Post a response:
|
This is machine-generated. The French does not transcribe correctly. There are many small errors. No indications are made of the beginning or ending of sentences. I have neither time no interest in doing any corrections. Free online software is available to do a better job, but I'm not bothering with it, as the results, though better, still require corrections. Still, this may be useful to some, and should help to dispel misconceptions about the content of the lecture. The end of this post contains instructions on how to obtain transcripts such as this from YouTube videos. 0:16 we all know roughly what we mean by homosexuality today we all know that the term was uh invented in the latter part 0:24 of the 19th century the question is how far back can we push that 0:30 uh that description and still find that it's valid as a description of what we're looking at as 0:36 historians now there is obviously a risk of anacronismo that you can use this modern 0:42 term all the way back to the late Middle Ages and for that reason for decades now 0:48 historians have routinely avoided the word homosexuality or homosexual when talking about these earlier periods and 0:55 they've used the terms sodomy and sodomites which to the person in the street may seem strangely sort of crude 1:02 and rather offensive but I assure you it's just become a technical term and in some ways it simplifies matters so I'm I 1:10 will just follow that uh that 1:16 convention in 1976 the French 1:22 theorist um historian certainly philosopher possibly Michel Fuko 1:30 published a book called La Vol roughly translated as sorry La 1:36 Vol roughly translated as the will to know and this was uh the first volume of 1:44 a projected series of volumes it's a sort of extended essay introduction to 1:49 his theme and it's on the history of sexuality in this essay he talks mostly 1:57 about the 19th century and about large scale changes towards what he sees as 2:03 the modern uh forms of sexuality uh sexuality being something 2:08 which he helps to Define as a modern theoretical term more closely and in some ways much more richly than previous 2:15 theorists had done uh as very much as something that is produced by and 2:22 modulated by a society a social system and in his ultimately political view of 2:29 things a system of power and of course he was talking predominantly about 2:36 heterosexual uh sex and not very much about homosexual as he was talking about 2:42 the 19th century I can use the word there but he included one passage less 2:49 than half a page which has had a colossal influence on historians writing 2:55 about what I'm going to talk about and I'll just read out a slightly reduced 3:00 version of what he wrote sodomy as it appears in the old 3:06 codes of civil or canon law was a category of forbidden 3:12 acts the person who committed those acts was just the juridical subject of 3:18 them the homosexual of the 19th century became a kind of person a past a history 3:26 a childhood a character a way of life nothing in his entire being escapes 3:33 his sexuality it is everywhere in him underlying all his ways of Behaving it 3:40 is consubstantial with him not so much as a habitual sin but more as a distinct 3:46 nature the sodomite was someone who committed a sin the homosexual is now a 3:55 species that last sentence 4:02 SE r e l a PS slightly difficult to translate in this case someone who's 4:08 fallen into a particular sin uh which is how I how I translated it um since the 4:15 whole paragraph talks about Sin uh the penguin translation I note says a 4:20 temporary aberration but still you can see the basic distinction he's making um 4:26 and this has had as I say an enormous influence he was actually planning a seven volume 4:33 history of sexuality and this introductory short volume was the was the first volume in that 4:40 series uh sadly he died eight years later uh he was one of the very first 4:47 really prominent people in French society where it was known that he died of AIDS uh and by that time he' only 4:53 published volumes 2 and three and they are richly detailed and largely 4:59 text-based studies of sexuality in the ancient world um which you know they are 5:07 of great interest those volumes but they have almost no relevance to what I'm going to talk about he would have 5:12 continued through my period uh but alas we don't have that and yet as I say this 5:18 one paragraph has had a huge influence why well first of all the 5:25 modern idea of sexuality as roughly speaking or roughly think thinking a 5:30 social construction I don't want to get into technical uh and I think often rather 5:38 time wasting arguments about exactly what is meant by social construction and so on but we can all agree that in 5:48 general complex human behavior is greatly influenced modulated molded and so on by the 5:57 society around us by what we think what What We Believe by Traditions we've inherited and so on and so forth and 6:03 this is true of even things that seem to have connections with what we might think of as rather basic biological 6:10 things such as food or sex so in that sense I think it's common sense to be a 6:15 moderate constructionist there's not much to disagree with there Fuko pushed 6:20 the theory further um his particular view was that as I mentioned earlier 