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HOMOSEXUALITY

HOMOSEXUALITY. Like modern homosexuality, early modern homosexuality is better understood in the plural than in the singular. Homosexualities in different parts of early modern Europe were profoundly divergent, with equally profound differences existing between rural and urban settings and between diverse social groups in the same geographic areas. Class and other hierarchical differences added further dimensions to this divergence. Just as modern male and female homosexualities may be seen as the outcome of historical processes, their histories, despite their occasional intersections, are quite different. Until the eighteenth century, there were no societal, psychological, or self-identifying concepts of "gay" and "lesbian" as we know them today. But the eighteenth century was an era of transition that gave rise to modern homosexualities, in particular in northern France, England, and the Dutch Republic.

TERMINOLOGY AND SOURCES

The words "homosexuality" and "lesbianism" were first coined in the second half of the nineteenth century. Previously, aside from words in the vernacular, the common European term for homosexuality was "sodomy," which had profound theological and legal connotations. The term derived from the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and of God's wrath for presumably widespread homosexual practices in those cities. Religious connotations affected words in the vernacular as well. "Buggery" and "bugger" (which had derivations in different languages, like the French bougre or Dutch bogger) came from Latin bulgarus and connected sodomy with heresy; this is because Bulgaria supposedly had been a center of Manichaeism, which espoused an indulgence in heterosexual and homosexual sodomy. Sodomy was also referred to as crimen nefandum, the 'umentionable vice', the crime not to be known or mentioned among Christians.

From a strictly legal or penal perspective, sodomy did not refer exclusively to a same-sex configuration. The term could refer to anal intercourse, sets of prohibited sexual acts between men or between men and women, bestiality, and in some instances or places, sodomy referred to sexual contacts between Christians and Jews or Christians and Muslims. Although the word sodomy, at least in legal practice, was sometimes applied to sex between women, usually the terms "tribady" or "sapphism," as well as the more obscure Latin terms fricatrices, subigatrices, and clitorifantes, were used in vernaculars and in legal discourse. These words lacked the negative social and moral connotations of the term sodomy and instead referred specifically to sexual acts. By the end of the early modern period, the term sodomy referred to homosexual intercourse and bestiality in the general parlance. Throughout the era, a "sodomite" was a man who engaged in same-sex behavior. By the end of that period, words like "sapphist" and "sapphism," referring to same-sex female relations, had gained such currency in popular parlance in England. Early modern documents, such as love letters, that provide unmitigated personal accounts of men or women with same-sex orientations are extremely rare. However, some of these have survived, mainly as components of court records from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The latter provide the most substantial (if somewhat problematic, having been filtered by judicial systems) documentation on same-sex behavior and desires in early modern Europe. Although there certainly was no impunity for women who engaged in lesbian acts, the numbers of women prosecuted for same-sex behavior are small in comparison to men, and consequently documents on lesbian behavior are rare indeed.

LEGISLATION

Presumably, the East Roman emperor Justinian, in his sixth century writings against sodomy, had been the first to justify legislation against homosexuality. He claimed that natural disasters, like floods and earthquakes, diseases, and the negative outcome of wars, were collective penalties for homosexual behavior. Those ideas would affect legislation and legal practices in many parts of Europe for centuries to come. In 1120, the Council of Nablus turned sodomy in canonical law into a capital offense. Those convicted of the crime were punished by burning at the stake. The council also designated sodomy a crime that could be prosecuted by ecclesiastical and civil authorities. Local and regional laws in the next centuries provided a variety of penalties for sodomy, ranging from fines and mutilations for repeat offenders to death.

At the beginning of the early modern period, more penal unity was achieved in continental Europe with the enforcement of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (ruled 1519–1558) in 1532, followed a year later in England by Henry VIII's (ruled 1509–1547) "buggery" act. In many places prosecutors or judges deciding in sodomy cases could still call upon custom, local or regional laws, mosaic law, or rather arbitrary interpretations of Roman laws such as the Lex Scantinia from the third century B.C.E. and the Lex Julia de Adulteriis Coercendis from the first century B.C.E.

The Carolina and the English act both placed the death penalty on sodomy offenders: the first stipulated burning at the stake, the latter called for hanging or decapitation. Joost de Damhouder (1507–1581), an advisor to Charles V, in his Praxis Rerum Criminalium (1554), a commentary on the Carolina that was authoritative in many parts of Europe into the first half of the eighteenth century, once again invoked the Sodom story and claimed that natural disasters and pestilence would be God's wrath for the existence of sodomy. Although the main focus was on male homosexual and heterosexual sodomy, commentators on legal issues at the time often did include female same-sex relations as well.

