Question: How & Why did Male/Male Intimacy Become Taboo?

"Andy" asked: When and how did male intimacy become so taboo. How did we get from the bonobo place to the place where men touching each other is punishable in the most severe ways?

I can only offer conjecture on this, but it seems pretty clear to me that the taboo against male intimacy is part of the Old Testament sex-for-procreation-only package, which also banned masturbation and eventually spread the terrifying idea that even nocturnal emissions were the result of having been visited by satanic succubi.

In the early days of hydraulic agricultural societies, it seems that the powers-that-were had an urgent need for rapid population expansion and/or a large surplus of disposable laborers/soldiers. So they cleverly decreed that all of our species' sexual energy should go toward increased fecundity. Of course, we've got far more libido than any animal needs for reproduction alone, so this set off the raging conflict between libido and culture that Freud pointed to as the driving force of civilization itself.

It's as if these societies found a way to harness human libido as if it were steam: block it, let the pressure build, then direct the explosion into work. "Work," of course, being the raping and pillaging of neighboring societies, slave labor trying to save enough money to marry, recruitment into religious societies where homosexuality was covertly practiced, etc. You know the story: block access to a birth-right then sell an inferior version at an inflated price to those willing to enslave themselves to pay for it. It's the oldest story in the book. It's happening with water rights in Bolivia right now.

Supporting evidence for the non-universality of this taboo against male/male physical intimacy can be found in the many societies where such behavior is anything but "unnatural." Among the Maasai, for instance, boys often accompany young, unmarried men on long grazing trips with cattle. The boys serve as sex partners for these young men ("penetration" is not oral or anal, but between the thighs). None of the boys or men involved consider this to be "homosexuality" at all—just a normal part of male development. Similarly, among several groups in Papua New Guinea, semen is believed to contain the essence of masculinity. Thus, boys who aspire to be the most masculine men do what they can to ingest as much semen as possible to that end.

In fact, PNG, despite the cannibalism and very common warfare between groups, is full of male bisexual behavior. Just last night, Cacilda and I watched a fascinating documentary about an openly gay anthropologist named Tobias Schneebaum who returns to PNG as an old man to reconnect with one of the Asmat men he loved when he lived among them in the 1970s. Quite a film, if you get the chance to see it. Schneebaum also wrote several books about his travels (he also lived with the Lacandons in Mexico and the Harakambut in Peru).