"The story itself is set in Fujian, which Li Yu explains is "the region foremost in passion for men," and concerns two men who become "husband and wife" (fufu). First the narrator introduces Jifang, a brilliant and handsome young scholar in his early twenties—in short, the stereotypical romantic ideal. Thoroughly misogynistic, he goes so far as to outline his dislike for women in orderly detail...
The other partner in this relationship is Ruiji, a beautiful fourteen-year-old boy from a poor family. Owing to a succession of natural calamities. all men in the prefecture are ordered to attend a special temple festival to appease the deity. Since no women are allowed to go, Ruiji excitedly predicts that during the festivities everyone will be enjoying the southern custom. He is not disappointed. While there, the assembled men hold a beauty contest for handsome youths and post the names of those considered most attractive. Ruiji wins first place.
Jifang falls in love with Ruiji and decides he. wants to marry him, expressing his intent using the word qu. which usually refers to heterosexual. Apparently Li Yu assumed that the custom of homosexual would be unfamiliar to many of his readers, since he includes an explanation:
In Fujian the southern custom is the same as that for women. One tries to discern a youth for whom this is the first marriage. If he is a virgin. men are willing to pay a large bride price. They do not skip the three cups of tea or the six wedding rituals—it is just like a proper marriage with a formal wedding.
Accordingly, Jifang goes to Ruiji's father to ask for his son's hand in marriage. The narrator explains that in Fujian bride prices for youths can be quite high: some boys bring up to five hundred pieces of gold. In order to pay for the exceptionally attractive Ruiji, Jifang sells all of his land...
Even more important within the story are references to an actual marriage ceremony. This ritual was not simply the product of Li Yu's wild imaginings: men apparently found it desirable to construct homosexual relationships along the lines of heterosexual marriage. The greatest advantage to be gained was the legitimation of the union according to a recognized convention...
Men of certain parts of China also appealed to heterosexual marriage as a model when trying to construct a more stable and respectable type of relationship with one another. As Li Yu acknowledged, the province of Fujian in southeast China was particularly famed for its cut sleeves and half-eaten peaches. The Dutch soldier Hans Putnams, who attacked the Fujian coast in the early seventeenth century, confirmed this fact in calling men of the region "filthy pederasts"; and the literatus Shen Defu (1578— 1642) stated that men of all social classes in Fujian would take male lovers...
Shen Defu described the most extreme form these relationships among men could take in Fujian: marriage...
The Fujianese ceremony went beyond this earlier custom by abandoning the earlier ritual of brotherhood and adopting the language and ceremonies of heterosexual marriage.
According to the terms of the Fujianese male marriage, the younger qidi would move into the qixiong's household. There he would be treated as a son-in-law by his husband's parents. Throughout the marriage, many of which lasted for twenty years, the qixiong was completely responsible for his younger husband's upkeep. Wealthy qixiong even adopted young boys, whom the couple raised as sons...
Male marriage was prevalent enough in Fujian that the men of that region even felt compelled to sacrifice to a patron deity of homosexuality. As with many potentially vengeful spirits in China, this one took the form of an animal. The. choice of a rabbit seems more than accidental... the development of homosexual life in Ming Fujian might have been more highly developed than even the institution of male marriage would indicate. Not only did men form couples, but the male community at large seems to have been involved in organized homosexual cultic activity. Large-scale retirement parties, the all-male festival in Li Yu's tale, and the development of religious rites centered around a cult of male homosexuality all point to involvement of the male community at large.
As Li Yu indicates, the institutionalization of homosexuality as marriage seems to have been the custom of a limited geographic area...
Remarkable in the tale of Nénuphar is the resemblance of her lesbian relationship to marriage. The analogy is not merely coincidental. Other sources document lesbian group marriages...
The most carefully documented of the female marriages are the "Golden Orchid Associations" of southern China. Scholars are uncertain as to the full implications of the choice of this particular title. Within the group, a lesbian couple could choose to undergo a marriage ceremony in which one partner was designated as "husband" and the other "wife." After an exchange of ritual gifts, the foundation of the Chinese marriage ceremony, a feast attended by female companions served to witness the marriage. These married lesbian couples could even adopt female children, who in turn could inherit family property from the couple's parents. This ritual was nor uncommon in the Guangzhou area. One male observer described the marriage ritual...
Like marriages among the men of Fujian, lesbian marriage seems to have been a localized custom found mainly in the Guangdong region. And like its male counterpart, these lesbian marriages were simply the most visible manifestation ofa wider range of lesbian practices throughout China."
--- Passions of the cut sleeve : the male homosexual tradition in China / Bret Hinsch
Bret Hinsch (韓獻博) | Fo Guang University - Academia.edu:
"Professor of History at Fo Guang University, Yilan, Taiwan"
"Scattered throughout the Roman sources we find allusions to marriages between males...
There are... later sources that explicitly speak of men who are married to other men...
The evidence certainly suggests that some Roman men participated in wedding ceremonies with other men and considered themselves to be married to those men...
In the uniformly hostile reports that survive, the assumption is never challenged that one partner in a marriage must be the husband and the other the wife: there is a notable insistence upon the gendered model, and particularly the trappings of a traditional ceremony joining husband and wife (dowry, torches, veil, and the like) that are represented as grotesquely inappropriate... marriages between men were represented as anomalous not because of homophobic anxieties regarding intimacy between males, but rather because of hierarchical, androcentric assumptions regarding the nature of marriage. The fundamental problem was not that two men joined themselves to each other, but that one man was thought necessarily to play the role of the bride...
It seems clear that some Romans did participate in formal wedding ceremonies in which one male was married to another (hostile outsiders imagined the full ceremony, complete with dowry, bridal veil, and ritual acclamations) and that these men considered themselves joined as spouses... n traditional Roman terms, a marriage between two fully gendered “men” was inconceivable; if two males were joined together, one of them had to be “the woman.”"
--- Roman Homosexuality: Second Edition / Craig A Williams
Craig Williams | Classics at Illinois:
Head, Professor"
I was told that "Never in the history of mankind has any society -- even
pagan or Roman or Confucian etc -- conceptualised same sex
relationships as a possible "marriage". and that "even the simplest
history student" could tell us that ancient Rome did not have same sex
marriage (but this later got bait-and-switched to "same sex monogamous
'marriage' in the Western sense"), and that the two experts above were
biased and woke and distorting history (with no evidence presented for
this claim).
