The History of Sexuality

By Anna Clark | Published in History Today Volume: 61 Issue: 9 2011

We like to think of ourselves as having made progress from those repressed Victorians. However, since the 1970s, feminists, gay activists and historians have been questioning the notion of sexual repression. Anna Clark considers important recent studies on this most stimulating of subjects.

Detail from Attic red-figure cup c.500 BC, inscribed: 'the boy, yes the boy is beautiful'. Image: Bridgman / Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge We cannot find distinct gay men or lesbians in the past because distant cultures had no conception of sexuality as an identity, as Michel Foucault, James Davidson and Giulia Sissa have shown (Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, Vintage, 1988). The ancient Greek man may have cruised the Acropolis looking for teenage boys, but he was just as happy to find a female slave – and he went home to his wife. It is tempting to imagine such past cultures as oases of toleration, when people didn’t care who a man slept with. Tell that to Timarchus, deprived of his citizenship in ancient Athens for supposedly selling sex (James M. Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008; Giulia Sissa, Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World, Yale University Press, 2008).