Enlightenment writers like Beccaria in Italy, Montesquieu in France, and Bentham in England rejected (in their works on penal reform) the penalties for same-sex behavior. With the exception of Bentham (who never published his most radical writings on this issue), they had nothing positive to say about same-sex love, yet they rejected the idea that the inherent harm in homosexual behavior was so great that it warranted interference of the state through punitive action. Pursuing a separation of church and state, radical penal reformers also rejected antisodomy laws because those were believed to originate in theology. Reformers emphasized the political abuse of antisodomy laws and maintained that confessions of defendants were all too often obtained through torture. While rejecting the death penalty for sodomy, not all Enlightenment legal reformers rejected penalization, and in many places some form of punishment remained in place. At the end of the early modern period, those countries that adopted the French Napoleonic penal code (or had that code forced upon them) decriminalized same-sex behaviors.

PROSECUTIONS

The late Middle Ages also saw prosecutions and executions of individuals in Europe who were charged with same-sex intimate behavior. Sometimes legal actions were politically inspired, like the accusations in England against Edward II in 1372, or those against the Knights Templar. Prior to the early modern period, accusations of homosexual or heterosexual sodomy were also leveled against groups of heretics who at times faced extreme persecution.

In the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the early modern period, religious and civil authorities in cities in Tuscany tried to stamp out widespread practices of so-called age-based homosexuality. Venice, Lucca, and Florence created special courts to deal with the offenders. In its seventy years of existence, the court in Florence dealt with over 10,000 cases. Although death penalties and incarcerations were sometimes applied in Venice, in Florence most cases offenders were merely fined, creating the belief (especially later in Protestant countries) that Italians considered sodomy to be a peccadillo, a minor sin. A century later, cities like Geneva and Ghent saw serious persecutions, yet in both places mostly foreigners, and especially Italians, faced trial. In Ghent, as in some other places in Flanders at the beginning of the Reformation, a number of monks were burned at the stake after having been found guilty of sodomy. Autos-da-fé (the public burning of offenders) occurred on the Iberian Peninsula especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Sodomy trials in rural parts of Europe like Prussia and Sweden usually involved charges of bestiality. This was the most common sexual offense in Sweden well into the twentieth century. No serious persecutions have been reported in eastern European countries. In Denmark sodomy seems to have been a crime without offenders: there have been no sodomy trials in that country.

France had witnessed limited numbers of sodomy trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the eighteenth century the Parisian police documented and policed sodomites' lives in a way unheard of before, but this hardly ever resulted in trials. However, such observations did provide ample documentation on sodomite subcultures in Paris. England and the Dutch Republic also had few sodomy trials up to the late seventeenth century. From that time on and well into the next century, there is ample documentation on raids on "molly houses" (from Latin mollis, referring to softness and effeminacy) in London. Offenders often were seriously injured by being put on the pillory for their crimes.

After the 1670s in the Dutch Republic, the number of sodomy trials gradually increased until a major wave of arrests erupted in 1730, which was to be repeated several times during the eighteenth century. Persecutions here turned into the most severe in early modern Europe. Between 1730 and 1811, when the French penal code was enforced in the Netherlands, some 800–1,000 sodomy trials were held there, resulting in about 200 death penalties and as many (often de facto lifelong) solitary confinements when mutual masturbation was the only proven offense. Most of the rest of the men prosecuted were forever expelled from their countries, often after they had already taken refuge abroad.

Trials against women for same-sex activities were rare. Occasionally, cross-dressing women who had sex with other women were brought to trial. Only in a three-year period in late-eighteenth-century Amsterdam were lower-class women prosecuted regularly for having sex with one another. They faced up to several years of incarceration.

EARLY MODERN HOMOSEXUALITIES

Divergent patterns of male same-sex behavior dominated different parts of Europe and the rest of the world at different times; upon closer examination, several patterns of behavior—cross-gender, class-based, intergenerational (age-based), and equal-status—could be distinguished. These patterns could also be mixed. The first three patterns, generally speaking, were related to assigned passive and active roles. Only in the equal-status pattern could adult men interchange active and passive roles with one another. Patterns of same-sex behavior could be permanent or temporary. Unlike in the modern West, these patterns did not necessarily represent an alternative sexuality, but were part of male social bonding and also of the socialization process from boyhood into adult masculinity.

In the cross-gender pattern, men dressed as women and took on a female role. Although crossing class barriers (which is what the second pattern is about) is a persistent and apparently enticing feature of same-sex behavior, traditionally the class-based homosexuality is mostly relevant to societies in which free-born men engaged in sexual activities with male slaves. European colonizers met the first among indigenous populations of the Americas, and may have engaged themselves in the second form.

