Passive roles

Excerpts from the book, "A critique of social constructionism and Post modern Queer thoery by Rictor Norton"

The following sentence runs as a leitmotif throughout Greenberg’s The Construction of Homosexuality (1990): ‘Though there was neither word for, nor a concept of, a homosexual person, an adult man who took pleasure in the anal-receptive role was scorned and thought to require an explanation.’

... their concept of the homosexual was primarily limited to the receiver – in exactly the same way that most modern words for homosexuals have that connotation: queer, fairy, pansy, faggot, cocksucker, gay, queen and homo.

Many social constructionists maintain that in ancient Rome, for example, homosexuality in itself was not a problem, but that the problem (i.e. an issue given great consideration) concerned taking the ‘passive’ role in male–male sexual relations (i.e. being penetrated). Thus, for example, there is no term for the active (i.e. penetrating) partner in this relationship; he is simply a man, whereas his passive partner is a catamitus.

Most periods and most cultures have words for homosexuals, but the significance of these is dismissed by noting that the stigmatizing label is almost invariably applied only to the man who takes the passive role, and the passive role is determined by an act rather than orientation or object choice.

...premodern and indigenous cultures have no word for the more abstract concept of the homosexual, but only a word for the effeminate/passive male...

NOTE from Reclaiming Natural Manhood:

Thus it seems that if at all there has been a concept of sexual orientation in the past, then it was that of sexual orientation for passive sex, and sexual orientation for penetrator role... and that the former was 'gay', while the latter was 'straight'. This is essentially what the society at large still believes in, about the concepts of 'homosexuals' and straight. Homosexuality is widely believed to be both about 'transgenderism' and about a desire to be 'penetrated' like a woman.