Straight kiss

In the political life, the kiss between men had formerly a certain success. I say : to kiss him on the mouth. Very often, it was the sign of alliance and harmony. It was naturally a heterosexual kiss. Symbolic example, the poem of Louis le Pieux, written near 828, which evokes an official meeting between the monarch and the pope Etienne : "then both, king and the respectable pontiff, kiss on eyes, on lips, on forehead, on breast, on neck. And hand in hand, interlaced fingers, César and Etienne go towards the white houses of the city ", then they go to Church to pray, and then to the palace to celebrate. Obviously, the kisses on the lips that exchange in public the pope and the king are not the mark of a passionate eroticism, a prelude of a crazy sex night. It is simply about ritual gestures intended to point out the harmony between two sovereigns, who intend to clearly show their alliance to each other. Also, in the medieval literature, it is very frequent that the knights kiss each other on the mouth to express their deep friendship : the examples are uncountable, and this gesture is not perceived as being necessarily a sign of "sexual abnormality". Having said that, in France, at the end of the Middle Ages, things go bad, as reveals it the affair of the Knight Templars. The story is well known : on Friday, October 13th, 1307, Philippe le Bel makes 140 members of the Order arrest, the Knight Templars being monks-soldiers who have for mission to save the Temple of Jerusalem at the time of the crusades. Number of them was put to death. We know Philippe le Bel's political and economic motivations, but the fact that we find the kiss on the mouth among the grievances used against the members of the Order, to strengthen the accusation, reveals that this gesture was already not perceived in the same way at this time : widely heterosexual rite until then, it began to be interpreted as a sign of homosexuality. The kiss between men was already in the era of the suspicion ; he entered henceforth the era of the condemnation. However, this practice continued to have certain success in some other countries, in Russia, then in Soviet Union, for example. Posters or photos do not miss, which show Brejnev, for example, kissing on the mouth such or such of his interlocutors during public meetings. But today, the political kiss between men is much less made in Russia because we know that this gesture could be interpreted in the West or somewhere else as a sign of homosexuality, what we want to avoid. We see that the evolution of the cultural codes requires an approach which is at once semiological and historical.