The two most dominant patterns of male homosexual behavior in early modern Europe are the age-based and equal-status homosexualities, although the latter only began to emerge in the later part of the seventeenth century in northwestern Europe—England, northern France, and the Dutch Republic—and may have been present in urbanized western parts of Germany. Age-based homosexuality was the most dominant pattern in southern Europe throughout the early modern period, in particular in Italy; adult men strictly upholding active and passive roles sought sex with pubescent and sometimes prepubescent boys. Those boys, on reaching adulthood, switched from passive to active roles, started to have sex with women (mostly prostitutes), and ideally left all of that behind them when they were married in their late twenties or early thirties. Florence had gained such a reputation in Europe that "to Florence" had become a verb in German and Dutch, referring to same-sex activities. By the late Middle Ages, Italy had already earned a reputation for its apparent widespread homosexual activities: during most of the early modern period in western Europe, the word "Italian" was synonymous with "sodomite." Although documentation on homosexuality in eastern European countries is still scant, reports suggest that in a city like Moscow in the seventeenth century, patterns of behavior existed that were not unlike those in Tuscan cities. Once St. Petersburg started its ascendancy as capital and as window to the West, more "modern" patterns of homosexual behavior may have emerged here.

Prior to the emergence of equal-status homosexuality in northwestern Europe, far more hierarchical forms were dominant there, usually taking the forms of class- and age-based same-sex behavior, or some combination thereof. Homosexual behavior could manifest itself between masters and apprentices, or officers and privates. Such hierarchical and age-based forms involving young cabin boys show up persistently in documents of ship councils far into the eighteenth century.

The rise of the equal-status homosexuality in the late seventeenth century marked the beginning of a period of transition into modernity, which would eventually result in modern homosexualities and identity formations. This rise went hand in hand with the emergence of same-sex subcultures. Meeting sites for sodomites have been reported since the late Middle Ages in cities like Cologne, but they meant little compared to the numerous places—pubs, brothels, parks, gardens, and urban sites like city halls, commodity exchanges, and theaters—that show up in court documents from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in cities like Paris, London, and Amsterdam, and some smaller cities.

In Amsterdam, sodomites who had met someone could go to any number of public toilets underneath bridges. Some of those toilets had a reputation as places where sodomites could pick up partners, too. European societies with a dominant age-based homosexuality have also documented some sites at which men used to meet, yet those were typical places where men used to socialize and bond. The meeting sites frequented by sodomites in Holland and elsewhere from the late seventeenth century onwards were often the places where female prostitutes picked up their customers.

The rise of the sodomitical subcultures was accompanied by the development of a distinct homosexual role. Sodomites developed an often effete body language and deportment, and used gestures and an argot that sometimes resembled that of prostitutes. At one of the most notorious meeting sites for sodomites in Amsterdam, men used to walk to and fro with their arms akimbo and hit another man with their elbow if they were interested in him. Prostitutes of the time may have used similar tactics. In London's so-called molly houses sodomites staged plays and rituals in which they mocked marriage ceremonies and childbirth. While in the agebased same-sex pattern men could be infatuated with particular boys, in this equal-status homosexuality some men engaged in jealously guarded love affairs. By the end of the early modern period, to have a lover had become a definite goal for many members of these subcultures.

While in previously dominant patterns male desires were generally not directed exclusively towards other males, but were epitomized by the literary and also printed image of a man holding a boy on one arm and a woman on the other, in the eighteenth century the "new" effete sodomitical role became more solely geared toward males. Upon being arrested, some of these men in northwestern Europe would acknowledge that they never had had any desire for women. For some that would also mean acknowledging a preference for a passive role in sex.

Patterns of female same-sex behavior are far more difficult to discern. As with some male homosexualities, some forms of lesbian behavior must be looked at from a wider perspective. One of these is the tradition of amply documented female transvestism. Throughout the early modern period, women cross-dressed to masquerade as soldiers, sailors, pirates, or sometimes just to travel safely. Whether some of these women originally dressed up for sexual reasons is unknown, yet there is also documentation of women who in their male attire courted and even married other women. Some had sex while using artificial penises they had made. Women who cross-dressed had to adopt a male role in such a way that even people in close quarters like ship bunks did not become suspicious.

Women did not have subcultures like those men had in northwestern Europe, that is, clandestine spots and physical cues that exclusively served male-to-male desires. There is some evidence, especially from the Netherlands, that lower-class women did have subcultures, in which (although not exclusively) female-to-female desires could be fulfilled. These women, often widowed, abandoned, or left behind by sailor husbands, formed mutual support networks in which (sometimes through prostitution) they could pursue sex with men but also with one another. These women may have lived together in inconspicuous manners. Upper-class women and, for instance, actresses, although not cross-dressing, sometimes dressed in sufficiently ambiguous ways, mixing male and female attire, to raise suspicions if not of same-sex behavior, at least of having loose ways.

PERCEPTIONS

Separating theological from penal views is difficult, since the latter were mostly based upon theological perspectives on sexuality. Thomas Aquinas's thirteenth-century distinction between natural and unnatural sexual offenses (even though Thomism temporarily lost its influence) bore upon the early modern consciousness. In his morphology of sex crimes, rape and adultery were at least natural because they did not stand in the way of procreation and therefore were not as heinous as sodomy. While later Protestant writers would not refer to Aquinas, they by and large adhered to the same morphology. For Aquinas as much as for these writers, the only thing worse than sex between men or between women was sex with an animal.

