Happy Hermaphrodite and Tribade Community Day!

[felis_ultharus]

This has been a good week.

The parade was great last Sunday. We had trouble with the car, so we reverted to a more primitive state, peeled montrealais's marvellous signs from the truck, and marched carless as our ancient ancestors would have done in their Pride Parades.

A slow-moving, gas-guzzling automobile is a poor symbol of an environmentalist political party anyway. The hybrid car we had one year was small, but it was cute and quiet and less toxic.

Today, we're tabling all day for community day. Tonight it's the Outgames closing ceremonies -- the only part of the Outgames I've been able to attend. Then it's jenjoou's housewarming party. Tomorrow it's tabling again.

Somewhere in all this, I have to finish Ben Jonson's Volpone. I'm still trying to figure out if Androgyno the Hermaphrodite is meant to be physically a hermaphrodite, or a homosexual (which meaning was more common at the time).

Jonson was also the guy who introduced the word "tribade" -- meaning "lesbian" -- into the English language (hence, "tribadism"). So this seems to have been a favourite subject of his.

Comments

[sugar-spun.livejournal.com]

I think that for future parades you should hire or invest in a tandem bicycle.

They're environmentally sound and a lot of fun.

So hermaphrodites in seventeenth century literature are homosexuals by another name? I didn't realise that, how interesting.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Yep -- although it carried the modern meaning as wel. Specifically a homosexual in the passive sexual role, although Androgyno boasts that s/he can experience sex both ways.

I think it's related to the classical theory that the internal anatomy of passive homosexuals was different (was that Galen or Aristotle? -- I'm not sure now). Jonson and other Renaissance writers especially were big on Classical learning.