A History of Heterosexuality
Still on the Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship book, I just finished “The Heterosexual Male in Eighteenth-Century London and his Queer Interactions” by Randolph Trumbach. Trumbach argues that previous to the 18c, modern definitions of heterosexuality and homosexuality did not exist. Instead, western European culture had an age-based system whereby it was socially acceptable (perhaps even encouraged?) for older men to sexually desire young men who had reached puberty but had not yet grown full beards (that is to say, men between the ages of roughly 15 and 25). Within this system it was only acceptable for the older man to be the active party and the younger the passive party in the act of sodomy, but as long as the acts and the desires conformed to those social conventions they were acceptable. Men would, of course, also desire, marry and procreate with women under this system.
Trumbach argues that this system began to be replaced by the modern dichotomy of heterosexuality and homosexuality during the first few generations of the 18th century, and this phenomenon gradually moved southward, only reaching the Mediterranean countries near the end of the 19c. Trumbach argues that these two generations were a sort of transitional time during which remnants of the old system remained, but evidence of our modern definition of homosexuality was also beginning to emerge. Trumbach looks at many “queer” interactions and personas; illicit public sexual encounters, male prostitutes (both transvestite and those dresed as men), quote unquote “mollies” like Lord Hervey who resembled modern homosexual stereotypes as well as sexual interaction between men in closed, single-sex environments such as boarding schools, ships and prisons (though, as Trumbach notes, 18c English prisons were not strictly segregated). In court records of sodomy trials and other primary source documents, Trumbach finds evidence of both the older, age-based tradition and the new hetero/homosexual dichotomy, though I must admit I’m uncomfortable with some of the sweeping historical claims that he makes along the way.
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