Arthur N Gilbert. Journal of Homosexuality. Volume 6, Issue 1-2. January 1981.
Recently and tentatively historians have begun uncovering the roles of homosexuality and homosexual men and women in history. It is not an easy task. Proscriptions against homosexuality have always been enormously powerful, and prudent individuals rarely left any record of this aspect of their lives. Documents that might have shed some light on the subject were more often than not destroyed by friends, relatives, or heirs anxious to avoid scandal and preserve the family name. Court records can tell us something about the treatment of offenders in a number of countries, and newspaper accounts occasionally record a homosexual scandal, especially if it involved someone of prominence. Here and there one finds a pamphlet or observation by a chronicler of the day writing about covert or overt homosexual behavior. Beyond this, however, there is silence, for what was called in English law “the crime not fit to be named” was not likely to leave many traces.
Still, the history of homosexuality is being written, and it has taken a number of predictable forms. As one might expect, there have been books and articles about individuals as well as studies of homosexual life during particular historical periods. Representative of the biographical approach are a number of works by Roger Casement, the Irish patriot who was condemned, tried, and executed for treason in 1916. Casement’s life is of great interest to historians of homosexuality because after he had been condemned to death the discovery of his diary, the notorious black books, effectively destroyed any likelihood that friends and acquaintances in positions of power would draw attention to themselves by intervening to have his sentence commuted. As such, the example of Roger Casement shows how the violation of one of Western culture’s most powerful sexual taboos could mean the difference between life and death.
Raising consciousness by demonstrating historical continuity has always been an important function of the historian’s trade. Both the women’s movement and the black movement have been given considerable legitimacy by the publication of numerous books and articles on historically important, but generally ignored, women and black people. In this same vein there are books that attempt to rediscover a homosexual past by telling the stories of a number of historically important homosexual men and women. A. L. Rowse’s Homosexuals in History is an example—an unfortunate one in my judgment—of the effort to identify “great gays” and thus, presumably, to dignify the lives of homosexual individuals of the present day.
Alongside these popular accounts, there are many scholarly articles that stress the environment that spawned and shaped homosexual subcultures at various periods. An example is the fine article by Randolph Trumbach, “London Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century.” Trumbach’s thesis is that, in the large cities of Europe, underground homosexual communities lived a sometimes furtive but nonetheless flourishing existence, with a full panoply of modes of recognition and behavioral patterns, and a distinct argot. In other words, underground homosexual communities shared many of the characteristics often exhibited by other secret and forbidden societies. Trumbach’s study is an interesting blend of history and that branch of sociology that deals with subcultures and deviance.
Another attempt to deal with homosexual subcultures is Peter Allison’s “The Secret Sharer.” Unlike Trumbach, Allison is less concerned with organized homosexual activity in time and place but focuses rather on the various conditions that gave rise to homoerotic sensibilities in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. According to Allison, upper-class and upper-middle-class males of this period were virtually isolated from contact with females. The public school, the military, the university, and professional training all helped to create, as Allison writes, “values, allegiances, and shared experiences to which women were almost inconsequential.” He does not discuss actual sexual practices, as does Trumbach, for Allison is more interested in the symbolic meaning of the institutional encouragement of all-male environments.
As biographers probe more deeply into the homosexual proclivities of their subjects, we all may come to a deeper understanding of the public and private behavior of well-known men and women. More importantly, we may learn how homosexual people survived and functioned as subgroups in Europe and America and about the kinds of sociocultural traditions that explain the cause, incidence, and awareness of homosexuality at various times in history. Research in the first two areas mentioned would be an important adjunct to modern studies of homosexual subcultures and the psychosocial dimensions of homosexual individuals and their communities. The work of psychologists and sociologists in this field usually suffers from a lack of historical referents.
A second and larger field of study concentrates not on the history of homosexual persons but the history of their treatment by society. In many ways this is a more interesting subject, for it ranges beyond the problem of subculture formation and survival to the roots of Western fears of certain modes of sexual behavior. The focus is not so much on individuals but on the reasons why they were mistreated, persecuted, and even killed for their sexual activities. Implicitly or explicitly, those who work in this area are interested in the sociology of deviance. The central dictum of deviance theory, with its emphasis on interaction and labeling, is significant here. As Albert Cohen noted, “[T]hat which we deplore and that which we cherish are not only part of the same seamless web: they are actually woven of the same fibers.” For Kai Erikson,
[D]eviance is not a property inherent in certain forms of behavior: it is the property conferred. upon these forms by the audience which directly or indirectly witnesses them. Sociologically, then, the critical variable in the study of deviance is social audience rather than individual person, since it is the audience which eventually decides whether or not any given action will become a viable case of deviation.
