An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain

Chapter Two Homosexuality and Satire

43 CHAPTER TWO Homosexuality and Satire Qui fuer preso en sodomítico pecado, quemarlo. Fuero de Béjar [Whoever is caught committing the sodomitical sin, burn him.] Law code of Béjar Jean-Paul Sartre once commented that “the ass is the secret femininity of males, their passivity” (quoted in Bredbeck 1991, 31).1 His juxtaposition of femininity and masculinity, of activity and passivity, and the specification of the anus as marker and magnet for homosexual desire —although not new for the present state of early modern sexuality studies—are concerns that are central to the topic of this chapter. Before we address them, however, it is important to point out the range of these assertions. The late rock composer and singer Frank Zappa—an existentialist who is more contemporary to us and less inclined to dialectical poles—made the following spirited comment with respect to human sexuality: “My attitude toward anybody’s sexual persuasion is this: without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible” (quoted in Bredbeck 1991, 31). Less prosaic than Sartre’s and Zappa’s statements could be, and closer to the Spanish context of this book, is the philosophy of the late twentieth-century Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. In a poem entitled “No decía palabras,” from the collection Los placeres prohibidos, he includes the verse, “El deseo es una pregunta cuya respuesta no existe” (2005, 178). [Desire is a question whose answer does not 44 An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain exist.] Since the poem focuses on homosexual love, it is not simply a matter of poeticizing a love that cannot speak its name; rather, the poet addresses the issue of how we deal with desire. For Cernuda, only the poet can intuit poetic-erotic rapture, because the various types of desire cannot be explained rationally. Precisely because the triggers of desire are out of control for most of us, the task of Cernuda’s poetic voice is to normalize homosexuality for readers by linking it to the naturalness of sexual desires, as inexplicable as these may be. Satire and the Poetics of Sodomy Other literary venues exist to communicate the complexities of and attitudes toward homosexual desire; one common to the early modern period is satire. In this regard, the humorous vein that underlies Sartre’s and Zappa’s twentieth-century positioning of sexual otherness falls neatly within the purview of contemporary theorists of satire. Gilbert Highet (1962), Arthur Pollard (1970), Alastair Fowler (1982), and Margaret Rose (1993), to cite a canonical progression in discussing this mode, are at pains to specify the textual functioning of satire. However, they and the authors of most critical handbooks and dictionaries agree that in the discourse of satire all is permitted and the unmentionable is mentioned freely, often without the buffer of euphemism or reticence and always from a polemical or critical perspective. Such freedom of expression also prevailed in the early modern period. For this reason sodomy—the so-called peccatum mutum [silent sin], the crime that could not be named among Christians—was, in fact, textualized quite readily in satirical poetic discourse of the Spanish baroque. If this comes as a surprise to literary historians or cultured readers, it is most likely because until the advent of gender studies and queer theory in the final decades of the twentieth century, such poetry was rarely anthologized and was even more infrequently included as a topic worthy of academic scrutiny. Since 1990, with the publication of such foundational critical texts as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, it is a commonplace that queer theory challenges sexual orthodoxy by revealing the conceptual and discursive biases on which conventional categories of sexuality are based. In so doing, such theories ultimately question the “naturalization” of all sexu- Homosexuality and Satire 45 alities and the resultant heteronormativity within Western society, often from a position of gay activism and advocacy. Those theoretical lucubrations have led to the exploration of writers ’ sexual orientation and the manner in which it allegedly marks their work. Thus, several critics and/or biographers have attempted to “out” that most canonical of Golden Age figures, Miguel de Cervantes (see the discussion in Martín 1998). Nonetheless, in hispanism the representation of sexual “deviation” in literature has traditionally been silenced, and in many interpretative communities the outing of revered canonical authors is still considered distasteful or at...