Pansexual Freedom

Question: With a new pantheon up, I feel it's time to revive your Ancient Sex Blog! So, I read a story about young Erinle going hunting in the forest against Yemoja's warnings and then being kept there by Osanyin "because of his beauty". Maybe I'm overinterpreting this after reading too much Greek mythology, but it sounds like an affair to me. What was the Yoruba's actual position to homosexuality/ephebophilia?

Yay! Ancient Sex Blog powers activate!

This is actually a really interesting question because traditional Yoruba society and religion view gender roles, and thus homosexuality, very differently from most western European cultures. Men might sometimes take on "female" roles and vice versa without this being viewed as abnormal, from male priests who dress up as women in order to more appropriately serve their patrons to women who marry other women in order to keep families together and a lot of other things in between. European cultures tend to have very rigid ideas of what male and female mean and how they are different, but for the ancient Yoruba the line was much less clear, and it was possible to cross over it in various ways and for various reasons without necessarily incurring any stigma.

There's very little mention of homosexuality in accounts of the ancient Yoruba, which is mostly the result of rampant confusion on the parts of both the invading Europeans and the bewildered Africans they were talking to. The Yoruba didn't really distinguish between the ideas of sex between opposite sexes and sex between members of the same sex, so they didn't have separate words for them and lacked any specific term for "homosexuality", meaning that many of their explanations of their culture just talked about "sex" and were interpreted by Europeans as just talking about "normal" heterosexual practices. European chroniclers were also very confused by what seemed to them to be a society that had none of the normal, sensible divisions between the sexes, and many of them either censored evidence of homosexuality or revised it so that it made more sense to them, making note of same-sex married partners as "husband and wife" to make the idea more easy to understand for the Europeans.

We do know from the few possibly-reliable records we have of the time when European colonists first encountered the Yoruba that homosexual practices did exist and were considered fairly normal. A few historians mention that men slept with other men or young boys if no women were available, and since priests of the Orisha are considered their spouses, often women become the husband of a goddess or men become the wife, to the point that even in the modern day priests of Shango often dress in womens' clothing in case they should be called upon by their husband. But this is also the pre-colonial Yoruba, and nowadays modern definitions and prohibitions against homosexuality have led to current adherents to the religion in Africa moving toward the religion specifically forbidding homosexuality. The rules are different across all the many diaspora religions, and further vary across regions within them just as they do within any other country and religion, so there's no overall "right" answer for this in the modern religions that call the Orisha their gods.

In Yoruba mythology, it's obvious that sexes are fluid and don't always matter very much when it comes to a god's character; they're more often tools that allow a god to represent one thing or another without locking them into a single sexual role. You'll see genderswapping all over the Yoruba myths, starting with Obatala transforming into a woman in order to sleep with Aganju and give birth to Shango or Oya growing a manly beard whenever she marches to war. Many of the Orisha are variously described as male or female in different stories, and the fact that Olokun is a man in one tale and a woman in another doesn't give them any pause or suggest any particular contradiction. In addition to the general Yoruba flexibility when it comes to gender and sex, the gods are also gods, and the Yoruba didn't think that gods necessarily had to conform to anything that humans did. If a god is a god, who cares whether it's appearing as male or female, when surely it has power over both? Gods like Obatala, Erinle, Olokun or Oshumare might appear as male or female, and it only matters as much as whether or not a mortal shows up wearing a button-down shirt or a t-shirt.

Many of the Orisha have both male and female "forms" that turn up at random in their stories, usually without bothering to explain why or how they changed sex, assuming that the listener of the story won't find it particularly odd. Often these stories are also being told in translation by people who didn't necessarily understand the Yoruba worldview or religion, and they may have arbitrarily assigned sexes in order to make a story "make sense" when in fact the original myth either didn't specifically note sexes or referred to a homosexual relationship that was confusing or abhorrent to a later reteller's sensibilities. And there's a further layer of complexity in that, in the American religions that came with the slaves kidnapped from the Yoruba of Africa, many of the Orisha changed sex again to fit the needs of their new religions, and Christian ideas of sexual proprieties and divisions syncretically colored the results. At this point, it's basically impossible to tell which stories might have either provided examples of or condemned homosexuality without a time machine and a universal translator.

So the interpretation of Osanyin's motives is really on the shoulders of whomever is doing the interpreting. It's certainly possible that Osanyin might have had a sexual motive in keeping young Erinle with him, which might or might not be homosexual (Erinle's one of the constant sex-swappers among the Orisha, and traditionally spends half the year as each sex). He also might simply have wanted to keep someone beautiful with him because of his own ugliness, either out of spite against the rest of the pantheon who exiled him because of his deformity or to have something beautiful of his own to counteract his own unpleasant presence.

When you're talking about ancient Yoruba stories, it's really not a question of whether or not the culture was comfortable with homosexuality; it's really a question of understanding that homosexuality isn't a separate and rigid concept for that culture the way it is for many others, and that thanks to the cultural kaleidoscope of interpretation that all our stories have come through, any given tale may be accidentally hiding implications that are no longer visible.

If you see a possible sexual interpretation of a Yoruba myth as a Storyteller, there's really just about as much chance that you're right as that you're wrong. There's nothing to stop you from running with the idea, and thanks to the constant swapping and cycling of sexes among the Orisha, also nothing to prevent you from running a given relationship as heterosexual, homosexual or both as you think will best suit your story.

Other pantheons have a lot of rules about who can sleep with whom, but the Orisha do what they want. Nobody is the boss of their bedrooms!