How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (40 page)

This questionable reasoning is buttressed by some rather casual methodology. Boswell's discussion of what he insists were formal public marriages between men in ancient Rome treats Martial's verses (and, later, Juvenal's) as if they were straight reportage rather than acidic satire; once again, he rips literary evidence out of its proper generic and historical context in order to score his same-sex points. You'd never guess that Martial ran with, and wrote for, a café society crowd with whom John Q. Roman is unlikely to have hobnobbed. Not for the first time, Boswell here makes a methodological error that J. P. Sullivan, in an article that Boswell himself, oddly enough, cites, succinctly characterized: “We cannot easily distinguish,” Sullivan wrote, “in Martial or his audience, between what is reality, i.e., common sexual facts or practices, and what is desired or feared, sometimes even repressed….” In order to realize one particular fantasy of happily-ever-after, boy-boy weddings in ancient Rome, Boswell keeps adducing supporting material that is highly unrepresentative.

Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the historical evidence used to demonstrate that gay marriage ceremonies weren't “always” private: an account of a feast at which Nero married a freedman eunuch called, delightfully, Pythagoras. Here as always, the author provides an impressive-looking footnote: Suetonius, Dio Cassius, and especially Tacitus are all cited (“generally a very reliable source,” Boswell approvingly notes of the last). But you can't help wondering why, if Tacitus is so reliable, Boswell doesn't quote the historian's introduction to this narrative—the bit where Tacitus disapprovingly recalls Nero's feast as a prime example of the excess and depravity (
luxus, prodigentia
) of the decadent imperial court. Using Nero's sozzled antics as evidence for the assertion that marriage ceremonies between gay Roman men were regularly and publicly held is intellectually dishonest and philologically irresponsible. It's like relying on
Town and Country
's coverage of Truman Capote's 1966 Black and White Ball as the basis for generalizations about the lives of gay white men before
Stonewall. This stuff wouldn't pass in an undergraduate paper, and it shouldn't have passed here.

 

Such are the bases for Boswell's claims about the classical background for
adelphopoiêsis
. It is unfortunate that this inadequate discussion of classical material turns out to be a rich preparation for what follows; for in treating the ceremonies themselves in their medieval context, the author of
Same-Sex Unions
merely reiterates the skewed linguistic and cultural analyses that are by now all too familiar. In his discussion of premodern Christian Europe, the author again insists on a pervasive failure to distinguish between the literal and the figurative—in this case, between “the chaste, charitable sense in which all Christians addressed each other as siblings, and the erotic, marital sense” (134). But his evidence for the claim that “the conjugal implications of the words in question,
frater
and
soror
, ‘brother' and ‘sister,' were not absent” from liturgical contexts turns out to be little more than idiosyncratic readings that once again beg rather than answer the important questions.

To support his point about sibling vocabulary, for example, the author cites Justinian's
Novel
133.3, a rule prohibiting women from entering male religious space “even if he should call himself her brother, or she his sister” (
nec si quis forte frater esse dicatur, aut soror
) (135). For Boswell this rule demonstrates that “even in this ecclesiastical context, the phrase [
sic
] ‘sister'…suggested distinct disapproval” (135)—disapproval, presumably, because of what Boswell alleges are the word's inevitably conjugal and erotic implications. Yet the phrasing of the rule surely derives its force from an assumption of a wholly
nonerotic
sense of
frater
and
soror
(whether literal or, as is here more likely, in the figurative sense applied to the inhabitants of monastic communities): the sense seems clearly to be that the woman is to be prevented from entering “even if she claims to be
merely
a sister, or he claims to be
merely
a brother”: for the author of this rule, the sibling terms were unequivocally innocent words that might successfully provide a cover for not-so-innocent goings on. Only a fairly deaf interpretive ear could take evidence such as this to support the extraordinary claim that “the countererotic”—which is of course to say
literal
—“sense of ‘brother' was largely unknown in the premodern Christian world, because
all
relationships were expected to be chaste in the sense of subordinating desire to responsibility” (24). This is a bit like saying that the literal sense of the word “brother” is unknown in urban African-American communities today, because young black men often refer to one another as “brother.” Context is everything.

Boswell then proceeds to an oddly insubstantial treatment of the late antique and early medieval sociosexual context for his
adelphopoiêsis
ceremonies. This discussion is as wobbly as his discussion of homoerotic relationships in the classical period. When he provides a detailed description of early Christian ambivalence about sexuality in marriage, it is only to promote a portrait of marriage in the Middle Ages as being largely unconcerned with procreation—an arch, stylized, and misleading model if ever there was one. And all this serves to justify yet another careless tumble down the logical slope: he argues that because celibacy was endorsed by the Church in a way that was unthinkable in classical times (and his evidence for classical attitudes about celibacy is a note remarking that the number of vestal virgins was low), then it stands to reason that nonprocreative—and hence eventually same-sex—unions would have been endorsed with equal vigor:

What, you may ask, has already been adduced about the veneration of same-sex pairs? Little more than Boswell's own hints that the early Christian martyrs Saints Serge and Bacchus were…
comme ça
. And how do we know? Well, they call each other “brother,” and by now we all know what
that
means. (The circularity of Boswell's argumentation here leaves you a bit dizzy.) Then there's the fact that the parading of the pair through the streets “recalls,” as Boswell puts it, one of the penalties for homosexual acts—although one that even Boswell admits postdated the historical date of the saints' martyrdom (and which, moreover, was not unique to those being punished for sodomy). Finally, the Greek word used in the account of their martyrdom to de
scribe their affection for each other,
syndesmos
or “bond,” is also used in the New Testament in the phrase
syndesmos adikias
, “bond of iniquity” (i.e., sodomy). Boswell exclaims over what he sees as the “fascinating association” between these two instances of
syndesmos
, but for his readers it's merely another example of the author's penchant for free association—a demonstration of the “He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother” variety. Such is the evidence that Boswell keeps “adducing”; but more often than not, it's induction rather than adduction.

