ABSTRACT
To most people of modern Anglo-American culture homosexual indulgence appears self-evidently abnormal or immoral, but many older communities have taken different attitudes. Some societies have been more rigidly condemnatory than ourselves, others have treated it with indifference or denied its occurrence, others have looked upon it as expected and appropriate behaviour for young unmarried people, and some have accorded special social or religious status to the occasional sex deviant. In a survey of anthropological literature the investigators Ford and Beach found that in 49 out of 76 (that is 64 per cent) of the primitive societies about which information was available some form of homosexual activity was considered normal and acceptable. In some societies male homosexuality was universal [103]. They quoted several examples of this. For instance the Siwans, a small North African tribe, who lived by raising crops and domestic animals, expected all men and boys to engage in homosexual sodomy, and thought a man peculiar if he did not have both male and female affairs. Among the Kerski of New Guinea the young men were introduced to anal intercourse at puberty by older men, and thereafter spent the rest of their bachelorhood doing the same to other initiates. They had to pass through these two stages of first passive and later active homosexual sodomy before they could achieve full social status and have relations with women [25]. The Kiwai had similar customs; they believed sodomy helpful in making young men strong [225]. The Aranda of Australia carried the custom a stage further. Their youths commonly went through 18a stage of homosexual ‘marriage’ in which they lived as a ‘wife’ with an older bachelor for several years until the elder partner would break away and take a female wife.
