Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (24 page)

The French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote of several girls from the French town of Chaumont-en-Bassigny who had secretly agreed to “dress themselves up as males and thus continue their life in the world.” One of them became a weaver and assumed the identity of “a well-disposed young man who made friends with everybody.” She eventually married a young woman from the town of Vitry-le-François. The two lived together for several months, “to [the wife’s] satisfaction,” until the weaver was denounced. She was charged “for using illicit devices to supply her defect in sex,” and was hanged—a fate she said she would rather endure than return to living as a female. It is simple enough to recognize the dynamic at work in such cases: Male judges recoiled at what they saw as the theft of male sexual prerogatives.

The situation became more complex when men dressed as women, professionally, in order to attract other men. The customers could not be blamed; they believed they were paying for a female. Yet did a cross-dressing prostitute commit any crimes? We have few records about male transvestite prostitutes during this period, but that does not mean they were rare; nor does it show that they were at peace with the law. There can be little doubt that many paid for forsaking their male identity.

Such was probably the case with John Rykener, a transvestite hustler arrested in London in December 1395. Rykener, whose
nom de rue
was “Eleanor,” was caught dressed in women’s clothing while performing “libidinous” acts on his customer, John Britby. Evidently Britby had believed Rykener to be a woman when the two crossed paths on Cheap Street, and still thought so when he and Rykener went to a nearby stall to commit what records called the “unmentionable, and ignominious vice.” Rykener told police that he had been trained in the finer points of cross-dressing by Elizabeth Brouderer, a pimp. A prostitute named Anna had given him further instruction on how, in the words of the London authorities, to “practice this detestable vice in the manner of a woman.” He was a quick study and soon had his own customers, all of whom had believed that “Eleanor” was female. Not long before the arrest, Rykener had worked in Oxford as an embroiderer and a female prostitute, counting at least three university scholars as his customers. He added that he preferred to service clerics because they paid well.

Rykener was certainly unusual, but did he do anything illegal? We do not know what he was charged with. Most likely he was not accused of illegal prostitution, as that was an offense only women could commit. There are no known English cases from this period in which a man was charged with prostitution. Assuming that Rykener was too male to be a prostitute, was he too female to be a male sodomite? It is unclear. The records consistently refer to Rykener as “Eleanor,” as though the police who recorded the confession also accepted him as a woman. If they did, and if he was taken for female, his sex with Britby, the priests, and the other men might not have been characterized as sodomy.

Another case against a male transvestite prostitute, this time in Venice, involved even blurrier gender lines. Rolandino Ronchaia was, at least to some extent, a hermaphrodite. He was born with male genitalia and was raised male, though he also had an unusually feminine face and enlarged breasts. Ronchaia tried marriage as a young man, but the union collapsed on account of his inability to achieve an erection. After his wife died from the plague, he assumed a female identity, took the name “Rolandina,” and went to work on the Rialto as a female prostitute. Rolandina’s “many and infinite” customers believed they were having sex with a woman. “He deceived them,” declared the court, with the following ruse: “When they were on his body he hid as much as possible his member . . . and took the member [of the other] and put it in his rear parts and stayed with this until they emitted sperm giving them every delight as do true prostitutes.” The authorities were intrigued by his physical peculiarities but had no trouble sentencing him, in 1354, to a fiery death between the Columns of Justice in Piazza San Marco.
¹⁸

ONCE WE GRASP the level of savagery meted out to sodomites during the late Middle Ages, we must ask whether or not it deterred anyone from having forbidden sex. Did the horror of watching people consumed by fire in city squares scare anyone away from their own gender? How many Christians saved their souls by swearing off the “unnatural vices?” Did the association of sodomy with plagues and heresy prompt people to live by the rules of Leviticus? Other than an informal “sodomy census” in fifteenth-century Venice (which showed an increase in the vice), there were no studies of homosexual behavior during this period. Yet even without hard data, we can make some cautious assumptions.

