European writings about the American Indians make many allusions to homosexuality, or as it was referred to, sodomy. From the very beginnings of the encounter with the inhabitants of the New World, Western European Christians wrote about their shock at witnessing the unnatural lust of the “natives.” Such denunciation, as Richard C. Trexler has shown in his detailed study, Sex and Conquest, was in the spirit of the denunciation that had been leveled at the Moors in North Africa and in pre-conquista Iberia. During the conquest of America, Spaniards and other Europeans were already familiar with reports about Africa and the Middle East describing “sexual practices .. . including of course homosexual practices.”1 Upon encountering the native Americans, whether inhabitants of the Caribbean or the mainland, the conquerors recalled the homosexuality they had seen in North Africa—and in various parts of Christendom as well. The term berdache, which the Spanish and later the English colonists applied to Indian homosexuals, was derived from Persian by way of Arabic.2 Nothing was more convenient to the conquistadores than to see the pervert as the Moor or the Indian. In America the homosexuality of the natives conveniently rendered them immoral in the eyes of the conquerors, thereby legitimizing their destruction, conversion, or domination—whichever best served the conquerors. Sodomy became the devastating justification for conquest and possession; it served to distance, dehumanize, and ultimately render the Other illegitimate.
Oviedo was one of the earliest to denounce homosexuality among the American Indians and link it with Spanish domination and appropriation. “[M]any of these [Indian] men and women were sodomites, and it is known that many of them are [still],” he wrote in his Historia. 3 Oviedo continued by describing the gold with which the sodomites decorated themselves and how he had seized that gold. The denunciation of sodomy was a justification for taking away the possessions of the sodomites: “. . . in some parts of these Indies they wear a jewel made of gold, representing one man on top of another in that base and diabolical act of Sodom. I saw one of these jewels of the devil . . . [which was brought] to be smelted before me as a royal official and overseer of gold smelting.”4 Whether the Indians practiced sodomy, as Oviedo declared, or did not, as Las Casas refuted, is not the issue. The issue here is how sodomy is used both rhetorically and colonially; in Oviedo’s words, sodomy legitimated for the Spaniard his conquest of Indian land and his theft of Indian gold. As Todorov has pointed out, pro-Spanish writers always praised the colonization of America because it civilized the Indians by eradicating sodomy from their midst5; on one level, the rhetoric of colonization became dependent on sodomy.
By simply describing the Indians as sodomites, Oviedo felt that the Indians’ character was adequately defined and understood—the Indians were a group outside the cultural and moral acceptability of the audience, or at least outside the professed morality. Such a stereotypical definition of them, where one feature of their behavior supposedly represented their whole identity, subverted any questions that could be raised about the legitimacy of taking their gold or dominating them. For Oviedo, the “unnatural sexuality” of the inhabitants went hand in hand with their property and possessions. As he sought to punish them for their unchristian sin, so would he punish them by taking away their property.
This Spanish focus on sodomy as a stereotypical justification for the conquest of the Indians also appears in the writings of the English colonists in North America. For the colonists, “unnatural sexuality,” as John Canup has shown,6 not only broke the laws of the Bible, but also threatened the community at a deeper level—the level of the interior demons they felt that life among the Indians would unleash. In the wilds of America there was fear that the colonists would turn wild in their morality and sexuality. After all, and having been assured by Spanish texts that the Indians practiced sodomy, they feared that the unnatural behavior of the “Salvages” would infect them too. In 1642, William Bradford queried three of his ecclesiastical correspondents about “what sodomitical acts are to be punished by death.”7 The wilderness for him was a place where civilization was under threat, and where one of the articles of civilization was sexual conformity and an abhorrence of all that was Indian in its unnaturalness and deviance. Later, in the treaty the Massachusetts Indians signed with the Bay government in Boston in 1644, the English fear of sodomy was included in the terms to which the Indians had to submit; the Indians were made to pledge to “commit no unclean lust, as fornication, adultery, incest, rape, sodomy.”8 Political submission meant sexual conformity. Not only was the land of the Indians appropriated, but the privacy of the Indians’ lives along with their sexual modes and perceptions. In 1648, John Cotton praised England’s success in his The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared at weeding out from among the Indians all forms of “adultery and fornication, and unnatural lusts.”9
The stereotype of the Indian sodomite helped the colonists in New England—just as it had earlier the Spaniards—to justify the dispossession and destruction of the Indians. The laws against sodomy that had been instituted in England by Henry VIII, and sustained throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods, had sanctioned dispossessing the sodomite of all his “goods, chattels, debts, lands, tenementes, and hereditaments.”10 As a result, the colonists in America treated the Indians as sodomites would have been legally treated in England. The Indians had broken English law and were therefore to be punished in accordance with that law. The Indians had also broken biblical law and would therefore be punished by God in accordance with that law. For the English colonists, the dispossession and destruction of the Indians was not a result of the colonists’ superior technology or novel diseases, but of punishment inflicted on them in the manner of the inhabitants of Sodom among whom Abraham had found himself. John Winthrop made this point very clear. In discussing why the colonists had a “warrant” to seize the land of the Indians, he pointed out that just as Abraham was given permission by God to live “among the Sodomites,” so had the colonists been authorized.11 And just as God later destroyed the sodomites for their abuses, so would He destroy the Indians. The New Englanders were the new Abrahamic covenantors who applied on their enemies what God had applied on the biblical Sodom. Well into the second half of the seventeenth century, particularly after King Philip’s War, this link between Abraham’s conquest of the sodomites and the colonists’ conquest of the Indians continued to appear in English texts.12
