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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FORBIDDEN DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE  
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Peter Conrad
January 28, 2024
The Guardian
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_ Historian Noel Malcolm’s survey of gay life in the 15th to 18th
centuries debunks many myths, but mostly catalogues the extreme
violence perpetrated against those judged to have broken religious
doctrine. _

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Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations,
1400-1750
Noel Malcolm
Oxford University Press
ISBN-13: ?978-0198886334

_Forbidden Desire, _Noel Malcolm’s sober and footnote-heavy history
of male homosexuality between 1400 and 1750, has some friskier
bedfellows: on Amazon it shares its title with a slew of hairy chested
bromances, one or two Sapphic romps, and a sulphurous tale about a
witch’s affair with a tormented demon. Against such competition,
Malcolm fields a cast that includes lustful Turkish potentates,
predatory Catholic priests, corruptible scullions and smooth-cheeked
choristers, together with two English kings who allegedly fooled
around with virile young favourites. But mostly the sodomites, as
Malcolm grimly insists on calling them, are left to satisfy their
desires in private; the historian’s concern is the forbidding
religious commandments that the same-sex couples flouted and the
crazily brutal penalties imposed by laws that purported to uphold the
divine order of the universe.

Sex here seems to be followed, almost automatically, by excruciating
death. In the 15th century, sodomy in Venice was punished by
decapitation, after which the corpses of the malefactors were burned
to ensure that no trace of them remained. Because it was unlawful to
kill an ordained man, a lecherous cleric was locked in a cage in the
Piazza San Marco and left to starve in full view of a gloating
populace. In Florence a boy aged 15 was castrated on the scaffold,
then fatally sodomised with a hot iron poker. A Dutch youth placed in
the pillory was pelted with filth and bombarded with stones, which
finally finished him off. Others were sentenced to row themselves to
death as galley slaves; the lucky ones, in a bizarre act of mercy, had
their noses, not their heads or penises, chopped off.

The moral panic whipped up by these prosecutions often concealed
squalid financial or political motives. A French assault on the
secretive Knights Templar in the 14th century used sodomy as an excuse
for confiscating their wealth. In Peru, Indigenous tribes were accused
of the same vice to justify the rampages of the Spanish conquistadors.
In case you wonder why Christian Europe was so tightly clenched
against intrusion, Malcolm mentions an abstruse psychological hang-up
known as “xenohomophobia”: men who opted for a passive role in sex
were considered treacherous because their preference signalled
“religious and military penetrability”. Perhaps the mad metaphor
can be stretched to explain Trump’s border wall, designed as a
protective plug for one of America’s orifices.

As Malcolm demonstrates, this paranoid bigotry derived from a
misreading of scripture. The ungodly city of Sodom is condemned
because its inhabitants committed a particularly abominable sin, but
the Bible does not specify that this peccadillo was “male-male
sexual intercourse or desire”. Patristic commentators filled in the
blank by huffing and puffing about a practice they called
“unnameable”; warning that if uttered aloud it would “pollute
the mouth of the speaker and the ears of the listener”, which left
the devout free to luridly fantasise about a love that dare not speak
its name. Sodom remained so conveniently obscure that when the
Marquess of Queensberry invoked it to denounce Oscar Wilde for
corrupting his son, he could not remember how to spell the word: the
card he left at Wilde’s club addressed him as a “posing
Somdomite”. Thanks to one of Malcolm’s learned asides, the
synonymous charge of buggery also vaporises into hot air. The term
comes from the French “bougre”, originally meaning
“Bulgar”’, which refers to “the Bogomil dualists of the
Balkans”, Gnostics who shunned procreation in order to reject the
material world. Vulgarised in English, Bulgaria turned into buggery,
an all-purpose expletive that reduced the religious anathema to an
exercise in name-calling.

Near the end of Malcolm’s book, Enlightenment thinkers finally
challenge the Christian imposition of moral codes by pointing out that
our bodily appetites cannot be called unnatural. In 1785 Jeremy
Bentham dismissed the old sacred taboos as “offences against one’s
self”: if pederasts could be incinerated, Bentham suggested that
monks should be roasted alive over a slow fire. Muslim theology, to
its credit, made discreet allowances for sensual foibles: in his
account of Ottoman culture, Malcolm quotes poets who liken ephebic
waiters to cupbearers in paradise and sweetly paraphrase ejaculation
as “extracting milk from the sugar cane”. Eleventh-century Muslim
scholars even licensed sodomy in the afterlife. On Earth,
non-procreative sex was censured because it might lead to
depopulation, but such prohibitions were unnecessary in heaven, where
there would be no new births. How better to pass the time in eternity?

Announcing that he has “come to this subject with no personal
investment in it”, Malcolm resists the wishful thinking of
historians who double as gay activists and back-project
“anachronistic sexual significances” on to blameless friendships
between medieval men. Academic neutrality is fair enough, but I find
it hard to remain dispassionate about the pious carnage his book
unearths. Christianity’s epochal campaign to forbid desire was a war
against humanity, and it is now belatedly concluding in defeat.

 

Peter Conrad is an Australian-born academic specialising in English
literature.

* homosexuality
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* Early Modern Europe
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* homophobia
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* History of Europe
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* History of Christianity
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