6:26 everything is ultimately to be described analyzed in terms of power structures that lie behind what we see and what we 6:33 experience and his particular account of the development of homosexuality as a 6:40 category in the late 19th century was that this was formed by medical and 6:46 legal discourse um particularly medical or a new kind of medical discourse involving 6:52 what became Psychiatry and this created a sort of category and people's lives 6:58 were were influenced to the point where they started behaving so to speak within the category that had been developed for 7:04 them but that ultimately there was something political about this power is exercised for the benefit he doesn't go 7:11 into a lot of detail on exactly who and how but for the benefit of those who are holding the power and this obviously 7:17 chimed with other ideas in the 1970s or a bit earli in the 60s that there might 7:23 be something liberating about seeing through this and then you could liberate yourself from the PA so that's one 7:29 reason why one can see why he he was a very influential figure writing about sex but the thing I want to concentrate 7:35 on is a different aspect and a more simple one I suppose this contrast between acts and identity which is the 7:43 message of that paragraph modern sexuality he says is based on a notion of identity I quote 7:50 again a kind of person nothing in his entire being escapes his sexuality it underlies all his ways of Behaving the 7:57 idea that before that we just had acts 8:03 now I don't think this would have been so influential if it had all depended on 8:08 people being convinced by Fuko as a historian at this point because in this 8:14 very essayistic short volume he gave almost no proper historical evidence um 8:21 in the grand French style he he set out his ideas and developed them with with 8:26 sort of very inspiring Pros but the actual evidence if you look at his footnotes there's almost nothing there 8:32 he quotes a couple of early modern texts these are manuals for confessors how to 8:39 deal with particular sins and they have sections on sexual sins one's by the 8:44 little known Pao seeri from the 17th century ones by the better known Alfonso liori from the 18th century he quotes 8:51 them in 19th century French translations um now these are guides for 8:56 confessors confessors don't deal with with General species as he calls them or 9:02 identities they deal with with acts you don't say father um I have been a 9:07 particular sort of person you say father I've have committed a particular sin so it's not very surprising on those 9:13 grounds that he would think that previously it was all to do with 9:18 acts but having said that his argument at the beginning was not pretty hardly 9:25 at all anchored in historical research miraculously after he published and 9:31 particularly after he died a wealth of historical research serious research was done by people looking at early modern 9:40 sodomy and almost all of it seemed to confirm what Fuko had said uh he seemed 9:47 a rather sort of prophetic figure like those astronomers who say there must be a planet up there and then you train 9:53 your telescopes on it and there it is the year after he died 198 5 a 10:00 Spanish hisor Rafael carasco published a book called inis in 10:07 Valencia uh on the based on the Inquisition in Valencia one of the three Inquisition tribunals in the Kingdom of 10:15 Aragon which went into a lot of detail about sodomy cases there then in the 10:20 same year Guido Rogero Italian-American historian a book called Boundaries of AOS sex crime and sexuality in 10:26 Renaissance Venice he had a substantial chapter on the situation in Venice and 10:31 then 11 years after that a a deeply impressing impressive book by Michael 10:38 Rook an American who has spent most of his career in Florence uh sorry it's 10:44 spelled Rock but with an e on the end and pronounced Rogue um forbidden friendships homosexuality and male 10:50 culture in Renaissance Florence based on an extremely rich archive in Florence 10:57 and after that there have been other studies of Luca Barcelona Spanish territories in 11:03 the new world uh a Brazilian scholar Lu M uh started working on Brazilian cases 11:09 in the Portuguese Inquisition and went on to write much more widely on the Portuguese Inquisition generally on this 11:16 topic so we now have a wealth of information and as you may have noticed 11:22 from those place names very much concentrated on southern Europe or colonies of Southern European powers 11:31 much of this of course almost all of it in this research is from trial records 11:37 of one sort or another there are very different tribunals there's the Inquisition which was not universally dealing with sodomy in fact it didn't 11:43 deal at all with sodomy directly in in the Italian lands uh it did in Valencia 11:50 Saragosa and Barcelona um and it did in Portugal but not in the rest of Spain 11:56 but there are also criminal tribunals and special tribunals uh and other courts so trial records again we're back 12:04 to what I said about the Confessor manuals a trial by its nature is concerned with looking at acts did a 12:10 certain criminal act take place or not so that may slightly um narrow our Focus 12:18 or blinker Us in some ways but we don't only have trial evidence