Sodomitical
Subcultures Emerge
1700-1800. In the early 1700s, Europe witnessed a
transformation in the forms of sexuality as subcultures of adult men who pursued
each other
as sexual partners emerged in London,
Paris
and Amsterdam.
In England, adult men called mollies met in houses and taverns to
socialize, drink, and have sex. They were effeminate and often dressed in drag. Before the
mollies, sex between males usually involved a man in a relationship with a teenager. The
mollies practiced a new egalitarian sexuality as adult men coupled with each other.
In Paris, a similar subculture emerged. The French called these men "pederasts" inaccurately using the ancient Greek
word for sex between men and boys. As in England, the penalty for sodomy was death, but this sentence was only rarely
applied.
In the Calvinist Netherlands, officials prosecuted sodomites more
aggressively than elsewhere. An orgy of prosecutions in the 1730s nearly destroyed the
Dutch subculture, but it re-emerged later in the century.
The effeminate, egalitarian sexuality that characterized these subcultures
was the core of the Urning and homosexual identities that emerged more than 100 years
later.
Sex and Power
Before the beginning of the modern period, sex between males was
structured quite differently than in the European subcultures after 1700. English
writers in the 17th Century wrote often about sodomy as a sin that springs from a
universal lust for illicit pleasures. Writing in the 1600s, Englishman John Wilmot
described same sex desire this way:
Then give me health, wealth, mirth, and wine,
And, if busy love entrenches,
There's a sweet, soft, page of mine
Does the trick worth forty wenches.
That is, the character's teenaged male servant could satisfy his sexual
urges as well as forty girls of easy virtue.
Two main features set Wilmot's view apart from later perceptions of the
mollies. First, the sex is trans-generational, an older man sexually penetrating a
teenager. Sex between men and boys is common in non-Western cultures and was
paradigmatic in ancient Greece, so even though it is now considered morally repugnant, it
is not surprising that this form of male sexuality would appear in the pre-modern period.
The second feature that distinguishes Wilmot's understanding of male-male
desire is that the character he describes has a taste for sex with both males and females.
That he desires his page does not contradict his desire for wenches, and it doesn't
make him effeminate.
Other texts show that British buggers did have some constraints on the
kinds of sexual practices that they permitted themselves. People who practiced
sodomy were preoccupied with who penetrated whom. The powerful/adult partner in a
sexual encounter was expected to penetrate the weaker/younger partner, often referred to
as his Ganymede or Ingle, and if he did not, the
status of his masculinity was questioned. Sex and power were so intimately
intermingled that a man who took the passive role in his relations with his Ganymede would
surrender his power to his sexual partner, and in so doing, his status as a masculine man.
The teenaged sexual partner of an older man had less to worry about.
As long as he was beardless, he was not stigmatized for being the receptive partner
in sex, but as as he began to assume his role as an adult, he was expected to take the
inserter role with Ganymedes of his own.
The whole pre-modern system for the regulation of male same-sex desire
collapsed when the 18th Century subcultures emerged. All sodomites came to be
perceived as effeminate regardless of their favorite sexual positions, and any man that
that had sex with another man was thought to have the sexual desires of a woman.
Terrorizing Heterosexuals
The prosecution of early European sodomites shows that widespread networks of adult men
who had sex with each other existed in European cities. It is tempting to explain
the emergence of these subcultures as a consequence of the freedom provided by urban
anonymity, but the great cities of Europe were small towns by modern standards. The
population of London, for example, probably didn't exceed 90,000 during the 18th
Century, hardly a large enough population to afford the anonymity associated with New York
or Paris today.
So why did these subcultures appear within a generation or two at the beginning of the
1700s? There is no obvious answer, and most historians believe that much more
research is required before they can even hazard a guess.
A second mystery is better understood: Why were so few sodomites executed in the
18th Century? Every single European country had laws on the books that specified
death for convicted sodomites, but the worst record of prosecution, the Dutch case,
probably netted less than 600 convictions for sodomy during the entire century. Yet,
historical evidence shows that thousands of sodomites lived in Europe's cities.
Though evidence is still thin, Queer Theorist
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a thought-provoking analysis. Instead of a policy of
extermination, European authorities pursued a strategy that Sedgwick calls
terrorism. By making an example of a few sodomites through brutal executions and
public confinement in the stocks, authorities intimidated sodomites who learned to keep a
low profile, but they did a lot more than scare sodomites. Public punishment also
defined and enforced expectations about how men should behave. Real men, people who
would now be called heterosexual, don't have sex
with males and they don't act like women, authorities seemed to say. John Wilmot's
17th Century description of a page who "Does the trick worth forty wenches"
became unutterable in the 18th Century because it would implicate the speaker as a
molly. By making a public spectacle of a few randomly selected effeminate sodomites,
authorities succeeded in policing expectations about what it means to be a man, whether
they intended to or not.
Today, we would call the fear and hatred people felt
toward the early European subcultures homophobia,
and it was this homophobia that created a sharp line between sodomites and the
non-sodomite majority. Sodomy was no longer perceived as a sin caused by a universal
lust. Instead, people came to believe that sodomy is a unique sexual taste of
individual members of a distinct sexual minority.
Sources and Further Reading
The quotation from John Wilmot is from Bray, 1982, the
classic introduction to the transition from hierarchical/trans-generational to
egalitarian/effeminate sexuality in England. For an extended treatment of the
relationship between the inventions of heterosexuality and homosexuality, see Trumbach,
1998. On trans-generational and other structures of same-sex relationships, see
Greenberg, 1988. The population statistics for London are from Porter, 1994, and even
though some other historians offer different estimates, no one believes London, Paris or
Amsterdam were large cities by modern standards. For a thorough discussion of
universalizing versus minoritizing discourses, see Sedgwick, 1990.
Bray, Alan, 1982. Homosexuality in Renaissance
England. London: Gay Men's Press.
Greenberg, David A., 1988. The Construction of
Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Porter, Roy, 1994. London: A Social History.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 1985. Between Men:
English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Trumbach, Randolph, 1998. Sex and the Gender
Revolution Volume 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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© 1999
Andrew Wikholm
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