hrj

The long time-scale look is one of the things I love about this project! Not thinking so much in terms of the historians' approaches, but rather of the material itself. One fascinating angle is the regular shifts over time in whether societies considered desire to be driven by similarity or difference. That is, was it more natural to love people who resembled you or those who were different from you? The idea of "opposites attract" is hardly a cultural universal. And those shifts affected how people imagined same-sex attraction and how they were expected to act on it. One of these days I'm going to do one of my topical essays on that angle.