Given the repeated superimpositions of models, it is not surprising that the same stereotyping of the Muslims as sodomites appeared in English writings during the Renaissance period. As with the Indians, the Muslims were represented as a people who defied God, nature, and English law, and therefore deserved punishment. As plague, military defeat, and starvation assured the colonists that God’s punishment was underway in America, writers about the Muslims hoped that the same punishment for sodomy would befall the “infidels.” And just as God’s punishment of the Indians had made possible the colonization of America, it was also hoped that His punishment of the Muslims would make possible the conquest of Islam. Leo Africanus assured his English readers (in John Pory’s 1600 translation) that God had already begun punishing the Muslims for their sodomy. The Moors, he wrote, had lost the city of Azamur to the Christian Portuguese because of their sodomy: “Neither doe I thinke that God for any other cause brought this calamitie upon them, but onely for the horrible vice of Sodomie, whereunto the greatest part of the citizens were so notoriously addicted.”13 The Christian conquest of the Other, be the Other American Indian or Muslim, was divinely sanctioned because of the moral and sexual deviance of the Other.
In English writings about the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, both by English, Scottish and continental writers whose works were translated into English, there are many allusions to “sodomitry”—more so than in the discourse on America. Nearly every travel or captivity account includes references to Muslim sodomy and other sexual practices. As Winthrop C. Jordan has stated, whenever Africans were described, so was their sexuality.14 And as Elliot H. Tokson has demonstrated, such interest in sexuality informed English drama—and travel literature too, as will be shown later—throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: there is “. .. hardly a black character created for the stage whose sexuality is not made an important aspect of his relationships with others.”15 Given that the North African Muslims had not been defeated as the Indians had, nor enslaved en masse as sub-Saharan Africans had, the need to demonize and alterize them became paramount. And what better proof of the Christian Otherness from the Muslims than the widespread evidence of sodomy among the latter? For writers, especially captives and theologians eager to widen the gap between themselves and the Muslims, sodomy seemed to be an incontestable dividing line. “These Turks,” wrote William Davis in 1614 after having spent years in the Mediterranean, “are goodly people of parson, and of a very faire complexion, but very villains in minde, for they are altogether Sodomites, and doe all things contrarie to a Christian.”16 Sodomy was the dividing line between the Christian, civilized Briton and the Muslim “barbarian.” Belonging to the former group signified normalcy, civility, and humanness, while sodomy signified barbarity. By predicating the barbarous on the sodomite, English writers created the stereotype of the Turk and the Moor.17
Numerous English writers used such a stereotype of the Muslims because they sought to establish demarcation and polarization with them. “Sodomy” was a topic about which there were very few historical writings in Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline England; it is not as if it were a topic openly discussed and therefore at the forefront of social and rhetorical polemic. Rather, as B. R. Burg has observed, homosexuality was ignored by “ordinary citizens, officers of the church, the military, and by leaders of the civil government,” unless the denunciation of sodomy by none other than King James I prevented the appearance of writings on such a topic.18 But literary texts, especially those purporting to be translations or adaptations of Greek and Latin sources, frequently presented both homoeroticism and homosexuality.19 This literature about an imaginary and distant past was the only venue in which homosexuality was treated, since all surviving historical data about English and Scottish homosexuality consist exclusively of records of legislation and court decisions—both of which, as Alan Bray, Christopher Hill, B. R. Burg, and others concur, are lacking in breadth and precision.20 They are also extremely few and do not provide enough bases on which to establish the early modern understanding of homosexuality in England.21
While homosexuality may have been either ignored by the general populace, or was so socially acceptable that it merited no mention by writers, it was repeatedly denounced in the Muslim context. Writers about the Muslim world felt they were expected to say something about Muslim sodomy in the same way it was expected of Muslims to be sodomites. The accounts therefore that describe Muslim sodomy are wide-ranging and appear in all genres—captivity accounts, drama, travel and, much less frequently and significantly, in government documents. Readers luxuriated in the degeneracy and deviance of the Muslims. The prurient interest in what was viewed as “Islamic sex” had appeared in the writings of medieval monks and would continue well into the early modern period, as with Lady Mary Montague. Now, in the period when for the very first time there were travelers, trading representatives, and captives among the Muslims, the claim about Muslim sodomy could be presented as verifiable and empirical.
