Homosexuality in Early China: History and Historiography of a Minor Tradition

Our knowledge of homosexual traditions in the ancient world has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few decades. The landmark publication of Greek Homosexuality by John Dover in 1978 inaugurated a whole new field on the history of same-sex relations in the classical Mediterranean world. A great many publications on this oncetaboo subject have appeared since then, and by now, we have a fairly rich, panoramic view of the varied lives of homosexuals in Ancient Greece and Rome. In contrast, the scholarly landscape at the opposite end of Eurasia, namely Ancient China, is far less developed. Groundbreaking works did appear a few decades ago, such as Bret Hirsch’s Passions of Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (1990) and Zhang Zaizhou’s Aiwei de licheng: Zhongguo gudai tongxinglian shi (Ambiguous Journeys: A History of Homosexuality in China; 2001). Significantly fewer new studies, however, have appeared in their wake. In this paper, I will present my ongoing book project Homosexuality in Early China: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents, which I hope to be a meaningful contribution to the field. It will be a critical anthology of all writings about homosexuality and homosexual individuals in Ancient China from antiquity to the second century CE. I will introduce the design of this anthology, the very first of its kind, the range of sources that we have, and the furtive glimpses that they afford us into the often-perilous lives of homosexuals in Ancient China.