Figuring Sex Between Men

Writers wishing to voice love between men often develp strategies (such as
allusions to the Greeks which allow such desire to be identified, while also inviting
readers to construe it as something other than sexual-as masculine friendship, as
religious devotion. (2)

Using languge which permitted multiple interpretations and allowed scope for
denying dangerous construction 6

Indefinition and discontinuity seem to have been crucical, for it was the capacity of
writers and readers to refuse defintions, to keep possibilities in play, that created
and protected the textual spaces in which homoerotic pleasure become possible 7

Sodomy doesnt map to modern definitions 8

No simple 17th century term category of sodomy was incoherent 8
Distortion to use homosexual but then argument of its usage 9
Homosocial is a thing

Summary of alan bray. Sodomy idealogical as opposed to erotic preference

Sexual relations between men became sodomy when it was expedient politically to
do so 10

Bruce smith book I need to read

Physical signs of friendship common in 16th century (embracing, kissing, sharing a

bed) fell out of use, no doubt partly for fear that these would be interpreted as signs
of sodomy.
Hermeneutic problem
Possibility of reading homoerotic texts without fully registering their sexual import:
images often have more than one meanin.
There is an openness to allegory Homoerotic desire can be figured without being
exclusively figured 13

We are providednot with an actualy sexual act but with the preliminaries or
consequences of a sexual relationship the English renaissance stage seems
deliberately to foster theatergoers capacity to use partical and limited
presentations as a basis for conjecture about what is undisplayed

The firx explores how textual spaces were shaped in which homoerotic desire could
be articulated and homosexual relations imagined: the ways in which potential
spaces were delineated as places in which the fulfillment of such desires might be
staged. 13

Some key terms can be surprisingly fluid and indefinite. Shakespeare sonnet brief
discussion.
What does a friend mean? What does a lover mean? 18-19

We know that religious language (at least since Petrarch) often figures sexual desire
The word grace has a clearly religious meaning, but in the sense of a favor conferred
is commonly used for the granting of sexual satisfaction 34

Pg 44 discussion of symposium and plato

Francis Osborne wrote I have seene Sommerset and Buckingham labour to

resemble, in the effeminateness of their dressings; through in w- looks and wanton
gestures, they exceeded any part of woman kind my conversation did ever cope
withall. (129)

Pg 136-7 One topical play which could never have been staged was Francis
Osbornes The True Tragicomedy an account of life in the Jacobean court which
was composed circa 1655-8 but not printed in the period, and remained in
manuscript until 1983.

James himself appears in a scene with Villiers, and begins by praising the superiority
of love for a man over love for a woman:

Love of men is seasoned with stronger delights than that to silly women because
pricked on by the sharp spurs of restrainrt and rarity. Which the vulgar affections,
wanting, grows flat and distasteful, like over-oiled herbs without vinegar, maiming
rational satisfaction for want of confidence and discourse. The most elegant ladies
carrying no wittier arguments (in the apprehension of an imagination unsuborned
by fond formalities) than a dairy maid, yet strong enow in both to confute desire
before it is able to consider the best way and means to resolve itself. (137)

In effect, the love between James and BUckinham displaces the love between James
and his people. The medieval and Tudor doctrine of the Kings Two bodies made the
ordinary, mortal body of the king the bearer of heavy symbolic significance, for in an
almost incarnational theology the divinity of kingships was twinned with the human
flesh of the ruler (143)

Homosexual Desire in Shakespeares England

Sexuality, like madness, I s aonstruct of human imagination, a cultural artifact that

changes with time. Sexuality has no independent existence Foucault argues, either
outside in nature or inside withint he suboncious mind. 7

Pg 9 Boswell discussion
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sexuality was not, as it is for us, the
starting place for anyones self-definition. No one in Shakespeares day would have
labeled himself a homosexual. The term itself is a clinical, scientific coinage of the
clinical, scientific nineteenth century. Bugger and sodomite the closest equialents in
early modern English but neither has the exactitudes. 11

Quote from Alan Bray on Renaissance 11

For the simple reaons that those categoires of self-definition do not exist. But that
does not mean, Boswell would interject, that there were no men in early modern
England whose sexual desires were turned primarily toward other men.

TO distinguish homosexual men from heterosexual men, is, then, a distinctively 20th
century way of constructing identity.

Homosexual behavior may be a cross-cultural, transhistorical phenomenon;

homosexuality is specific to our own culture and to our own moment in history. 12

Sedgwick argument that oppression in a society is structured in different

dimensions that intersect in complicated ways. Can be oppressed in one way yet
wield power in another

Sexuality is not simply subject to power; it manifests power.

Disparity that separates the extreme punishments prescribed by law and the
apparent olerance, even positive valuation, of homoerotic desire in the visual arts, in
literatre, and, I shall argue, in the political power structure. 14

The kind of discourse we are used to calling literary, poetic, imaginative or

fictional 15

Four kinds of discourse about homosexuality, moral, legal, medical, and poetic
address different subjects entirely.

Moral, legal, and medical discourse are concerned with sexual acts; only poetic
discourse can address homosexual desire. 17

Assume that homosexual acts occur in all cultures and what varies is that
homosexual desire exists in all culture that people everywhere do on osme occasion
feel sexual desire for members of their own biological sex and that the intensity and
frequency of homosexual desire may vary from individual to individual 17

I shall maintain this distinction between acts and feelings, because sodomy and
homosexual desire, becaue I believe it is crucical to understanding homosexual
behavior in any early modern England included, that stigmatizes homosexual acts.
Connections between homosexual desire and patterns of poetic discourse are the
subjects of this book.

Renaissance writers discovered they could with texts. Repository of centuries of

experienceexperience that could be used to express a modern writers own sexual
desires. 20