In this context, the actual use of the word “sodomy” is important because it shows how Britons strongly linked it to Muslims. In medieval and Renaissance England there were varying meanings to the term “sodomie,” but in documents pertaining to the Muslim world it was consistently used in a sexual context. Nicholas Nicolay vilified (in T. Washington’s translation) converts from Christianity to Islam by listing the sins of the “Christians renied, or Mahumetised” as “whoredome, sodometrie, theft, and all other most detestable vices.”22 Sodomy sealed the fate of the sinful renegades. The preacher Meredith Hanmer, denouncing the theology of Islam in a sermon preached in 1586, could find no better image than that of “Mahometical Sodomits” to describe the Muslims in order to ensure their spiritual doom.23 “[T]hose who have done buggery (as the most part of them [Muslims] do) and homicide, shall fall . . . to the profoundest pit in hell,” wrote the Scottish traveler William Lithgow.24 Sodomy was concomitant with homicide and both would lead the Muslims to eternal damnation. The Muslims, wrote Richard Knolles in his seminal Generall Historie of the Turkes, “are much inclined to Venery, and are for the most part all Sodomites.”25 Muslims, concurred J. B. Gramaye in Purchas’s Pilgrimes, “expatiate . . . all Lust, Sodomie and Adulterie” in their baths. Sodomy was Islamic and separated between the civilized and the uncivilized.26
In trying to explain why sodomy was so prevalent among the Muslims—and of course absent in civilized Christendom—English and Scottish writers appealed to what they viewed as the root of all evil in the Muslim world: Islamic theology. None other than the religion of the Muslims was to blame for legitimating homosexuality. Hanmer declared that for Muslims “the pleasurs of the body hurt not nether hinder at all the foelicity of the life to come.” Because of this belief, he concluded, Muslims indulged in sodomy.27 Edward Grimeston, translating a 1626 French account of the Seraglio, believed that Islamic theology did not condemn sodomy. Ignoring the death penalty prescribed for the sodomites in the traditions of Islamic jurisprudence, he stated that “the Turkes doe not punish it” (sodomy) because they leave justice to God. He then recounted a story about a boy who killed a man who had sodomized him: “Mahomet their Prophet sent his Kinsmen to open his [slain man’s] Tombe, and see how many wounds he had; they came and saw no body, but found in the place a blacke and smoakie stocke. Hence they say, that seeing the diuine Iustice doth punish those that are culpable of this offence, they must leaue the execution to him, and in the meane time suffer this vnnaturall excesse to any.”28 The Qur’anic paradise, wrote Thomas Calvert in 1648, promised Muslims pleasures of the flesh including “lusts of Boyes.”29 Calvert had obviously not read the Qur’an, but in his view the Muslims must be sodomites because the Qur’an must have condoned sodomy. Since the Muslims had deviated from God by following the teachings of a “false” prophet, they could not but have become deviants in their sexuality as in their beliefs.