The sociologist of deviance sees normality and deviance, acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, as mirror images, with the audience playing a major role in defining deviant behavior. This audience can be defined historically in broad or narrow terms. We have respectable contributions on the treatment of homosexual people from Arno Karlen, who deals mainly with Western culture, and from Vern Bullough, who adds not only to our understanding of Western culture but measures it against the attitudes and practices of the non-Western world, in particular, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Taoist approaches to sexual behavior. These general studies have many obvious virtues and provide a framework for better understanding of an entire heritage. The defects, however, are equally apparent. Sometimes lost in an overview of thousands of years of history is the sensitivity to nuances, to the change of attitudes, provided by narrower but more intensive studies.
Bullough’s work is a good example of this latter point. Attitudes toward homosexuality in the West were shaped early by Platonic philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome and later by Christian horror of unnatural and non-procreative sex. Differences in attitude and practice over the next couple of millenia seem less important to Bullough than the overwhelming fact of repression of homosexuality. A number of questions come to mind. If Christianity was indeed perenially hostile to homosexuality, why was this the case? Other early Christian beliefs were modified when confronted with changing world-wide realities. The history of Christian attitudes toward war is a good example of how ideas have been modified by new situations. An essentially pacifist religion turned into a crusading one in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Why were Christian attitudes toward things sexual, as opposed to matters of external violence, reinforced? This process cannot be explained simply by reference to “the power of ideas” without careful attention to the economic, political, and social conditions that allowed for the unchanging transmission of these ideas. In addition, although Bullough notes the perceptible changes in attitudes that do occur, he does not account for them. Bullough merely states that there were times of tolerance and times of harsh repression, that there were royal courts dominated by homosexual courtiers but also fierce persecutions of homosexual men and women, persecution that led to the stake and the gallows.
More modest studies, like William Monter’s on the interconnection between witchcraft and sodomy in the Swiss Romande in early modern times, help to remedy the shortcomings of general surveys; Monter probes beneath cultural generalities to pick up spatial and temporal differences. He notes that in the Swiss Romande accusations of sodomy and other sexual offenses often were paired with witchcraft accusations, implying that the fear of witches and the fear of sexual deviance were similar. Monter suggests that the great age of witch persecution, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had a sexual parallel. Whether Monter is correct is problematic, but at least his study undertakes the kind of correlations that must be made if we are to understand fear of deviance in history. Other studies, such as some articles by Bullough and Karlen, link charges of sodomy to fear or heresy, once again joining sexual and religious deviance.
Yet connections between heresy, witchcraft, and sexual deviance explain only partially the fear of sexual deviance. We need more information on the social and economic conditions that exacerbate fear of deviance, and we must uncover the social explanations for why society’s fears change from time to time. My own studies of sexual deviance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both in the British Navy and in Great Britain in general, are useful in this connection. With respect to the British Navy we have an institutional explanation for fear of deviance. British naval society—highly structured and disciplined—could not tolerate an activity that might interfere with the smooth running of the ship. Further, it was an all-male and therefore a “marginally” puritanical society. In British society generally, we find an intensification of fear of deviance that parallels involvement in the long and threatening Napoleonic Wars. Pressure on homosexual men was particularly intense in 1810, when war weariness and fear of anti-religious and revolutionary French ways were combined with economic strife. This analysis suggests a link between persecution of homosexuality and perceived or imagined social disaster.
