The Queer Archive
I just read another chapter in Love, Intimacy and Friendship Between Men, this one called “Homosexuals in History: A.L. Rowse and the Queer Archive” by Alan Stewart. Stewart looks at Rowse’s provocative book (published in the mid-70s, around the same time as the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality), in which he sought to identify and discuss some of the most notable homosexuals in early modern history. Stewart criticizes Rowse’s method for being essentially ahistorical, not accounting for the non-existence of the category “homosexual” in early modern England or the fact that early modern categories like “sodomite” do no map easily onto modern definitions of homosexuality. Stewart notes a number of critics who argue, as I gleaned from my reading of Sade, that sodomy was an act that could have been performed by any person, and that sodomy did not necessarily place one into a category anything like homosexual before the 19th century, when the homosexual became an identifiable figure.
Most of the second half of Stewart’s article is occupied by a dissection of the diary of a young man named Simon D’Ewes who seemed to have commented on the sexual practices of then-prince James I. Stewart notes, as he argued previously, that the acts of sodomy that James was rumored to have participated in did not necessarily classify him as a homosexual. He also notes that in early modern England the issues surrounding the concept of sodomy often had much more to do with judgment than the particular act that one was being judged for. As the most prominent example of God punishing an entire polis in the Bible, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah provided a key biblical text for theorists on punishment, and it was arguably more important to this debate than anything relating to the modern definition of sodomy.
Stewart also develops the concept of the closet, a relatively new concept in early modern architecture. While these spaces have often been represented as intensely private, Stewart argues that these are spaces of transaction, and that their presence in houses act as open secrets; the things in the closet as well as what happens there are clearly labeled secret, but the open-ness with which they are labeled secret seems to be in tension with their status as secret. Stewart also argues that this is true of many diaries as well as some of the small cases used to store important letters and other secretive materials.
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