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Dutch
Sodomite Massacre
Amsterdam, 1730. Dutch courts were shocked to learn of
a widespread sodomitical network spread throughout the major cities of the Dutch Republic.
In Utrecht, Zacharias Wilsma was arrested and charged with sodomy and when
questioned, he told his interrogators about sodomitical contacts he had in the
major Dutch cities, especially Amsterdam. Utrecht officials sent Wilsma there to
help Amsterdam officials eliminate the sodomitical scourge from their city. In May,
1730, Wilsma testified against four men in an Amsterdam court. All four were
executed the next month.
Even though it ultimately did him no good, one of the four revealed the
names of 40 other sodomites in his confession and an anti-sodomite hysteria enveloped
Amsterdam. The confessions of those convicted in the wake of Wilsma's testimony revealed a
sodomitical subculture with its own slang and meeting places including "fun
houses", as sodomites called the all-male brothels, and two taverns. Men who left the
taverns to have sex with each other in public toilets were said to be "going to the
office" and they had names for their sexual practices: the "shaking out"
meant masturbation, the "dirty work" referred to anal intercourse.
Like England's
mollies and Paris' pederasts, the subculture was
effeminate. Dutch sodomites used feminine nicknames and terms of
endearment. One commenator, a publicist named Justus van Effen, described sodomites
as "hermaphrodites in their minds" - a point of view that would be independently
popularized by Karl Ulrichs more than 100 years later. Several servants confessed
to sexual relationships with their masters and their master's friends, a familiarity that
Dutch society, dominated by an oligarchic class structure, found threatening. From
the standpoint of public opinion, these men were not just casual sinners; sin was their
way of life.
The conviction of Wilsma's friends could not have come at a worse time
for Holland's sodomites. A dominant strain of public opinion held that the Dutch, after a
century of economic growth and prosperity, had grown idle and debauched because of urban
luxury, in contrast to the good old days of honest hard work on the farm. The Netherlands,
it was said, were in a period of economic decline and moral decay as a consequence of too
much idleness and leisure living. In the midst of this imagined debauchery, the sodomite
emerged, a man who was said to live for illicit pleasure and its pursuit, who dressed in
effeminate French clothes, and certainly had no respect for God. The sodomite was
the incarnation of the decadence that a Dutch Calvinist mind feared. Broadsheets
appeared blaming a perceived rise in unemployment and financial troubles on the presence
of sodomites, and a public alarm arose, fed by a fear of divine retribution a la Sodom and
Gomorrah. The sodomite had become a scapegoat.
In the wake of the trials, the government produced the Edict of 1730
just one month after Wilsma's friends were executed. It reiterated existing anti-sodomy
laws, and restated that the penalty for sodomy was death, although the method of execution
was left to individual judges. Some convicts were drowned, some hung, but most were
strangled, the method usually used to execute female criminals.
A flurry of trials and executions followed the Wilsma cases, and many
sodomites who could afford to do so left the republic. Holland's sodomitical networks were
effectively destroyed in the pogrom between 1730 and 1737.
Massacre at Faan
The late historian L. J. Boon has compared the tragic events at the
rural village of Faan in 1731 to America's Salem witch trials (1692). The story begins
with an aggressive local magistrate, Rudolphe De Mepsche who undertook a campaign to find
and eliminate sodomites from his tiny village. At first, only a few sodomites could be
found, but they were tortured and asked to name accomplices. They complied, perhaps to
avoid the rigors of further torture, and De Mepsche ended up with as many as 36 accused
sodomites incarcerated in his horse stables.
The testimony of Faan's sodomites shows them to be very different people
from Zacharias Wilsma's crowd. Many didn't know what sodomy was, but admitted that
if sodomy meant mutual masturbation or anal intercourse, then they must be sodomites. They
confessed to indecencies with other men or boys in the barn or in a ditch, but their
sodomitical acts were casual and occasional. There were no established meeting places, no
"fun houses", no secret language to describe forbidden sexual acts. De Mepsche
acted as if a subversive, underground world like the one Wilsma revealed in Utrecht, The
Hague, and Amsterdam existed in Faan, and he acted accordingly.
The villagers were not convinced. They knew of the sodomy trials in
Holland's cities through broadsheets and other publications, but they did not believe that
their husbands, sons, and brothers were part of a secret underworld in Faan. Frightened of
a revolt, De Mepsche called in soldiers to help in the executions. The 24 men and boys
that De Mepsche found guilty were publicly strangled, then burned at the stake in
September 1731.
De Mepsche was accused of political motivations, and may have used
charges of sodomy to eliminate his enemies or their employees. After the executions his
reputation suffered, and popular legend held him to be a brutal killer of innocent people.
He had used the new form of sodomy that had been "discovered" in Utrecht in 1730
as a justification for a mass slaughter of people who were in no way connected to or
identified with the emerging urban subculture. The men and boys he killed did not think of
themselves as sodomites, but as good folk who occasionally fooled around.
Persecutions Continue
The prosecutions of 1730 were effective in suppressing the sodomitical
subculture for a time, but flurries of sodomy prosecutions recurred in 1764 and again
during the period between 1795 and 1811 when sodomy laws were rescinded. After 1795,
"tribades", or female sodomites, appear in the court records for the first time,
but their testimony shows no evidence for the existence of a tribade subculture like the
one discovered among male sodomites.
Holland's prosecutions appear to have been more frequent and sentences
more severe than elsewhere in Europe, but the total number of sodomy convictions between
1730 and 1811 was probably less than 600.
References and Further Reading
Zacharias Wilsma's story, the quotation from
Justus van Effen and the story of the Faan massacre are from Boon, 1988. van der
Meer, 1988, provides the basic chronology of sodomy prosecutions, a description of the
Dutch sodomitical slang, and the estimate of less than 600 sodomy convictions during the
1700s. van der Meer, 1997, includes a nuanced analysis of the association between
sodomy and luxury/gluttony in the 18th Century Netherlands. The flight of wealthy
sodomites is documented in Huusen, 1988.
Boon, L. J., 1988. "Those Damned Sodomites: Public Images of Sodomy
in the 19th Century Netherlands." Journal of Homosexuality Vol. 16 nos. 1
& 2.
Huusen, Arend H. 1988. "Prosecution of Sodomy in 18th Century
Frisia, Netherlands." Journal of Homosexuality Vol 16 Nos. 1 & 2.
Nordam, Dirk Jaap, 1988. "Sodomy in the Dutch Republic,
1600-1725". Journal of Homosexuality Vol. 16 Nos. 1 & 2.
van der Meer, Theo, 1988. "The Persecutions of Sodomites in
Eighteenth Century Amsterdam: Changing Perceptions of Sodomy." Journal of
Homosexuality Vol. 16 Nos. 1 & 2.
________, 1997. "Sodom's Seed in The Netherlands: The
Emergence of Homosexuality in the Early Modern Period." Journal of
Homosexuality, Vol.34 No. 1.
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© 1998
Andrew Wikholm
All Rights Reserved |
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