Recently, the homosexual-leaning news media has been touting the reemergence of the late John Boswell’s book “Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.” The work came out in 1994, the year I graduated from UC Berkeley. Boswell, a Catholic convert, and a fascinating man in his own right, was a Professor at Yale University who died of AIDS at age 47, the same year as the publishing of his most famous book. During the almost 20 years since its first appearance, most of the conclusions reached by Boswell have been discounted by leading historians. But, back in 1994, the book impacted the gay community in the same way as Kinsey’s “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” did in the straight world. Only, the heterosexual elites also took great notice. The New York Times said Boswell “restores one’s faith in scholarship as the union of erudition, analysis, and moral vision. I would not hesitate to call his book revolutionary, for it tells of things heretofore unimagined and sets a standard of excellence that one would have thought impossible in the treatment of an issue so large, uncharted, and vexed.” The next year Boswell won the American Book Award for History. Since then the book has become a staple in the new field of queer studies.
The Boswell thesis centered on his misinterpretation of the adelphopoiesis ceremony practiced in the Byzantine East. Although Boswell saw this as an early form of Christian sanctioned same sex marriage, it was merely a “brother-making” ritual between two men; and explicitly denied any sexual overtones. At the time, along with many of my compatriots, who were also looking for any flimsy excuse to outwardly retain a semblance of unity with our Christian upbringings, we latched onto the Boswell book and held tight. Later on, when sex became even darker and uglier, I abandoned Christianity all together and dove into the occult. But, when you are seeking to make sense out of a life that feels empty and desolate, any glimmer of hope, no matter how false, becomes a cherished idol. Sadly, before the book even appeared, I was fortunate enough to study under the brilliant Medievalist Geoffrey Koziol, whose “Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France” took a different take on a similar ceremony in the West; the dubbing ritual; nevertheless, I was too blocked by sexual panic and confusion to absorb anything else that might have discredited what I so earnestly wanted to believe. And, herein lays the danger within these types of books: the wholesale duping of entire generations. What one historian or pseudo-intellectual may see as harmless theorizing; another may take as the Gospel Truth from God. Anyway, it can all lead to hell.