The narrower studies, such as Monter’s and mine, raise some important cautionary banners to which historians in this field must pay heed. In attempting to understand fear of homosexuality contextually, one becomes acutely aware that there are difficulties in defining terms and a great danger that one will apply current definitions to a past that saw sexual deviance quite differently. As an example of this pitfall consider a short article by Louis Crompton, entitled “Gay Genocide: From Leviticus to Hitler.” The term genocide is used inappropriately in his discussion of homosexual offenders. Genocide, the systematic execution of large numbers of people because of their beliefs, race, or origins, does not fit the occasional and sporadic violence against sodomites. A graver error is Crompton’s contention that there were about 2000 years of repression and violence directed toward a definable group called gays, homosexuals, or whatever. In his recent book, The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault makes some distinctions that are important for historians of homosexuality. Foucault correctly notes that terms such as “homosexuality” and “homosexual” are modern, originating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This linguistic development stemmed not from some arbitrary desire to find a new word to replace the earlier ones, but rather from the recent creation by society of a new class of deviants. Suddenly there were “homosexuals”—a group of males who because of heredity or childhood training chose to seek sexual partners from members of their own sex. The sodomite had been someone who sinned by performing a deviant social act. The homosexual was not a sinner in the old religious sense but someone with an identifiable lifestyle revolving around the choice of sexual partners of the same sex. The distinction is important, for it marks the beginning of the treatment of a segment of the population as a race apart. For Crompton, apparently, the persecution of a sodomite in the fourteenth century is pretty much the same as harassment of homosexual communities in the twentieth. He may be correct, but it is wrong simply to assert this sameness without taking a more intense look at similarities and differences among historical views of deviance.
Because of the historical silence surrounding the subject of homosexuality, it is not all that easy to determine what was being punished in the past. One thing is clear, however: The words “sodomy” and “sodomite” had dual meanings. On the one hand sodomy referred to unspecified sexual relations between males, and on the other it meant a particular mode of sexuality, usually anal sex. Understanding the dual nature of sodomy is an important antidote to the false assumption made by so many scholars that there was only one meaning, a relational one.
This distinction can best be understood by a quick review of the writings of clergy and the surviving penitentials. Thomas Aquinas is representative of the first category. Aquinas attempted to define and rate those sins that fell under the general heading of “unnatural vice.” One unnatural vice, according to Aquinas, was the act of “procuring pollution without any copulation, for the sake of venereal pleasure.” Aquinas called this the sin of uncleanliness, and it seems likely that he was referring to masturbation. Another unnatural vice was bestiality, and a third was the “vice of sodomy,” which Aquinas defined as “male with male and female with female.” Finally, Aquinas included “unnatural manner of copulation,” which appears to cover unacceptable positions, for example, oral and anal heterosexual sex. Aquinas regarded all these unnatural vices as grave sins, more serious than incest and rape, but he also rank-ordered the four categories. The worst sin was bestiality “because use of the right species is not observed,” followed by sodomy “because use of the right sex is not observed.” These two most grievous sins were followed by “not observing the right manner of copulation” and by “pollution without any copulation.”
It should be stressed that Aquinas was concerned with sin in the traditional Christian sense: sexual acts forbidden by God. As Foucault warns us, we must not assume Aquinas viewed homosexuality as a lifestyle. Nonetheless, in placing all homosexual behavior in the forbidden category, he seemed to support writers like Crompton who define sodomy in modern-day relational terms.
We should also examine surviving handbooks of penance, which give a somewhat different view of the nature of sexual deviance. The penitentials are much closer to law as it might be applied in a modern court than to the expository writings of clergy on sexuality. The definition of penances required precision because confessor and sinner needed to know precisely what was sinful. A sinner was a lawbreaker and the punishment had to fit the crime. As a result, penitentials were act specific; there were no penances for illicit relationships such as homosexuality.
In a study of penitentials, John Noonan remarks that “anal and oral intercourse is treated as a serious sin by everyone who mentions such behavior” and, he continues, “many writers prescribe a more serious penance for it than for homicide committed by a layman… ” Noonan also notes that the penitentials were designed essentially to control lust and not simply as an adjunct to the church’s stance against birth control. Further, so far as we can tell, there were no distinctions made between oral and anal sex as performed by heterosexual couples and by homosexual couples. If the length of penance is an indicator, then among those acts, anal intercourse was clearly the more heinous crime.
The dual definition of sodomy led to endless confusion in the public mind, as well as in law courts throughout Europe when civil law later replaced church control of sexual misconduct cases. In England the law was unclear on this matter for years. In the seventeenth century Edward Coke had defined sodomy as sex between males (there was no mention of lesbianism), presumably eliminating the possibility that heterosexual deviance would be punishable by law. In practice, however, sodomy was defined quite differently. In the seventeenth century the Earl of Castlehaven was convicted of sodomy on his wife. In the early eighteenth century, in his important decision of a case involving anal sex committed on a twelve-year-old girl, Judge Fortescue ruled that prosecution under the sodomy statute was perfectly appropriate here because it was inconsistent for the law to claim that only males could be sodomized. There can be no question that Fortescue favored a behavioral rather than a relational interpretation of what constituted sodomitic offenses.
