Sex Before Sexuality by Phillips Kim M.; Reay Barry; & Barry Reay

Author:Phillips, Kim M.; Reay, Barry; & Barry Reay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

Boyish effeminacy is here admired, where in contemporary chronicles it was reviled, but in both instances any connection with sexual desire remains unsure.

Some premodern men desired males who resembled girls, while others were seen as wanting to be like women sexually. Their desires and different dispositions were written on their bodies in the effeminacy of the movement of their limbs and general bodily deportment. The Romans called them mollitia; the Greeks called them kinaidia. Michael Camille has detected such characteristics in representations of the demeanour of the fourteenth-century Italian sodomites.148 A fifteenth-century Castilian tract, known principally for its misogyny, wrote of heretic sodomites who ‘are like women in their deeds and like little sluts in their disordered appetites, and they desire men with greater ardor than women do’.149 And we know of at least one medieval medical/scientific treatise that recognizes that some men enjoy the passive role in male-to-male intercourse.150 Some Renaissance texts, claimed somewhat exaggeratedly as a species of early modern sexology, posited that a man’s sodomitical inclinations – as insertor, or receptor and fellator – were detectable in his physiognomy, including marks on his hands (chiromancy) or forehead (metoposcopy): that is, the hands of cinaedi, the facial mark of the sodomite, the twitching lips, flashing eyes and flushed faces of the fellator.151 There are also allegations that sodomy made early modern Dutch men effeminate; that their disposition was reflected in their beardless faces, ‘wriggling’ movements, ‘whorish’ eyes and ‘effeminate posture’.152 The problem is, of course, that such accounts deal with rhetoric rather than subjectivities.

Discussions of premodern, English effeminacy have been dominated by descriptions of the eighteenth-century mollies – a name with a striking likeness to the words molles and mollesse. Halperin includes the mollies in his prehistory of homosexuality, where they are characterized as ‘effeminate men’.153 We need to consider the mollies because it has become something of a historiographical orthodoxy that they represent an important stage in the formation of homosexuality as identity. As Bray expressed it in his pioneering study, the mollies signified a ‘momentous’ shift from male-to-male sex as something that mankind in general was capable of to something associated with a particular group with its own sense of self. It was an identity or subculture that emphasized effeminacy in a way that modern homosexuality would reject, but was ‘an identity nevertheless’.154 This was an early statement, drawing on Trumbach’s claim that the mollies embodied the birth of modern homosexuality. But others have more or less followed the framework. Hitchcock writes: ‘The molly houses became synonymous with homosexuality, and gradually over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to the broader transition, both in perception and reality, from the sodomite to the effeminate homosexual.’155 All these historians (and sociologists) stress the effeminacy of both the ‘perception and reality’ of molly culture, referring to the wearing of dresses and the use of female names.156

We remain unconvinced by the historiographical prominence of the molly. One major difficulty is with the source material, for the image

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