although it's the richest source and the only one that 12:25 can be subjected sometimes to a kind of statistical analysis we also have uh 12:31 cultural evidence of different kinds and indeed within some of these trial records there are quite detailed 12:36 narratives of personal events there are inter inter interrogations so we get more than just 12:43 the story of particular acts and what we get especially from the Florentine archive which is immensely rich is 12:50 enough to give us a whole picture of a pattern of 12:55 behavior and that pattern I would say in advance I hope this will will you'll agree with him by 13:01 the time I've described it does very much support some sort of basic distinction between acts and identity 13:08 this is very heavily on the acts side of the story so let me describe this 13:15 pattern in just in AR the essential Point here is age 13:21 differentiation it was adult men having sex with boys teenage 13:27 boys in Florida 90% of the passive Partners in the 13:33 sexual act were under the age of 19 and the overwhelming majority of 13:39 those were uh between 13 and 19 the average age was 13:44 16 of the active Partners in the sexual act 83% were 19 or over they were mostly 13:52 in their 20s that's 55% some in their 30s uh 18% 13:59 very few above that only 10% above 40 so this was an activity of basically young 14:06 adult men seeking teenage boys we have detailed evidence from Luca The 14:13 Watershed age there was 18 above that 85% of those who prosecuted were adult 14:19 men prosecuted for the for the active role and there was not a single man over 14:25 the age of 30 in arog The Watershed age was 20 82% 14:32 of those under 20 were were were passive 80% of the over 20s were active and in 14:39 Valencia the average age of the boys was 15 and a half within months of the Florentine figure so this really is a 14:47 sort of it's not a local or just a national phenomenon there is a common culture 14:54 here and what I want to emphasize is this very different from Modern homosexuality 14:59 uh you may think oh before you go any further you better give us a you know cut and Dy definition of modern 15:06 homosexuality I don't need to do that because as I describe this you will see very clearly that this is just very 15:12 different whatever your particular take on how to define modern homosexuality may be first of all it was not generic 15:21 male male desire uh and I've sort of said that already because adult men did not desire 15:28 to sort of other adult men or to be sotomized by them the age 15:33 differentiation was was absolutely basic to this the Watershed age 18 to 20 was 15:41 determined by the appearance of facial hair um these changes were a little bit 15:47 slower and later in the early modern period because ultimately for nutritional reasons we've speed it up a 15:53 bit in Modern Times And there are cultural comments on this you know how 15:59 can you think a boy is attractive when when he started shaving so think about it this is very 16:04 different from Modern homosexuality the point at which the boy becomes visibly 16:09 fully masculine is the point at which he cannot be desired this is not a desire 16:15 of the male for for a masculine object of desire a 17th century sort of libertine 16:23 right Antonio Rocco said where the pleasures of Love are concerned both appearance and nature change with age a 16:30 baby goat is fine tasting food but when it has grown into a billy goat it is utterly foul those who pay sexual 16:37 attention to these big goatish men are rebelling against the principles of Love they are animals Whose desire is beastly 16:44 and corrupt and this it was a genuine deepr rooted it wasn't just a sort of taboo that people had to pay attention 16:51 to it molded their feelings you it was deeply strange and off-putting to think 16:57 of a man an adult man Des iring to have sex with another adult man so that's the 17:02 first big difference it's not generic male male desire it's adult for boy male desire the second also sort of goes with 17:10 that but is different it was not reciprocal male male desire this 17:15 operated not on the basis that in any sort of sexual couple there was desire 17:21 flowing in both directions the adult men took their pleasure from available boys 17:27 it was as simple as that they had no thought of whether the boy was getting any pleasure from it um it it it it's 17:35 obviously more difficult from the records to tell quite what the psychology of all the boys concerned was some may have been doing for pleasure 17:41 there are some cases where they had confessed to multiple multiple partners 17:46 but there are always possible explanations they were doing it for money they were doing it for gifts uh 17:51 doing it for attention in some cases for the benefit to their family that came from a a sort of powerful person having 17:59 an interest in them and so on but there was no sense of of a sort of reciprocal relationship being key to such a uh an 18:08 arrangement third difference it was not exclusively male male desire didn't even have to be primarily male male desire we 18:15 know from the records Michael rope does a detailed analysis many of these men were also having sex with women uh some 18:22 were arraigned for fornication or indeed rape of of women or girls um the great 18:28 