The acknowledgment by Protestants and Catholics after the Counter-Reformation that sexual pleasure was a means for strong bonding between spouses, and was therefore primarily an environment to create offspring, probably engendered even more virulent rejections of same-sex behavior. After all, by bringing pleasure into the equation, a dangerous border was crossed that required constant vigilance. Since the Middle Ages and perhaps before, same-sex behavior had already been seen as the ultimate form of hedonism.

Such hedonism began with indulgence in other, corporeal pleasures, the luxuria. Indulgence in fine or copious food and drink, in dancing and smoking, in fine clothes, and also abuse of leisure through card playing or gambling was thought to provoke desires and lust for more pleasure and worse acts, such as womanizing, adultery, whoring, and, ultimately, homosexual acts. Unnatural behavior could thus originate in natural needs for food, drink, dress, and rest, and then only deteriorate from there. This was supposedly what had happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, which had been located on a fertile plain. The riches of these cities led to indulgence in all kinds of debauchery and, eventually, to God's wrath.

Women were considered to have less perfect bodies than men and were supposed to be, by nature, insatiable; thus submitting to the hierarchy of the sexes was seen as the only way for women to control their cravings. However, men could also lose control and become as insatiable as women were supposed to be, resulting in effeminate behavior and indulgence in all kinds of sexual vices. Hence, effeminacy in the eighteenth century was still seen as the hallmark of a womanizer. Womanizing was, after all, seen as only one step away from sodomy with men. This potential for sodomy was seen as destructive not just on the individual level, but on a national level as well. People feared eventual destruction by fire and sulfur, just as God had once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Hedonism, abuse, and loss of control represented chaos, and chaos could eventually become the undoing of society and creation, as the very purpose of creation had been to bring order into chaos.

To the extent that this way of thinking was a psychological theory about the causes of same-sex behavior, it attributed little if any agency to the mind, and it was profoundly distrustful of the temptations the body put in the way of even the righteous. In its prediction of individual and collective behaviors, of the rise and fall of nations, this theory was also social and political. It explained the demise of southern European countries as well as the ascendancy of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. Sodomy supposedly did not exist there until the sobriety that had characterized its inhabitants gave way to indulgence in the wealth that God had once bestowed upon them as a reward for their sober ways.

In the course of the eighteenth century, although remaining largely implicit, more individualized theories took hold; some commentators began to speak of inner proclivities rather than of bodies that had run amok. In a sense, the historical paths of male and female homosexualities also met around the 1750s. Lesbian activities at the time were attributed to "whores," that is, women who were not necessarily prostitutes but who had loose morals. Whereas previously effeteness among males had been the characteristic of womanizers, after the mid-eighteenth century it became more and more the hallmark of sodomites. The effete sodomite was like a he-whore, an English author wrote at the time, and that was also the way sodomites were perceived in the Dutch Republic. Consequently, fears of the spread of same-sex practices diminished somewhat in the course of the eighteenth century, although among some groups they persist to this very day. Nevertheless, authorities—and as indicated before, penal reformers—in many parts of Europe felt the need to "contain" the vice, no longer because they feared God's immediate wrath, but because they feared that the male sex was undermined, and with it nations' capacity to pursue political, economic, and military power.

SELF-PERCEPTIONS

By the late eighteenth century, sodomites in northwestern Europe had not only developed a distinctive societal role, but also perceived themselves as a separate category from men and women. They also talked about these issues among one another. Early in the eighteenth century they would refer to other sodomites as men who liked to do this kind of thing as well. Some seventy years later sodomites talked about "being a member of the family," "people like us," and "you and me and thousands like us." It especially allowed devout men to look upon themselves as morally responsible human beings. From the 1750s onward sodomites arrested in the Dutch Republic would refer to the biblical story of David and Jonathan, and increasingly they would claim to have been born with their inclinations intact. More than half a century before Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in Germany in the 1860s formulated the theory of the existence of a third sex—men born with a female soul—sodomites in the Netherlands spoke among one another of their "condition" or "way of being" as an inborn weakness. There is no documentation about women who clearly spoke in such a way of themselves. For men, one might say this newfound homosexual identity culminated in the contents of a love letter from one Dutch male servant to his male lover early in the nineteenth century. He used still-current terms for boyfriend, talked about "being of the family," and he called upon innate weaknesses to explain their desires, while also legitimizing those desires by telling his lover that God had not created any human being for its own damnation.

See also Crime and Punishment; Gender; Sexual Difference, Theories of; Sexuality and Sexual Behavior.

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THEO VAN DER MEER