Sex and the Gender Revolution. Volume 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (review)

116 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:1 Randolph Trumbach. Sex and the Gender Revolution. Volume 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xiv + 509 pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-22681290 -1. With a series of influential articles over the past twenty years, Randolph Trumbach has emerged as one of the chief architects of the now widely accepted view that around 1700 a major cultural shift towards the clear establishment of two essentially distinct genders (sometimes referred to as "gender equality") began to occur in Europe. This shift, according to Trumbach in one ofhis early formulations, was catalysed by another, operating within the large urban centres of Europe (London is his primary focus), which saw aristocratic male libertine bisexuality replaced by a forbidden minority subculture of effeminate male homosexuals, or sodomites, known in England as "mollies." Trumbach's argument has evolved since his article on "London's sodomites" in 1977, when he surveyed homosexual behaviour in European and non-European contexts, concluding with a pioneering examination of sodomy in eighteenthcentury London. There he had suggested, as he put it ten years later, a distinction "between the illicit relations of adult men who found each other in the urban subcultures of Europe and the licit sexual relations in the rest of the world of men with boys or transvestites" ("Sodomitical Subcultures," p. 119). In the late 1980s, his position had crystallized to agree with that of Mary Mcintosh (whose name does not appear in the book under review) that "a profound shift occurred in the conceptualization and practice of male homosexual behavior in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. It was a shift caused by the reorganization ofgender identity that was occurring as part ofthe emergence of a modern Western culture." Whereas in the older pattern Western males desired both women and boys, Trumbach asserts that "in the modern pattern most men conceived first of all that they were male, because they felt attraction to women, and to women alone" ("Sodomitical Subcultures," p. 118). Another ten years has elapsed and Trumbach has now delivered his thesis in its presumably conclusive form in the first volume of Sex and the Gender Revolution. The shift towards gender equality is now formulated in terms of "minority/majority" politics: "Around 1700 in northwestern Europe ... there appeared a minority of adult men whose sexual desires were directed exclusively toward adult and adolescent males. These men could be identified by what seemed to their contemporaries to be effeminate behavior in speech, movement, and dress. They had not, however, entirely transformed themselves into women but instead combined into a third gender selected aspects of the behavior of the majority of men and women. Since a comparable minority of masculinized women who exclusively desired other women did not appear until the 1770s, it is therefore the case that for most of the eighteenth century there existed in northern Europe what might be described as a system of three genders composed of men, women, and sodomites." Trumbach (the author of the respected Rise of the Egalitarian Family , 1978) proposes in this book to write "the history ofextramarital relations"—the REVIEWS 117 chronicle of prostitution, illegitimacy, sexual violence, and adultery—as a consequence of how these activities "were reorganized and given new meanings after 1700 by the appearance of the modern system of three genders" (pp. 3-4). Trumbach emphasizes that historians must recognize that homosexual behaviour in all human societies has been organized by differences in age or in gender. Historians cannot presume that there has always existed an effeminate minority of males exclusively interested in other males (John Boswell's thesis). He then goes on to make the questionable assertion that in "European society before 1700 probably most males felt desire for both males and females" (p. 5). One cannot assume thatjust because one of every two Florentine youths had been implicated in sodomy (Michael Rocke's finding), "Sodomy was therefore so widespread as to be universal" (p. 5). Universal in Florence, in Italy, or in Europe? There is not much doubt that many upper-class European adult males practised some form of active as opposed to passive bisexual behaviour (not...