majority of got married and settled down and this may help to explain why the 18:33 statistics tail off after the age of 30 so again it just doesn't look very like 18:39 modern homosexuality uh even the the term the modern term bisexuality might spring to 18:44 mind but again we're in modern terminology and it may in the end be more problematic than than it's 18:50 worth and then the fourth difference and this I want to emphasize it was not felt to be was not viewed as abnormal desire 18:59 and that I think is another difference um well abnormal can be taken in 19:05 different ways but even today in a purely statistical sense I think it would generally be said that homosexual desires statistically 19:12 abnormal um but these people didn't think it was abnormal in any sense as a 19:17 desire it was acting on it that was uh a 19:22 great wrong it's quite striking how easily people could agree to the idea that this 19:28 was natural and normal as a desire uh there's a law a big law textbook by a 19:34 Papal lawyer in fact a cardinal at the papal Court uh joanni Batista Deca 19:39 1673 and he said there was a general assumption he's talking about how to imply penalties to the older and younger 19:46 person in these cases there's a general assumption that men who sodomize adolescent boys do so because of I quote 19:53 a certain urge which is as it were natural 19:59 Al says that urge or indeed natural instinct which commonly arises towards good-look 20:05 boys so the desire was viewed as entirely natural it was simply acting on it that was wrong so think of I don't 20:13 know um desire for cake is natural but to um 20:20 engage in gluttony is wrong not an exact parallel because the theological 20:25 position here is eating this sort of cake is intrinsically wrong but you see what I mean it's you can have a natural 20:31 impulse it may be natural to enjoy alcohol but um descending into brutish 20:39 drunkenness is wrong and so on I mean the the basic model in moral theology is not difficult to to 20:46 comprehend so you might ask well if this was viewed as a desire that any man could have does does that mean it was 20:52 very widespread I mean our evidence of people actually acting on it and the same logic suggests well it may follow 20:59 or it may not um there may be a society where it's widely agreed everyone enjoys 21:05 uh drinking but where because of strict social norms and other factors um the 21:12 society doesn't uh doesn't witness widespread widespread drunkenness and so 21:17 on so one just has to look at the historical evidence now here it's rather 21:22 difficult to judge because there are different regimes treating people and according to the severity or the 21:27 leniency of those regimes one may expect more or fewer people to have been 21:33 denounced uh you're less likely to denounce your neighbors if you think that will lead to them going to The 21:39 Gallows um the most lenient regime was that of Florence it has a special 21:44 magistrature to deal with these cases and here the statistics are 21:50 extraordinary uh in the last 40 Years of the 15th century the archive of this magistrature 21:57 gives us 13,000 names of men and boys and names that were mentioned in 22:04 accusations depositions witness statements and so on now obviously some of those may have 22:10 been malicious some of them the the evidence was not sufficient for prosecution and so on but still they did 22:15 their job and they ended up with 2,000 roughly 2,000 convictions now the total population of 22:21 Florence that time was about 60,000 so let's take the male population as 22:27 30,000 um your guess as good as mine I haven't gone into the demographic history how many we should subtract for 22:33 small boys and old men or perhaps most men over 40 given what we know but still 22:38 we're not left with many thousands and over a 40-year period we have 2,000 convicted but 22:44 13,000 mentioned it has been argued these figures are inflated by recidivists some of those 13,000 names 22:50 are duplications that's true but Rog thinks this inflates it by only about 10% and it's also true that some people 22:57 are being brought in from outside Florence from Villages or even as far away as PR or 23:03 pistoia even so this is an extraordinary figure looker had a similar similar 23:08 magistrature and we have high figures there too not as high in the second half of the 16th century we have 596 people 23:16 Accused at the tribunal 368 convicted is that a loss or a little 23:21 well I think it's quite a lot but roughly three times as many as that were 23:27 investigated and only investigated the ones where they thought they could prove something the denunciations were more 23:33 than that we don't have precise figures but it suggests that well over 2,000 would have been would have been uh given 23:40 as names to the tribunal and this is 50 years but it's a a little town with only 23:47 20,000 total population so again this is high other cities the statistics are 23:52 lower but we still have significant numbers of Trials um in Venice in the 23:57 early 16th century at least five trials a year and each trial could have multiple people um The Arrogant 24:04 Inquisition nearly 700 cases from 1540 to 1700 Portuguese Inquisition similar 24:10 period slightly shorter only 424 cases came to trial but the lists