Fortescue’s decision set the tone for English legal interpretation of the sodomy statute during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While the vast majority of cases tried under the sodomy statute involved two or more males, there were exceptions. Every now and then a man would be tried for sodomizing his wife or another female, and the courts never ruled that the indictments were illegal because sodomy referred solely to homosexuality. Following Aquinas, homosexual males were still tried under the sodomy statute, but, in accordance with the penitential tradition, heterosexual anal sex was forbidden too. As the eighteenth century progressed, it became increasingly necessary to prove penetration (and sometimes emission) into the anal passage in order for the judge and jury to convict. This suggests sodomy had come to be defined as a specific act under English law. Clear proof of this can be found in the surviving courts-martial records, which, unlike civilian records, have lengthy trial minutes. While military law had many unique features, in crimes for which there were civilian counterparts (murder, rape, robbery, sodomy), it followed the precedence and practices of English law. Sodomy was sodomy whether the offender was in or out of uniform. The army and navy trial records show intense preoccupation with whether or not anal penetration was achieved. Where penetration could be proved, the verdict was guilty and a death sentence usually followed. If there was no penetration, the accused would not be executed, although he might be punished for attempted sodomy or uncleanliness. Neither the military nor civilian society executed men for fondling, kissing, or oral sex, or for the myriad other activities homosexual males might perform.
Let us be clear on this, that narrowly defining sodomy as an act did not mean that English society or even the courts ignored homosexual behavior as unimportant and of no threat to the community. Many individuals were tried and convicted of attempted sodomy, even though there was very little evidence that anal sex had been intended. When the existence of homosexual clubs was discovered, both courts and populace could punish with incredible ferocity. A man convicted of attempted homosexual advances had every reason to fear for his life if he were pilloried in London, for the mob would turn out to hurl missiles at offenders. Nonetheless, the dual definition of sodomy and sodomite seriously qualifies the assertion that homosexual repression was equivalent to the repression of sodomy in past times.
In a short essay, it is not possible to explore these themes in great depth. But in light of the present-day misconception that sodomy and homosexuality were one and the same, it is crucial to examine the link between sodomy and anal sex. This is particularly important because the facts substantially qualify the gay-genocide or gay-repression hypothesis. Fear of anal sex in Western culture is part of a complex of values that developed out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Hostility to all nonprocreative sexual acts is significant but is only a partial explanation for the proscription of sodomy. Many modes of sex interfere with procreation, but, as the penitentials reveal and as the later application of civil law indicates, none was punished as harshly as anal sex. While Christianity frowned on self-abuse, oral sex, and the like, penances were shorter for those offenses and men were not normally executed for them. Furthermore, many if not all societies have taboos against the waste of semen. Such taboos are part of Taoist thought, Tantrist Buddhism, and other traditions that do not show any particular horror of anal sex per se. Disapproval of wasting semen is not a sufficient explanation for Western fear of sodomy.
To understand the anal sex taboo, as opposed to the homosexual relationship taboo, we must return to the origins of Christianity. From its beginning, the new religion was characterized by a dichotomy between body and spirit. Paul, for example, states in the Epistle to the Romans: “Those who live on the level of our lower nature have their outlook formed by it, and that spells death; but those who live on the level of the spirit have the spiritual outlook, and that is life and peace.” Soon after this passage, Paul writes:
It follows, my friends, that our lower nature has no claim upon us: we are not obliged to live on that level. If you do so, you must die. But if by the Spirit you put to death all the base pursuits of the body, then you will live.