The author's refusal to acknowledge the validity of any interpretive or sociological contexts other than homoerotic ones results in the addition of a third argumentative fallacy to his repertoire: the straw-man. Ignoring the ritualized-friendship tradition, he addresses himself to demolishing what he calls the “least controversial” interpretation of the ceremony, i.e., that it was an ecclesiastical formalization of some kind of “spiritual fraternity.” But of course the “least controversial” interpretation is the one scholars have advanced for over a century: that the
adelphopoiêsis
was created to solemnify alliances between heads of households or to formalize reconciliations between mutually distrustful members of opposing clans. (As the historian Brent Shaw pointed out in his negative
New Republic
review of Boswell's book, the ceremony's emphasis on the right to asylum and safe conduct surely supports such an interpretation.) Here as so often, Boswell ignores the evidence that doesn't suit him. Instead, he brandishes his famous erudition and plunges it deep into the heart of…a straw man.

The straw man isn't the only fantastical creature you're liable to run across as you travel down the twisty argumentative road leading to Boswell's conclusion that the
adelphopoiêsis
was a medieval gay wedding service. It's a journey filled with scary-looking beasts: philological lions and methodological tigers and plain old logical bears. And at the end of the road is the wizard himself. But even as his smoke-wreathed illusions of church-sanctioned gay marriages materialize before his awestruck readers' eyes, you realize that he's working the controls furiously, way down there in the footnotes where no one can see him. He's the man behind the curtain. Unfortunately, given the explosive political potential of this particular scholarly conjuring act, the author's introductory admonition to ignore the methods by which he achieves his impressive-looking results is deeply troubling, to say the least. “Pay no attention
to the man behind the curtain!” he may cry; but if you look closely enough, you realize you're being conned.

 

How could this have happened?

At the time of his death a few months after
Same-Sex Unions
first appeared, Boswell had secured the highest honors attainable in the academy: author of several learned tomes, A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale, chairman of his department—the university's largest, as he himself reminds us in his Preface. These are very distinguished credentials. How could the scholar who earned them have produced a work characterized by such obvious and egregious flaws? On first examination, pretty much any explanatory road you take leads to an unpleasant destination. Either you know that Nero's wedding wasn't a shindig typical of Roman social life but you cite it anyway, thereby violating what you, as a trained historian, surely know to be the standards for scholarly use of historical evidence; or you
don't
know that Nero's shenanigans were atypical, which is of course just as bad if you happen to be writing a book that is largely based on evidence from ancient Rome. There's just no way out.

Yet
Same-Sex Unions
owes its failure to a deeper and more disturbing lapse, one that brings us back to our Wildean allegory about the dangers of forsaking philology for fame. For it was clearly the latter that seduced Boswell away from the former; to his credit he did not yield his virtue easily. Despite its frequent recourse to the dubious tactics I have already described,
Same-Sex Unions
occasionally bears witness to a troubled scholarly conscience. “It is not the province of the historian to direct the actions of future human beings,” Boswell rightly observes in closing, “but only to reflect accurately on those of the past” (281). But this observation is accompanied by a more typical tendentiousness, as when, a few lines earlier, the historian refers to his thesis as “historical facts” whose “social, moral, and political significance is arguable, but considerable.” Arguable but considerable? Such uneasy juxtapositions bespeak a conflict that is surely understandable in a scholar who was at once a gay man and a devout Catholic. How could he not have wished to find the philologue's equivalent of the magic potion, an authentic text that would effortlessly reconcile those two ostensibly incompatible aspects
of his own identity—that would, as he himself put it, allow people to “incorporate [homosexual desire] into a Christian life-style”? It is indeed possible to see
Same-Sex Unions
, along with its predecessor, as the professional expression of what was surely a fervent personal wish.

But this is precisely the problem. The failure of Boswell's book on so many intellectual and scholarly grounds forces us to question the extent to which the standards of scholarship can comfortably accommodate the exigencies of a private—or political—vision. In the case of
Same-Sex Unions
, this question is especially critical because the tensions between scholarly standards and personal goals become exacerbated when the latter happen to serve the interest of a much larger political agenda shared by millions who, unlike the professional scholar, are unlikely to feel burdened by the exacting standards of a “particular expertise.” Unfortunately, this audience is likely to attach as much importance to, say, Boswell's prefatory announcement that many of his close friends died of AIDS, as to his less rhetorical utterances about material that is actually relevant to his argument.

Indeed, it is Boswell's attempt to go over the heads of expert readers that makes it that much more difficult to justify his work. In a heated attack on Brent Shaw and his negative appraisal of
Same-Sex Unions
, the classicist Ralph Hexter argued that it was inappropriate for Shaw to pass judgment on certain of Boswell's arguments in the first place. Shaw, he declared, is neither an expert on early Christian liturgy nor on matters medieval, as was Boswell; Shaw's knowledge of Greek, he went on—all-important for an evaluation of Boswell's critical linguistic claims—is bound to be rooted in classical rather than medieval training. This credential-checking was accompanied by a boastful reference to Boswell's great linguistic expertise, even in such arcane tongues as Old Church Slavonic.