of people 24:18 whose names were dutifully written down from the denunciations comes to a total of 24:26 4,419 and of course these are the people who just came to light one way or another we may assume that this is a 24:32 relatively small percentage of all those who are actually engaging in such sexual behavior in these 24:38 societies so how typical were Florence and looker it's very difficult to say there are some cultural forms of 24:45 evidence that suggest Florence really was much more um uh apt to to experience 24:53 sort of mythical Behavior than other parts of Italy there were sayings about FL and Tuscany uh and you know Lua is 25:01 only 40 mil away from Florence in a straight line the early modern German word for to sodomize was 25:09 florentin uh the the the the the fame of Florence had extended that far but I'm 25:15 not concerned I can't go into these difficult questions of relative frequency or intensity what I can say is 25:22 that because the Florentine evidence gives you sort of granular evidence and quite a lot of evidence of behavior you 25:27 can build up up a picture of how it worked and you can find that this is pretty much replicated in the other 25:33 evidence that we have from other cities so what do we find mostly it was what 25:42 one might call casual sex or transactional uh people met in the streets particularly after dark um boys 25:50 could just be targeted there was a sort of game ritual where you grabbed a boy's 25:56 cap and then refused to give it back until they had agreed to have sex with you um 28% according to Rog of these 26:04 encoun actual sex took place in public places Alleyways at dusk uh The Gardens 26:10 and outside the city walls the ramparts 36% in homes 15% in taverns which often 26:16 had rooms specially aside set aside for that purpose and it was basically for the purpose of of uh of 26:24 sodomy places of male sociability taverns again barber shops uh the public 26:30 baths and then dancing and fencing schools which were nothing like normal 26:35 schools these were obviously sort of voluntary um afterw working hours places where young men could go for something 26:42 more related to leisure activities than to education there was some 26:49 prostitution uh we can't identify anything that we would call in formal terms a brothel of of boys but some boys 26:56 did frequent actual brothel I.E mostly bres of female prostitutes there was a 27:02 lot of do-it-yourself prostitution just a boy looking for money uh there were older boys pimping younger boys 27:09 especially in the gangs there's a whole book about that by Marina baldasari using evidence from the Roman courts 27:15 Masters sometimes pimping their apprentices or employers using a boy as 27:20 bait to bring in customers um there's a rather extreme case from ler in 1572 27:26 from the bath house where it was found that a 14-year-old boy had been 27:32 sodomized by 42 men he was employed by the bath house owner um theoretically as 27:39 a sort of scrubber and and and masser but essentially as bait to bring in men 27:44 to his establishment but apart from prostitution there's a range that 27:50 emerges from sort of coercive acts by the men on the streets to persuasion uh 27:56 to quite volunt uh Le whether very shortterm or longer 28:02 and there are some longer relationships significant minority up to one year of repeated sexual encounters some even up 28:10 to three years not always easy to tell whether these reflect sort of what we 28:15 would call proper relationships maybe just a mutually advantageous um Arrangement that could be repeated 28:22 advantageous to the boy because he got money or gifts um but we have to remember that these were very 28:28 hierarchical societies most boys left their homes for work or some sort of training or employment around 28:35 134 the place was full of boys that were relatively easy for men to exert power 28:41 over and you see that through many different context servants um 28:46 apprentices Junior soldiers and Page Pages um ship boys and also novices in 28:52 the church uh young uh acolytes in in monasteries and and fries and so there's 28:59 a range of signs of the exercise of power relations um down to what can only 29:06 be described as as actual rape what was the General attitude this 29:11 is actually rather difficult to say in in general terms obviously it was known 29:17 about it wasn't a great Secret in a society like that but it was known about and disapproved of in the way that I 29:23 suppose fornication between an unmarried man and unmarried woman was known about and disapproved of and don't forget that 29:31 many of these cases most of them come to the tribunals because of denunciations by neighbors or other scandalized 29:37 Witnesses there's a lot of strong disapproval permeating these societies 29:43 and indeed the legal system reflects that you have very harsh punishments in many jurisdictions including mutilation 29:50 and death Michael Rog points out that in some ways it could be woven into what he 29:56 calls patterns of male sociability and that's true in Florence um there are sort of workingclass gangs 30:04 of boys and young men um but in many places it was a much more secret affair 30:10 and had to be um in sevil the Jesuit who attended condemned sodomites before they 30:16 were executed and must have had