-
Chapter 3: Sodomy and the Enlightenment
- University of Virginia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
G&S Typesetters PDF proof Chapter 3 Sodomy and the Enlightenment The crystallization of the image—and self-image—of members of the sodomitical subcultures of northwestern Europe as in some way a distinct and identifiable category of persons was certainly the most important development affecting these subcultures in the decades following their emergence and repression early in the eighteenth century. Scarcely less significant was the development of similar subcultures in parts of northern Europe beyond the small Paris-London-Amsterdam triangle. Of these by far the most important was in Berlin, the city that was to be at the forefront of the movement to achieve greater knowledge and understanding of sexual deviance in the coming century. During the latter half of the eighteenth century the population of Berlin doubled to over one hundred thousand, and during the reign of Frederick the Great (1740–86) the city was transformed from a Prussian backwater into the capital of a major European power. With population and power came an ever greater degree of cultural and social diversity, including the development of a thriving sodomitical subculture with all the characteristics familiar in the West: known cruising areas, taverns, clubs, and male brothels, a specialized slang, and elaborate visual codes of recognition. We are less dependent on police and court records for our knowledge of this subculture than for those in the West. There is in fact a firsthand account of the Berlin sexual underground in 1782 by an Austrian visitor accompanied by a knowledgeable native. Unfortunately, this account is richer in metaphor, classical allusions, and moralistic asides than in facts, so comparisons with what the official files from London, Paris, and Amsterdam reveal is difficult. As for government policy and law enforcement, the pattern appears to have been similar to that in the great urban centers to the west. In the early eighteenth century a number of convicted sodomites were put to the sword| 33 03-V2660 6/19/03 6:50 AM Page 33 G&S Typesetters PDF proof and then burned, sometimes at the insistence of Frederick the Great’s father, Frederick William I, though the very young and the titled were usually treated more leniently. Under Frederick the Great enforcement of the law, though not the law itself , was relaxed, perhaps in part due to the sexual predilections of Frederick himself. For here again we have a monarch rumored to be homosexual. The evidence, though of course circumstantial, is persuasive. He never lived with his wife but preferred all male company. He erected a temple on the palace grounds at Potsdam dedicated to friendship and decorated with portraits of close male companions from antiquity: Heracles and Philoctetis, Orestes and Pylades, and others. He purchased or commissioned both painted and sculpted representations of Ganymede, the beautiful boy whom Zeus took a fancy to and, transforming himself into an eagle, transported to Mount Olympus. Personal sexual tastes aside, however, Frederick had good reasons of policy and political philosophy to apply the law with moderation. Voltaire, during his three years as Frederick’s philosopher in residence, recorded an occasion when the monarch overruled a death sentence in a case of sodomy— in this instance with a donkey—noting under his verdict that “in his states he granted freedom of conscience and of cock.” Mention of Frederick the Great and of Voltaire leads inevitably to consideration of the influence of Enlightenment thought and of the theory and practice of enlightened despotism on the proper role of the state and society in matters of private morality and deviant behavior, sexual and otherwise. That influence was, of course, profound and the phrase “freedom of conscience and of cock” sums it up surprisingly well. The leading thinkers of the eighteenth century, as well as rulers such as Frederick the Great and Joseph II of Austria, when being enlightened as well as despotic generally held that individuals should be free to believe, think, and even act as they wished, consistent with the rights of others, the maintenance of public order, and the ultimate authority of the state. Not that the philosophes countenanced libertinism ; on the contrary, they were often rather prudish, at least in their public pronouncements. They strongly denounced almost all forms of sexual license or deviance, including adultery, fornication, the resort to prostitution, and sodomy, but not primarily on traditional moral grounds. Skeptics or freethinkers for the most part, the philosophes were critical of organized religion and often savagely anticlerical. Their objections to sexual...