Homosexual sex very likely continued apace even as sodomites were being executed. Neither the law nor religion ever seems to have lasting changes on what people do in bed. The increasing frequency of sodomy prosecutions is itself evidence that the message was not getting through; add to that the steady flow of poetry, letters, and other writings being generated that can only be understood as homoerotic. The twelfth-century monk-poet Bernard of Cluny was exaggerating when he said that homosexual sodomites were as “numerous as grains of barley, as many as the shells of the sea or the sands of the shore,” but he still made a point. There is no reason to believe that any threats from the law or the pulpit ever had a lasting effect on people’s sexual decisions.

Is this because those who engaged in homosexual sex were hardwired for it, in effect homosexual by nature? Probably not. Until the nineteenth century, no concept existed of heterosexuality or homosexuality as full-time orientations. The term “homosexual” was not coined until about 1870. As in ancient societies, people in the Middle Ages did not identify themselves or others as exclusively interested in one gender or another. Rather, sodomy was a broad category of forbidden conduct, something one did in violation of the laws of God and man. Most people likely had sexual relations with the opposite gender most of the time, but some form of sodomy was likely a reality for many people. Sodomy, in any of its forms, was a crime anyone could commit.

However, there are numerous examples of people who did lean heavily toward their own gender, such as the much-reviled king of England, Edward II (1307–27). Although he managed to father at least four children, his intemperate affection for young men became his undoing. Edward’s lavishing of gifts and privileges on his lovers brought him into constant conflict with his wife and the nobility, and eventually resulted in him being forcibly deposed. In 1326, his lover Hugh le Despenser was castrated, and his genitals were burned publicly before he was beheaded. Edward himself was later murdered, according to many accounts, by an assassin’s insertion of a red-hot poker in his anus. The significance of this kind of punishment could not be clearer.

Edward’s ineptitude as a monarch (both Scotland and much of Ireland were lost on his watch) destined him for an unhappy end, but he was far from the only medieval man of high position to openly pursue loving relationships with other men. One of Edward’s predecessors, the crusading king Richard I (the “Lionhearted”), had a lasting affair as a young man with Philip II Augustus, the king of France, with whom he spent much of his time and shared a bed. Richard’s piety led him to resolve more than once to give up his relations with men. When he fell gravely ill, he promised on his sickbed to lead a “holier” life if he survived. The king lived on, but it is unclear whether or not he kept his promise. He died without legitimate offspring, leaving a wife with whom, most agree, he had “no marriage.”
¹⁹

Despite the risks, devotional relationships between men were common, at least among the literate, and many of these affairs must have included sex at some point. Knights, aristocrats, and especially clerics left expansive evidence of their intense passions for male lovers, relationships that often ended in side-by-side burials. A letter from a respected monk-scholar in Charlemagne’s court named Alcuin (circa 735–804) to a beloved bishop shows how thick those relations sometimes became:

I think of your love and friendship with such sweet memories, reverend bishop, that I long for that lovely time when I may be able to clutch the neck of your sweetness with the fingers of my desires. Alas, if only it were granted to me, as it was to Habakkuk, to be transported to you, how would I sink into your embraces . . . how I would cover, with tightly pressed lips, not only your eyes, ears, and mouth but also your every finger and your toes, not once but many a time.

While this epistle is unusually erotic, it reflects the intimacies that existed among men everywhere. Assuming, as we must, that at least some of these men’s sexual longings were fulfilled, the next question is the extent to which intimate homosexual relationships were tolerated. Love was one thing, sodomy another. If male hustlers on the Rialto were burned to death and other European sodomites were being cut to ribbons, could long-term, loving relationships among men ever be permitted?