many many conversations with them he said one might be inclined to disbelieve this if 30:24 it was anyone else saying it but he said that some of them had a system of sort of secret handshakes to establish uh a 30:32 potential interest a way of communicating in the presence of uncomprehending others uh and I think 30:39 that can't be ruled out so it wasn't as open generally as you might think if you 30:44 only read um the accounts of life in Florence and it was alluded to in literature particularly in Italy not 30:50 much in in Spain um rarely expressed as a firstperson statement of 30:58 by a poet or a a writer mostly in things like comic stories the no starting with 31:04 bacho um with a disapproving slant always but also sometimes the comedy 31:11 slightly hinges on an element of of sort of knowing complicity on the part of the 31:16 of the reader so what was the psychology of the 31:21 sodomites themselves again a big question quite difficult to give a general answer 31:29 a lot of the modern literature starting with Rafael carasco has said we've got to see that in this period people just 31:37 felt undifferentiated desire and that that is the key to it 31:42 all and he he uses some of the language used in the Inquisition tribunal in Valencia which he 31:48 studied uh he he appeals to again to sort of Catholic moral theology he talks 31:54 about you know the sin of lust they only talk oh I was overcome by lust and they talk about lust as a general sin or 32:00 motive in exactly the same way they would if it was for a woman he said well this is the key to it that people just 32:06 felt undifferentiated desire and this again might take you back into a sort of fuan uh view of the 32:13 matter and modern ideas rather um 32:19 sometimes applied rather Pat to previous periods that 32:25 somehow behind all appearance or prior to certain modern developments we should 32:31 all we should think of everyone as being sort of bisexual or pansexual or whatever I think one has to resist this 32:38 analysis for the obvious reason which I've already stated this was not undifferentiated design it 32:43 differentiated very strongly against a man an adult man having sex with another adult man uh and that was fully 32:50 internalized and that was that was fundamental so it was not neutral between male and female it was neutral 32:58 between women and boys and that's a very different story now I've talked about 33:03 age differentiation but I think when one looks at this one needs to think of not 33:09 sure what the opposite word would be for differentiation but a sort of coration 33:15 sort of bringing to conglomeration something of that kind is going on between what is desirable in a 33:22 woman and what is seen as desirable in a boy I think that's actually a better way of looking at it and don't forget the 33:28 emphasis was on attractive boys that paper lawyer and Cardinal that I quoted he said the Natural Instinct uh which 33:35 commonly arises towards good-looking boys and there are many descriptions of the beauty of male adolescents and they 33:43 use entirely the vocabulary that's used for girls or for young women uh now 33:48 there may be some cultural inertia in that but it matches other cultural evidence we have that this is really how 33:55 they thought of what was desirable about one of these boys and there are many stories of boys being dressed as girls 34:02 I'm not talking of sort of actual transvestism but for example a story in Ben vuto chini's 34:08 autobiography where some artistic friends said we're having a dinner on Thursday and um bring a female guest and 34:16 as a prank he dressed up in female clothes the 16-year-old son of a 34:22 neighbor who was Spanish and he says this boy was exceptionally beautiful had a very fine complexion dressed him up as 34:29 a girl and all the men were bowled over by the beauty of this mysterious young lady that he brought with him and then 34:35 he says finally that some of the other women who were present sort of rumbled rumbled his guest and he says they 34:41 started shouting abuse at the boy I quote with the sort of insulting words commonly applied to beautiful 34:48 boys meaning words slang words for catamite and so on baso would be 34:55 the main one um so it looks more like a kind of extended 35:04 version of the desire for what was attractive seen as attractive in a woman 35:10 these boys before facial hair they had attractive faces they had soft skin 35:16 their voices may have been lighter they were just more more like women in in various ways so a working 35:23 hypothesis um which I will just park here and um return to in the last lecture a reasonable working hypothesis 35:31 is that there is some kind of of sort of extension or carryover from how people 35:36 thought of women to how they thought of these 35:46 boys briefly now I just want to turn aside and deal with the other end of the Mediterranean if only to make the point 35:53 that we have quite a lot of evidence there and it is remarkably similar and confirms the idea that what we're 36:00 looking at here is a sort of pan-mediterranean pattern of sexual behavior lots of reports by Western 36:08 Travelers diplomats missionaries in the Ottoman Empire um commented on 36:14 sodomy there are many reasons good reasons for thinking that there was a huge uh weight of cultural