One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love

The title essay’s argument is stated with precision in its title: “homosexuality,” as a category of person rather than a class of act, is less than a hundred years old. This is Foucault’s constructionist thesis applied to the classical evidence with the scholarly care that Foucault himself — a brilliant but sometimes impatient reader of Greek sources — did not always provide. The resulting book is among the most rigorous sustained applications of Foucauldian method in any field, and the essay “Is There a History of Sexuality?” is one of the clearest methodological statements the constructionist position has generated.

The Core Claim

The ancient Greeks did not have a concept of homosexuality as an identity category. What they had were concepts organised around active and passive positions, age, status, and the distinction between penetrating and being penetrated. The erastes/eromenos asymmetry Dover documented was not about the sex of one’s partner but about one’s position in a social and gendered hierarchy: to be the active partner was to express masculinity and social dominance; to be the passive partner was to occupy a position structurally analogous to that of women and social subordinates. Object choice — the sex of the person one desired — was categorically less significant than role.

The methodological claim in “Is There a History of Sexuality?” is the book’s most important contribution. Sexuality as a historical object — how sex acts are categorised, governed, interpreted, and experienced — must be distinguished from sex acts as a historical near-constant. The former has a history; the latter are more nearly universal. To ask whether the Greeks had homosexuality is to ask about the former: whether they organised same-sex behavior through a concept equivalent to the modern homosexual identity. They did not. This is not to deny that Greek men had sex with other men; it is to deny that they understood such acts through anything resembling modern identity categories. The collapse of this distinction — treating past sex acts as if they were organised by present categories — is anachronism, and it produces Boswell’s essentialist history as its characteristic error.

The universalising/minoritising distinction — whether homosexuality is about a specific minority or about something present in all persons — is the book’s other major analytical contribution, borrowed partly from Sedgwick’s contemporaneous work and applied to the classical material and to the modern history of sexuality more broadly.

Where the Argument Is Strongest

“Is There a History of Sexuality?” is as clear a methodological statement of the constructionist position as exists anywhere in the field — sharper and more careful than Foucault’s own formulations, and more attentive to what the distinction between history of sexuality and history of sex acts actually requires. Scholars working in any period who want to understand what the constructionist/essentialist debate actually turns on should start here.

The application of the active/passive framework to specific classical texts is more methodologically controlled than Foucault’s handling of the same material. Halperin is a trained classicist, and the essays demonstrate that the constructionist argument does not depend on historical impressionism — it can be grounded in precise textual and iconographic analysis of the kind Dover pioneered. The universalising/minoritising distinction opens analytic territory that the Boswell/Foucault debate had circled without naming, and it remains one of the field’s most useful tools.

Where It Strains

The constructionist position, taken to its logical extreme, generates a problem it does not fully resolve. If sexual categories are entirely historically specific, then the claim that the Greeks “did not have homosexuality” is itself a claim across historical difference — it requires some concept of what would count as “the same” phenomenon in order to assert the absence of a Greek equivalent. The circularity is not fatal, but Halperin does not acknowledge it with the clarity the methodological sophistication of the other essays would lead one to expect.

The book’s focus on male Greek sexuality means that female same-sex desire — Sappho, the Spartan evidence — appears but does not receive equivalent analytical attention. Halperin is aware that this is a limitation, but awareness does not resolve it, and the framework organised around active/passive penetrative roles handles female sexuality awkwardly. Some of the essays also show their origins as occasional pieces: the argument is strongest and most sustained in the title essay and “Is There a History of Sexuality?” and thinner in several of the supporting pieces.

Verdict

The book that best bridges Dover’s classical scholarship and Foucault’s theoretical framework, and the most important work for understanding what is analytically at stake in the essentialist/constructionist debate that Boswell and Foucault represent. The title essay and “Is There a History of Sexuality?” are among the most important short pieces the field has produced. Read it in direct dialogue with Boswell, whose essentialist premises Halperin engages explicitly; as the theoretical elaboration that makes Krafft-Ebing legible as the historical hinge between the ancient world and modernity; and as the foundation on which Sedgwick’s contemporaneous literary theory was building in a different register.