The answer, paradoxically, is yes. In the period up to roughly the thirteenth century, male bonding ceremonies were performed in churches all over the Mediterranean. These unions were sanctified by priests with many of the same prayers and rituals used to join men and women in marriage. The ceremonies stressed love and personal commitment over procreation, but surely not everyone was fooled. Couples who joined themselves in such rituals most likely had sex as much (or as little) as their heterosexual counterparts. In any event, the close association of male-marriage ceremonies with forbidden sex eventually became too much to overlook as ever more severe sodomy laws were put into place.

Such same-sex unions—sometimes called “spiritual brotherhoods”—forged irrevocable bonds between the men involved. Often they involved missionaries about to set off on foreign voyages, but lay male couples also entered into them. Other than the gender of the participants, it was difficult to distinguish the ceremonies from typical marriages. Twelfth-century liturgies for same-sex unions, for example, involved the pair joining their right hands at the altar, the recital of marriage prayers, and a ceremonial kiss.

Same-sex unions were denied to monks to the same extent that men in monastic orders were forbidden to marry women, but other clerics who were allowed to marry took part. One thirteenth-century Ukrainian story tells of the deacon Evagrius and the priest Tit, whose “great and sincere” love for each other led them to a same-sex union. Unfortunately, that love found its limits and the men had a bitter falling-out. When Tit later fell ill, some monks brought Evagrius to his sickbed to help the couple reconcile before the end. Evagrius refused and was struck dead, and Tit recovered.

Even had Tit and Evagrius made up and lived happily ever after, they would never have produced natural offspring, which was the main difference between same-sex unions and traditional marriages. Yet the couple’s barrenness did not impede sanctification of their relationship by the church. One version of the liturgy had the priest recite:

O Almighty Lord, you have given to man to be made from the first in Your Image and Likeness by the gift of immortal life. You have willed to bind as brothers not only by nature but by bonds of the spirit . . . Bless Your Servants united also that, not bound by nature, [they be] joined with bonds of love.

It is difficult to believe that these rituals did not contemplate erotic contact. In fact, it was the sex between the men involved that later caused same-sex unions to be banned.

With the widespread criminalization of homosexual relations starting in the thirteenth century, the marriages of men in churches could not last. The Byzantine emperor Andronicus II decreed in 1306 that, along with incest and sorcery, sex between men was prohibited. He added: “If some wish to enter into ceremonies of same-sex union, we should prohibit them, for they are not recognized by the church.” No Latin versions of the ceremonies survive—presumably they were destroyed—and several of the surviving Greek texts appear to have been defaced over time by disapproving churchmen. By the sixteenth century, Montaigne would write of a “strange brotherhood” in which Portuguese men in Rome “married one another, male to male, at Mass, with the same ceremonies with which we perform our marriages, read the same marriage gospel service and then went to bed and lived together.” They were burned to death.

GIVEN THAT MEN could no longer marry in a church without risking punishment, and that long-term love between men was not going away, something less inflammatory had to take the place of matrimony. In England and many Mediterranean societies (especially southern France), the new institution for same-sex unions was the
affrèrement
(“brotherment”) contract.
Affrèrement
was not designed specifically to accommodate same-sex love relationships; it was adapted to permit such couples to live together in peace. An
affrèrement
was a written agreement between two people to form one household and share
un pain, un vin, et une bourse
(“one bread, one wine, and one purse”). In Italy, the contracts used a similar phrase:
une pane e uno vino
. The reference to sharing the same bread and wine was meant to signify that the people would share all their property in the years to come.

Affrèrement
agreements were used when brothers (
frères
) jointly inherited a farm and wished to continue living there together with their families, or when cousins joined forces and merged their properties. They were formal and public, usually sworn before notaries and signed by witnesses. In 1606, the brothers Pierre and Jean Alary, living in southwestern France, agreed that

[i]n consideration of the great love and fraternal affection which they bear and have borne to each other in the past, having lived and worked in common all their life, have been brothered together. All that they have and that they will acquire henceforth shall be common amongst them. They and their family will live together for eating and drinking, making one table, one house, one fire.