Prejudice 36:23 their religious Prejudice uh medieval pists against against is Islam had accused it of all sorts of sexual crimes 36:30 and sins including sodomy so certainly they were prejudiced but the modern tendency of 36:38 Scholars influenced by Edward SED to say well then it's all obviously just 36:43 orientalism it's projecting Western prejudices onto the East and we should discount all of this has I think badly 36:50 skewed um the treatment of these matters in the modern scholarly literature there 36:55 is a lot of evidence I mean more than can just be explained away even in the western uh Travelers and missionaries 37:02 reports and so on but I think it's also rather strange that the people uh the followers of s 37:09 who complain about this orientalism have discussed this whole matter purely on the basis of Western 37:15 Travelers reports and so on as if it were the case that the only 37:20 debate can be has to be the one about Western attitudes as if the east in verted comms had no voice of its own we 37:26 didn't need to look at what they were actually thinking and saying well when serious arabist and turkology and 37:33 ottomanist have looked at the Eastern evidence from those societies they found 37:39 a mass of evidence to show that sodomy was was widespread widely known widely 37:44 talked about widely represented the best book on this is book published nearly 10 years ago by a 37:51 scholar who at Harvard khed El rib and it's called before 37:56 homosexuality uh in the Arabic Islamic World 1500 to 1800 and as he shows it 38:02 this this was just common knowledge and commonly discussed uh it it was much less secret than it was in many of the 38:09 western societies it was also age differentiated again facial hair was 38:16 what dictated the Watershed and the evaporation of all serious desire at 38:21 that point there was the same taboo against adult adult sex a special word for people who had sort of strange um 38:29 mental illness as it was seen of wanting adult men who wanted to be penetrated by other men called maun the same 38:37 assumption that the desire for boys was natural uh there's a chief Muti in the 1530s who has is asked to issue a feta 38:45 fatwa uh which is an opinion in response to a query on a legal point and the legal question was um is an Imam 38:53 entitled to tell uh a 15-year-old boy not to stand in front of other men at 38:59 prayers in the mosque because uh they will be distracted by lustful thoughts 39:05 and the chief mu's answer was yes it is Justified to tell the boy not stand there if he is sexually desirable using 39:12 what mush meaning particularly sexually desirable so you know this was just part 39:18 of what was taken for granted it was a natural the desire itself was natural we have similar evidence that these men 39:25 were not exclusively male oriented in their desire uh we the evidence is 39:30 similar that much of the sex was casual transactional the social contexts we have evidence of this too public places 39:37 ramparts of cities taverns uh coffee shops the BS quite 39:44 important the hamam was more important socially and culturally in uh Muslim Society than its equivalent in the west 39:51 soldiers Crews of gys and so on also prostitution very similar also cultural 39:57 gifts stroke payments but the main difference as I say is that it was much 40:03 more open in this Society men would talk about it beautiful boys would be openly 40:09 wooed in competition by men who would would uh celebrate their Conquest if it 40:15 worked or or uh write poems bewailing their failure if it didn't there was a 40:20 whole culture of love poetry and song that that that talked openly about this entire in fact entire liter 40:27 culture great deal of um love poetry written particularly the gazel gazal in 40:34 in Arabic which is a sort of roughly Sonet length uh poetic form love poetry 40:40 the vast majority of these are directed towards boys not towards women um there 40:45 were literary jees the sheenis which was a long poem celebrating the beauties of individual 40:52 beautiful young people in particular cities and going through the list you know this person Works in this coffee 40:57 shop and has you know eyes like like like 41:04 um the pools of the night and teeth like Ivory and all of this I say celebrating 41:11 the beauty of young people because there is one of these poems um celebrating beautiful young women there are 60 41:18 celebrating beautiful young men so it was just a much more open Society in these 41:25 matters and that I think and I'll give more reasons for this in the next lecture that's a major reason 41:32 why it actually was more visible in ottoman Muslim Society those Western 41:37 Travelers were not making it up when they said that you know we see evidence of sodomy around us in a way that a 41:43 foreign traveler in a western soci might not have seen so much um so I think 41:49 sorry to say this I think the sedans have have sort of got it doubly wrong on this issue okay just a few minutes left and I 41:57 want want to now turn to the other side of the story briefly because I've been talking about the dominant Mediterranean 42:04 pattern and it really was dominant I quoted figures 80% of this 90% of that 42:09 well that was mainly just on age differentiation and it's blurred there because the statistics