The words lower, base, and death contrast explicitly with higher, spirit, and life; however, at the same time, Paul and other Christian writers referred to the human body as a temple, a holy vessel. Paul writes in Corinthians, “Do you not know that your bodies are limbs and organs of Christ? Shall I take then from Christ his bodily parts and make them over to a harlot? Never!” He adds, “Do you know that your body is a shrine of the indwelling Holy Spirit and the Spirit is God’s gift to you?” The spiritual strivings in Christian thought clashed with the unassailable fact that life ends in death, that human flesh, like that of all other animals, rots and decays. Even more disturbing to the Christian mind was the admission that the living body constantly enacts the drama of death in its physical functions. Excrement was always the clearest and most persistent reminder of the fate of man. Humans usually defecate in secret, and in the Western imagination the anal function became a symbol of evil, darkness, death, and rebellion against the moral order. It is not accidental that Zoroastrianism, with its Manichean emphasis on the opposition of good and evil, body and soul, also treated the sodomite with the same hatred we associate with the Christian West. Early Christian asceticism and its attitude toward the body is most significant, for as Derek Bailey writes:
The rigorist tendency … in the New Testament came to its full development during the patristic age in an asceticism which sought, like its Hellenistic counterparts, to attain perfection through renunciation of the world and subjugation of the body. To this end every means was employed—fasting, solitude, prayer, mortification (not to mention a deliberate neglect of elementary hygiene), but always the decisive test, the critical discipline, was that of sexual continence!
Still, after punishing the body and denying the delights of the flesh in order to come closer to God, there was always, for even the holiest, a reminder of animality and mortality: that stinking bit of fecal matter that proved one was, after all, brother to the sheep, the dog, and the goat. For someone aspiring to overcome earthbound mortality, defecation was a sign of the ugliest fact of all: man is a dung-producing animal.
It was for these reasons that sodomy was inextricably linked in Western thought with bestiality. Just as sodomy was a reminder of “lower” physical impulses, so bestiality evoked man’s link with the animal kingdom. Both were acts in defiance of the spiritual nature of man. Rather than striving upward toward God and the angelic, copulation with animals was a deliberate turning of one’s back (or backside) to the deity and plunging, like Lucifer, to a level below man’s assigned role. It was to break the links with animality that Christianity had condemned heterosexual intercourse from the rear. For a man to mount a woman as the stallion does the mare was unclean—too close to the sodomitic and the bestial for comfort. In sodomy trials the imagery of animals and bestiality was always in evidence.
Sodomy, then, elicited the combined fears of sexuality, animality, and anality. This triumvirate came to personify evil to the Western sexual imagination. More particularly, the anal-evil link was established firmly. As one modern scholar has noted, “Dante’s hell is one vast ex-cremental dungeon.” The very structure of hell, with its tortuous downward spiralling in the belly of the earth, is suggestive of the ex-cremental organ, as are its features of darkness, wind, and stench. Since sin is the most hateful thing, only the language of the privy is adequate to express the disgust it generates. In the fifteenth century, Jan Van Eyck painted a remarkable rendition of the Last Judgment, which parallels Dante’s anal-evil theme. Christ is shown welcoming the saved into heaven in the usual fashion, but of much greater interest is Van Eyck’s views of the punishment of the damned. The earth is pockmarked with gaping holes into which sink the struggling, naked sinners. Astride the earth is a gigantic skeleton—death personified—with arms and legs akimbo, defecating the damned into a hell inhabited by monsters and wild beasts of the most terrifying sort, who tear, dismember, and devour those who did not lead the holy life. Hell is a giant privy and death turns human beings into waste. Men and women are metamorphosed into the products of their own bowels.
The anal-evil link is, if anything, even more dramatically presented in Martin Luther’s writing, as both Norman O. Brown and Erik Erikson have indicated. Also in eighteenth-century England, when sodomites were punished with death, the symbolic link between anality and evil was unmistakable. One sees it in the writings of Jonathan Swift, in the etchings and engravings of Hogarth, and most pointedly in the political and social satires of James Gillray.30 More research is required to discover why anality as evil was reinforced from generation to generation and why this theme dominates in some periods and not others. Already it is certain, however, that sexual acts involving the anal passage were regarded as the ultimate form of evil, a pact with the devil, a violation of the upwardly striving Christian attempt to find salvation. Fear of anal sex was certainly as powerful a force in the Western imagination as fear of homosexual relations.
The error of reading the present into the past is well known and yet common in the historical enterprise, as evidenced in examples cited here. Advice to respect the integrity of the past is hardly earthshaking, but it seems particularly important to remind historians who are studying sexual deviance to exercise some caution in their admirable attempts to write the history of homosexuality. While empathy for other times is difficult to achieve in the best of circumstances, it is particularly difficult in this case because of the secrecy and ambiguity surrounding the subject of deviant sexuality and because of the consequent paucity of data. Yet scrupulous historical accuracy is essential; indeed, it is the only way in which we will begin to understand not only homosexuality as a forbidden relationship but sodomy as a forbidding mode of sexual activity.