The link between sodomy and “Islam” was deeply entrenched in English minds despite the assertion by the widely read Purchas in his Pilgrimage (1613) that Muslim law was “contrary” to that sin which is “most rife amongst them, and that in the most filthie and vnnaturall kind of Sodomie.”30 Writers declared that because there was sodomy among the Muslims, their religion must necessarily permit it. But while there was sodomy among the Muslims, as there was among other societies, it was not necessarily condoned by them. The North African writer, al-Wufrani, recalled disapprovingly that the ruler Abdel Malek had been accused of “being fond of youths” and that ash-Sheikh al-Ma’moon was “fond of fondling boys” (“al-’abath bisibyan”); in a dialogue with a Christian in Paris, the Morisco writer of the first half of the seventeenth century, Ahmad bin Qasim, strongly refuted the allegation that Islam condoned “luwat” (sodomy).31 Still, English writers could not help but see sodomy as religiously sanctioned among Muslims.
In 1619 it was reported that the ship Blessing was captured by the Turks, and all its crew subsequently released except the cabin boy, who was retained for their “Sodomitical use.”32 Over half a century later, in 1680, it was reported in The Case of many Hundreds of Poor English-Captives, in Algier that a number of Quakers had been captured and sodomized—an incident that drove George Fox to denounce such behavior to the Algerian ruler.33 In 1681 it was reported that Francis Cooley, a captive in Algiers, had been tortured by the Algerians in order to make him “comply with their Sodomittish Lusts.”34 Somehow only Muslims seemed to English writers to practice sodomy, although among pirates sodomy was not uncommon—whether in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean, by Muslims or by Christians.35 Actually, sodomy was prevalent not only at sea, but also at home in England: homosexual practices were widely prevalent among the classes of vagrants and sailors, and in the first part of the century the realm was ruled by a homosexual king (James I) whose chancellor was also homosexual (Francis Bacon),36 and whose Lord Admiral of the Fleet, George Villiers, was homosexual, or at least receptive to the king’s homosexual desire. But no English writer thought of associating sodomy with Protestant Christianity, only with Islam. Simplification and stereotyping were the rules by which Britons represented Muslims. One behavioral deviance among some Muslims defined the whole Muslim population from Barbary to Cathay; there was no diversity among the Muslims.
Another association English travelers made with sodomy was that of class. Both in medieval and Renaissance England, as elsewhere in continental and Catholic Christendom, sodomy was viewed as a sin of the rich and associated in the public imagination with royalty and the court. Such an association had appeared in the Spanish writings emphasizing that it was Indian lords who practiced sodomy.37 Similarly in the Muslim Empire, writers noted that given the expenses incurred in the procurement and the upkeep of “young Boyes,” only the privileged and the elite among the Turks could practice sodomy. The basha and “the great Men of the Court,” wrote Edward Grimeston, are given to this “abhominable vice.”38 J. B. Gramaye reported in Purchas’s Pilgrimes that it was common practice among North African pirates who captured Christian children to “send them for Presents to the Turke or his Bassas” to satisfy their “Sodomiticall lusts to Boyes.”39 Paul Rycaut, English consul in Smyrna between 1667 and 1678, confirmed that “Persons of eminent degree in the Seraglio” as well as “the Grand Signiors themselves have also been slaves to this inordinate passion.”40 Ironically, the Grand Signiors sometimes relied on Christians to help them satisfy their desires. In the play Tarugo’s Wiles: or the Coffee-House (1668) by Thomas St. Serfe, it is the “Dutch Ambassador in imitation of Algiers” who presented “the Grand-Signeur with a Covy of East-Freezland Boyes, fatten’d with black Beans and Butter-milk.”41 At a time of anti-Dutch sentiments in London, it was convenient to portray the Dutch as pimps to the sodomite Turks.
Writers emphasized that among the powerful elite of the Ottoman Empire, homosexual activity was not only acceptable but also inherent in the very nature of their sexual norms. Rulers talked about it without shame or anxiety, perhaps because social hierarchy had made a secure place for that “unnatural” activity. Britons asserted that among the Turks there was a niche carved by the ruler himself for “sodomy,” and because the ruler was autocratic, not only could there be no criticism of his behavior, but the ruler might just be setting the example for the rest of the elite to emulate him. This link between the ruling authority and homosexual behavior among the Turks further confirmed for Christian writers their alterity with the Muslims. Not only had sodomy perverted morality, it had permeated the political institution as well. Not only was the religion of the Muslims depraved, but their political organization too. Since the ruler set the codes for his subjects, a corrupt and depraved ruler inevitably produced a depraved kingdom. As Edward Grimeston explained, “He that is the Head and commands them, doth furnish this pernicious example; for the Sultans Serrail is full of such Boyes, chosen out of the most beautifull of the East, and vowed to his vnnaturall pleasures: This doth countenance this disorder and corruption in the Othoman Court: Such as the Prince is, such are most commonly the Courtiers which follow him.”42 The institutionalization of homosexuality started at the very top and cast its shadow over the whole society. Paul Rycaut spoke bluntly about Sultan Murad’s infatuation with an Armenian boy, and at another time with a youth from “Galata.”43 The sexual orientation of the ruler was as unchallengeable as the ruler himself. It was not an aberrant whimsy of a few “eminent” men but, in the view of Grimeston and others, a stone in the edifice that held Muslim authority together.