can be swayed a 42:17 bit by older adolescent boys beginning to experiment socially on younger boys 42:23 um those statistics were in the sort of 80s or 90s but if you take something like passive adult men who did exist 42:30 we're not talking about 20% or 10% rog's calculation is 3% or in on one survey 42:36 down to 1% they did exist and they were known about there's another category um adult 42:45 men who adopted deliberately sort of female or feminine manners characteristics in order to attract 42:51 adult men who they hoped would would sodomize them very few cases of this but 42:57 they were a known quantity there's a frier in Valencia Pedro piaro who was 43:02 described by all his well known to all his colleagues in the Ferrari is um 43:07 laara U because they found him so feminine and uh some of them complained 43:12 about his his uh attempts to sort of beguile them into um having sex with him 43:19 in Portugal there was a special word for this F funon uh for a man past the age 43:25 of of of facial hair who continued to go around seeking uh to be the passive 43:30 partner with adult men another exception this comes up a lot in the literature men with 43:37 exclusively male male desire in other words women hating men well whether they 43:43 hated or not in daily life we don't know but but in terms of sexual desire men who absolutely did not want to have sex 43:49 with women uh bacho has two stories about such characters um and in one of 43:56 them the the poor wife Bano says he got married as a sort of camouflage so that people wouldn't gossip about him but he 44:02 never has sex with his wife and in Bano Story the wife complains why did he take me as his wife if women were not to his 44:09 liking uh in the story she he goes out for a long dinner so she sneaks in a a 44:14 handsome youth uh that she wants to have sex with but the man comes back early and uh discovers the boy and then the 44:21 comic ending is that the man spends a lot of the night with the boy um so that's another category that is 44:28 exceptional but it exists then another one is what we called inveterate sodomites meaning that they never 44:35 stopped so as I said the general statistics show a great tailing off after a man's 30s only 10% over 40 up up 44:44 all the way to death but the so-called inveterate sodomites carried on um going after Boys in their 40s 50s 60s even 70s 44:53 and according to rook's analysis the majority of them never married and then we have the men who showed a 45:00 very strong emotional attachment to a boy where it was absolutely not casual transactional they fell in love and 45:07 there's clear evidence of this it's a significant minority a bit larger than some of the others uh they would give 45:13 extravagant gifts their neighbors would denounce them for it and say they were making fools of themselves um but we 45:19 know that these people existed there was strong affection but all the evidence suggests it was one way affection the 45:26 man lav ing affection on the boy it's extremely rare to find anything uh any 45:31 evidence of affection in that sort of relationship equally the other way around and then very very rarely there 45:38 are reciprocal long-term relationships between men of the same age group 45:43 between adult men krasco has one example two uh boys who were brought up in the 45:50 same Village often same the shared the same bed uh when they grew up one became 45:55 a frer the other went off to work in Italy and then years later he comes back he seeks out his friend and as the 46:01 Inquisition then discovers they've been sleeping together and having sex together regularly for years and they're 46:07 now in their mid-30s um I mean that's a very interesting case but it's interesting 46:13 above all because it is so rare there are very very few cases of adult couples like 46:20 that so my conclusion the evidence so far is mixed but mixed in a very 46:25 asymmetrical way with a mass massive dominant pattern and then some interesting exceptions on the side the 46:32 dominant pattern is acts based or mostly acts based may not be in I mean it's 46:38 certainly not a matter of sexual orientations but one could argue about whether the men who go after boys have a 46:44 sort of extra orientation on top of their orientation for women but anyway I parked that question I will come back to 46:51 it but the minorities really do seem more identity based the Ive adult was 46:57 seen as radically different from normal men the feminite adult was obviously doing something more than just 47:04 particular acts the woman hating sodomite was regarded as a definite type 47:09 from Baco onwards and characterized as such the Romantic boy lover was obviously engaged in more than just acts 47:16 but in Muslim culture and this is another problem to park the romantic love of boys is woven into the culture 47:23 as well and so is much more common thank you [Applause] For the remainder of the lecture, load the appropriate page, expand visible contents of the video description by clicking "more," scroll down, choose "show transcript," press CTRL + C to highlight/copy the entire page (which will include the transcript) then paste into an editor, and edit out everything except for the transcript. M. But everybody here knows that already, don't they? ;-) Oh, and you're welcome. :-/ |