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G&S Typesetters PDF proof Chapter 2 Patterns of Repression The sodomitical subcultures that emerged in northwestern Europe at the close of the seventeenth century were bound sooner or later to attract public attention, hostile public attention, since the conditions that had fostered or simply allowed for their growth also ensured that they would be seen as symptoms and possibly as sources of social disorder and moral decay. The growth of London, Paris, and Amsterdam led to serious problems of criminality and public order and thus to demands from local authorities and respectable citizens for better law enforcement. The cosmopolitanism of these cities bred xenophobia; it is no accident that sodomy was often labeled a foreign vice (Italians being the favorite target). Political and religious toleration in the Netherlands and England fostered a traditionalist, conservative reaction. The opulence of court life created social resentments and class tensions; in moralistic tracts and press coverage sodomy was often portrayed as a peculiarly aristocratic vice. Growing emphasis on the nuclear family led to concern about any behavior that might threaten the integrity of the family and its mores, while greater autonomy and privacy for the individual raised the question how best to regulate the behavior of the unattached male, especially at a time when the influence of the extended family was in decline. By the early eighteenth century conditions in northwestern Europe were ripe not only for the emergence of sodomitical subcultures but for a savage reaction against them as well. Not, of course, that sodomy had ever been viewed favorably in Christian Europe. Biblical injunctions against sodomy in both the Old Testament (Leviticus 20:13) and the New (Romans 1:26–27) unequivocally condemned it as a crime “against nature” for which the practitioner “shall surely be put to death.” Moreover, the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gemorrah inextricably (though rather unfairly, since the sins of these cities of the plain were| 17 02-V2660 6/19/03 6:50 AM Page 17 G&S Typesetters PDF proof left somewhat vague) linked sodomy with natural disaster and divine retribution , while medieval conflicts within Christianity and between Christianity and Islam associated it both with heresy and with the infidel. Like the Arab enemies of Christendom, the Albigensian heretics were popularly supposed to indulge in sodomy, and their purported origins in Bulgaria gave the West its most common synonym for the practice: Latin bulgaris, French bougre, Dutch bouger, English bugger. Perhaps because it lent itself so readily to being labeled an alien vice, by the end of the thirteenth century sodomy, which had been condemned as no worse than other sexual sins (in Leviticus it was only one item in a category of abominations including bestiality, adultery, and incest), began to be singled out as especially repugnant and dangerous. In a number of Italian cities in the fifteenth century and in Spain a century and more later, major campaigns were launched to check what the authorities , civil and religious, claimed was an increasing incidence of sodomy. In successive years early in the sixteenth century Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and King Henry VIII of England promulgated statutes prescribing the death penalty for, in the language of the English legislation, “the detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast,” while the imperial decree cast its net wider to include anyone “who commits lewdness with a beast, or a man with a man or a woman with a woman.” Death was normally either by hanging, as in England, or, as in most of continental Europe, by burning alive. But there were variations, either as alternatives or as embellishments in especially sensational cases: stoning to death, garroting, castration or disfigurement before or even in place of execution, dismemberment after execution, and in some instances the total obliteration of the body, possibly along with all records of the crime itself. It was not for nothing that sodomy was called the unmentionable vice. So much so, in fact, that it was often referred to even in official documents nonspecifically as the crime against nature or simply as the most awful sin. For the historian this is more than merely frustrating. Even where records escaped accidental or deliberate destruction, the exact nature of the offense is often far from clear, as is the answer to the most important question: not what the penalties were but how often they were carried out. The powerful and the privileged, children, and the clergy were often treated...

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