[NSFW]

I understand where they got the pieces, and the desire to make a modern political point, but this is sadly medieval /r/badhistory.

Sexual identity and categorization

True: The Middle Ages had no concept of "sexual identity", "homosexual," "heterosexual." These are modern constructions, a product of modern Western's society drive to categorize sexual behavior and attraction in one particular scientific/socio-scientific framework that (even with the addition of bisexuality) doesn't necessarily fit everyone's own experiences over their lifetimes.

How medieval Christians characterized sex acts, on the other hand, was first of all whether they were "natural" or not. "Sins against nature" were among the worst sexual sins, and those included bestiality and men having sex with men "as the sodomites do." (Correction from earlier: incest is typically counted the worst sexual sin, but it is not a sin contra naturam. Masturbation is, but it is typically considered the least sexual sin. Bestiality and male-male fornication do not fare so well.)

What counts as sex?

A whole lot. As /u/idjet wrote, "Good god, what hijinks were they up to in those lonely, lonely monasteries...." Let me give you an example of some of the things that male monks considered to be sexual sins ("Item de fornicatione," writes Burchard of Worms):

Have you fornicated with a man against the hips, as certain men do, that is, that you have placed your virile member between the hips of another, and thus produced semen? If you have, do 40 days of penance with bread and water.

Have you fornicated, as certain men are in the habit of doing, that is have you taken the penis of another in your hand, and the other yours in his, and thus you rub the other's penis in your hands, and through this delight project semen? If you have, 30 days penance.

Have you fornicated as the sodomites do, that is have you inserted your penis into the rear, and thus had sex (coires) in the manner of the sodomites? If you have a wife, and did this once or twice, 10 years of penance. If you have done this habitually, 12 years.

Ladies?

As /u/idjet and I covered in this post, it is hard to find explicit references to women having sex with women in sources by male clerics. Much harder, indeed, than the condemnations we see against men having sex with men "as the sodomites do."

It surely wasn't for lack of interest on the parts of our celibate, male clerics. Burchard and other authors are well aware that women use "instruments or mechanical devices in the manner of a virile member" sometimes, and also that they bring themselves to orgasm by rubbing themselves with their hands.

So why the silence in the sources? Let's let the author of the 13C Ancrenne Wisse, a text written to instruct women vowing themselves to a very restrictive form of religious life how to behave properly, explain his reasoning:

for fear one should learn of more evil than she already knows, and should thus be tempted

Our anonymous but probably celibate monk author thought women needed men's help to discover masturbation--and, indeed, pleasure/sex with other women, as other passing whispers in the AW make clear:

"It was with an innocent creature, a woman such as I am."

Aelred of Rivaulx, also writing for women, had no such reservations:

That crime is to be detested, by which a man goes mad for a man, or a woman for a woman; it is to be judged more damnable than all other vices.

Sexuality & Gender

A frequent theme that arises in the sources, and ties in heavily with the "contra naturam" categorization, is the perversion of gender. Katharina Hetzeldorfer, executed for sodomy (using an "instrument") with other women in 1477 Speyer, is repeatedly described as doing what she did "just like a man." Columban, referencing the Vulgate's rendition of Leviticus 18:22, describes male-male sex as "sinned with a man by female intercourse."

Cross-dressing saints appear in hagiography from time to time. A topos of late antique saints' lives is the woman who makes herself "like a man" to join a monastery, and is only discovered to be a woman upon her death. This is a variation on the theme that women are incomplete men, and "become men" when they reach at spiritual perfection (cf. Perpetua's dream-vision of herself made like a man by/at her impending martyrdom in the arena). But this could also go both ways. Joan of Arc dressed like a man in prison to protect herself, as she said, but this was taken as evidence of her perversion of female nature (and hence heresy and witchcraft).

Asexuality

Medieval writers have no conception of "people who don't want to have sex" by nature. A major foundation of medieval thought is that people are sinners who want sex because sinners. Virginity is an ideal to be pursued as an attempt to recapitulate the pre-lapsarian (pre-Fall of Man) state. It is a struggle and a victory against Satan and sinful human nature after the Fall. When virgins (male or female) are hailed as never wanting sex or a spouse, it is because they have been specially graced by God. They are able to transcend their inherent sinful nature. They are saints.

Spiritual marriage

Totally a medieval thing. Medieval writing on friendship can be, from a modern perspective, wildly homoerotic in terms of its language--but this is a modern imposition. In fact, while celibate men and women, men and men, women and women could use deeply intimate language to describe their relationships with each other and even what reads to modern interpreters like pretty damn near sexual language to talk about their relationships with Christ, they were at the same time deeply aware of the ambiguities and how close to the line they might be walking. By the late Middle Ages, theologians inveighed against the frequency with which religious women--living saints, even! the nearly perfect!--sought confession, for fear that their relationships with their confessors would become too close. Women like Margery Kempe had to switch confessors frequently for this reason.

