strange then that the revolutionary vanguard that emerged from that previous society was guided by those men, among whom gays could be counted on one hand, and whose behavior adjusted to that paradigm. The presence of some distinguished women who actively contributed to setting the pace — Vilma Espín, Haydée Santamaría, Celia Sánchez — were the exceptions that confirmed the rule in that first vanguard. And I am not referring, of course, to the numerous women who fought in the ranks of the Revolution from the beginning, but to those who led it.
Secondly, the inertia of this manly pattern was maintained in such a way that revolutionary gays and lesbians double-locked their closets, to avoid social and political disqualification. To such an extent that, in some cases, they directed moral cleansing campaigns with a homophobic component called “deepening of consciousness” in the educational media. That the purgers, youth leaders and commissioners of ideological purity were themselves gays and lesbians is pathetic.
Indeed, the worst consequence of this officialized homophobia was not, as some believe, the UMAP, which lasted two years and a few months, before being closed and never repeated. Unlike the policy towards churches and believers, and even towards those who left the country for political reasons, the policy towards gays and lesbians was not reviewed, nor could a new stage of recognition and dialogue be announced, which was based on guiding, as in previous cases, that institutions and organizations rectify their policies. On the contrary, decades of low- or high-intensity homophobia followed one another, depending on the sector and region.
Some topics remain in my mind, such as the meaning of the eminently political debate around films such as Conducta impropia (1984) and Strawberry and Chocolate (1993), and their effect on the power relations around homosexuality. The topic deserves a text dedicated to cinema, probably the most political of all artistic manifestations, as the Bolsheviks themselves saw it at the time. I just want to point out now that those debates revealed the trans-ideological nature of anti-homosexual prejudice, both here and in Miami.
Without space to investigate when the pattern of homophobia as a power relationship began to change, and to what extent it has done so, I leave a string of questions to return to the topic based on the investigation: To what extent has it responded to the action of some institutions? To the meritorious work of the Sex Education Center? To the paradigm shift in mental health, which stopped considering homosexuality a pathology? To spontaneous changes in the sexual culture of the new generations? To influences in the migratory movement abroad?
It is clear that the extent of this change lies in the ability of gays and lesbians to come out of the closet; that is, to empower themselves as equal citizens. To hold their festivals since the mid-1980s, despite police raids, and to persevere in celebrating them, until the police forces and those who lead them were convinced that there was no point in persecuting them; or to go out on the street since the late 1990s and early 2000s holding hands, kissing, and dressed according to their gender identity.
I thought I would close these half-disjointed notes by returning to where I started: the epic theme of gay warriors. How are they handled in our armed forces? I had read that the gay movement and progressives in the United States celebrated with great fanfare, in 2011, the “profound change” of their country joining the list of 29 nations — such as Israel, Canada, Germany and Sweden — whose legislation allows gays to join its ranks. And I understood that here the Revolutionary Armed Forces accepted as a justification for considering oneself unfit for Military Service to declare oneself Hx (according to the psychological cipher code for one’s “pathology”).
A friend who was called into service in 1987-1990 confirmed this information for me about how to escape military service at that time. However, to my surprise, he told me that once in his military unit, he remained as out of the closet as he had been since he was 12, when he sat his family down and told them that he was gay, while the media stigmatized “the scum of antisocial elements and homosexuals” who left through Mariel. Instead of being ashamed of him, as perhaps would have happened in a family of a higher social class, of disowning him or insulting him, they made him feel that he was still the same to them, and gave him their full support to defend himself against the neighborhood bullies, whom he also knew how to confront, until he commanded respect and was accepted.
According to him, the military unit was not more difficult, although there he also had to wage skirmishes with some harassers. However, the officers themselves treated him with the same respect as the others, and even gave him trustworthy tasks in their office.
I presume that my friend’s experience is not that of others, and that even though we now have a Family Code that legally protects the rights of homosexuals, the atavistic resistance to their access to management positions or to work as school teachers continues, although they are not open about it as before.
In a world in which homosexuality continues to be criminalized in 70 countries, the road traveled has been long, and the space gained considerable.
My friend’s lesson is similar to that of Sun Tzu, the great Chinese strategist of 2,000 years ago: “The first thing is that you have to believe in yourself.”
Author
Rafael Hernández
