Tabu Homosexualität

[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] As recently as 2007, the Berlin Department of Education (Senatsverwaltung für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung) officially recommended use of the book in high schools as part of homophobia awareness trainings in social studies classes.

Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg identifies it as one of many examples of Sextus Empiricus's often-used rhetoric device of applying the most absurd properties to people, places, and other objects simply for the purpose of demonstrating basic rules of logic.

The second exception is a note by Posidonius, quoted in Diodorus Siculus's Bibliotheca historica, on Celtic sleeping customs which Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg attributes to a misunderstanding of traditional separation of the sexes in daily life.

Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg interprets these three strata as relating to the trifunctional hypothesis by Georges Dumézil, of classic Indo-European society consisting of three distinct classes, clerical (= Shamanic), agricultural, and warrior.

From there, Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg traces the genesis of homophobia via a number of historical derivations which exhibited increasing levels of rationalization: In Mannbarkeitsriten (1980) and Angst und Vorurteil (1989), Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg further chronicles the re-enforcing influence of Western colonialism when Indo-European cultures began globally expanding from the Age of Discovery and Age of Conquests on, thus explorers and conquerors again came upon Shamanic cultures partly involving ritual fertility and sexual cults, and Europe simultaneously encountered the wide spread of syphilis through these new cross-cultural contacts just when modern science began to dawn.