The basis for this was a fun little feature of Latin, the multiple words that become collapsed as the vernacular "love" (minne, amour, etc). Dilectio is desire or carnal love; amor is romantic love; caritas is divine love. Caritas is what these 'spiritual marriages' and friendships cultivated. A love on earth that reflects God's love for humanity.

The point here, I stress, is NOT that men and men, women and women never fell in love or had sex with each other for a thousand years of circum-Mediterranean history. People are people. It happened.

The point is also not that medieval attitudes towards persecuting men having sex with men or even women having sex with women seem to us, through the sources, to be as virulent as we start to see in the very late Middle Ages into the early modern era. There is no doubt that we see a general progression towards a focus on external, society-disrupting sins over the later medieval centuries, especially after 1400. That means adultery, that means sodomy (including for women, although more rarely).

The point that I take the cartoon to imply is that medieval people had no conception that "sex between men" and "sex between women" were sinful behaviors. That is flat-out wrong.

Putting people in boxes

The early medieval penitentials are lists and lists of sins that their authors are well aware people can do "once or twice," "or by habit"--and assign much higher penances to the latter.

High medieval natural philosophers ascribed to entire groups of people, immutable characteristics based on the climate from which they came.

Late medieval superman Dante assigned unrepentant sinners to an eternal location in hell based on their defining sin.

The Middle Ages perfected putting people into boxes.

Yeah, no. It's taking more circumscribed scholarly claims and pushing them beyond their boundaries

There are some important concepts here. For example, it is true that the idea of a gay person doesn't make much sense in a medieval context. Sexual acts between men were certainly frowned upon, but only insofar as the act was itself sinful. But it's not true that "asexual" would map onto the medieval ideal of "virgin". Virginity was an ideal, but it was an ideal obtained through struggle. The average saint, if we believe hagiographies, had at least one such contest with his or her lust; Benedict of Nursia threw himself into some thistles to quench it. If you didn't have lust, you weren't human.

The question of "marriage" is basically an uncritical reading of John Boswell's work, specifically Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. To call the very real ceremonies of spiritual union marriage in the modern sense is an anachronism, one Boswell deliberately (by my reading) chose to create. But both men and women did frame themselves as being "married" to Christ, strengthened by an exegesis of the Song of Songs, popularized by Bernard of Clairvaux, which cast the soul (anima, a feminine noun in Latin) as the bride and Christ as the bridegroom.

Most importantly, the entire conversation would be based in the medieval understanding, from the theories of Galen, that women were failed men, lacking the necessary "heat" (see Peter Brown's The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity). All ideas of "rightness" of relationship were based around this truth, whether it was clerical attempts to remove themselves from female weakness (as an anonymous and possibly apocryphal Praemonstratensian wrote, "the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women"), or, as Maureen Miller has argued, the creation of an identity as complete without the need for women.

In short, yes, our boxes would have confused the heck out of a medieval person. They only had one box, and they built it in a very different fashion.

I don't have an answer, but I just wanted to ask for clarification. Do you mean 'sexual orientation', rather than 'gender identity'?

Actually, to the best of my knowledge, it is, in its broad strokes, accurate for most of mainstream Latin Christianity after about 1200. There was no concept of differing sexual orientations, and they certainly would have played no role in one's identity. Men who had same-sex sexual relations were simply committing the sin of sodomy, which was in theory also committed when one engaged in hetrosexual oral or anal sex (theologically speaking). The conception of binary hetro/homo sexualities only emerged in the modern period, and other gender and sexual identities are even more recent. Foucault's 'A History of Sexuality' is the fundamental source for these ideas, though they're quite widespread.

That's not to say that differing sexual orientations were openly tolerated or all sodomies were treated equally. You only need to look so far as Piers Gaviston's (Edward II of England's lover) infamous murder to see that people practicing same-sex relationships certainly faced specific animosity.

There are, however, many examples of same-sex relationships which were pursued without adverse consequences. Richard I of England was probably what we would call 'gay' (some have speculated that a young Philip II of France was a lover), but repented his sinful lifestyle and married a Sicilian princess before embarking on Crusade. And we have quite a bit of detail about the love life of the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini, who wrote an autobiography (available in Penguin Classics as 'The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini', with a really good introduction putting it all in context). Cellini had at least 2 sexual relationships with (younger) men, as well as being married and having affairs with women. He never defines himself by who he sleeps with nor does he identify as homosexual or bisexual, as these concepts didn't exist for him. Same-sex relationships between unmarried men seem to have been tolerated in 15th and 16th century Italy as an acceptable outlet for sexual desires - so much so that when Cellini was working in France anal sex (with either sex) was know as 'the Italian style'!

I realise I've got nothing in here about same-sex relationships among women, but I've never come across any references to it. I suspect the comic might get that bit right too: that all of the male authors from the period never even considered that it would be a possibility!