So well established was the model of the “sodomitical Turk” in the European imagination that John Sanderson reported how a fellow traveler feared for his twenty-one year old “beardlesse” son because they were traveling through “Sodomitcall places.”44 The practice of sodomy was neither secretive nor clandestine but crudely public—much as it was in London, where Donne had satirized the “prostitute boy” (Satyre 1) and Shakespeare the “masculine whore” (Troilus and Cressida).45 But for Britons engaged in consolidating the unbridgeable binary with the Muslims, sodomy was a practice of the non-Christian Other who had no moral or religious qualms about it. William Lithgow wrote that in summer, the city of Fez “openly licentiate three thousand common stews of sodomitical boys,” and he confirmed that he had seen “at midday, in the very market places, the Moors buggering these filthy carrions, and without shame or punishment go freely away.”46 For Lithgow, sodomy was as obvious in the domain of Islam as the midday sun. Toward the end of the century, Thomas Baker confirmed in his journal entry of 30 June 1683 this openness of sodomy in the Barbary coast: “And this day alsoe the sonne of a Dutch Renegado a Brisk young Fellow of the Towne happened to goe into a Taverne, whither two Turks following him comitted a Rape of Buggery upon him Which (In regard it could not bee done without some bustle and noise) drew thither a great number of their dissolute fellow Souldiers, Thirty four of whom successively were as kind to him as the other Two Turks had been. And all this without ye least shame or feare of punishmt.”47 For Baker and Lithgow, Muslims openly indulged in sodomy because it was a structural deviance not only in the bedroom but also in the marketplace. Neither did the Jacobean traveler seem to know of King James’s public dalliances with male companions, nor did the Restoration trade representative know about the Earl of Rochester’s crude praise of sodomy in the play “Sodom.” Sodomy was exclusively Islamic.
In 1682, Adam Elliot published an account of his captivity in Morocco in 1670 in which he included the only actual description of an attempted homosexual seduction of a Christian Briton by a Muslim owner. Elliot’s language is hateful of the “Moor” who tried to sodomize him, but it is clear that his denunciation of the Moor was also intended as a denunciation of the notorious Titus Oates, who was known for his sodomy, and who had falsely accused Elliot of complicity in the Popish Plot. The deviance of the Moor made him doubly heinous in the eyes of the readers because he reminded them of the deviance of Oates:“While I was upon these thoughts, the Brute [Elliot’s master] raises himself up a little, and mutters somewhat to me of not-to-bementioned Carnality, not only unworthy of Christian ears, but the bare mention whereof offers violence to the dictates of Nature, and which my charity would never suffer me to believe that it could enter into any mans mind, unless I had heard of the Citizens of Sodom, and a Doctor of Salamanca [Oates].”48 Paul Hammond has shown in his discussion of the sodomy of Oates that “Englishness” was confirmed by linking the sexual deviance of Oates with the Turks.49 By bringing sodomy, Turk, and Oates together, Elliot could not help but consolidate an unbridgeable alterity with the sodomist.
As much as the sodomy of the Muslims drew from Britons’ anger and vituperation, it also perplexed them. As they observed the Muslims, whether from the angle of travelers or captives, they saw before them a powerful empire whose subjects and rulers practiced, brazenly, the sin that had brought God’s destructive ire on Sodom. As Alan Bray has observed, nearly every allusion to homosexuality in Renaissance English sources mentions the biblical account of Sodom’s doom.50 Yet, to the confusion of English writers, the Ottoman Empire did not seem to be facing, nor indeed to be apprehensive of, that danger. Britons therefore could not invoke the biblical example of Sodom to threaten the “Sodomiticall Turkes” with dire punishment, nor could they proclaim, with the same assuredness they or their Iberian predecessors had proclaimed in America, that divine wrath and European conquest were close at hand. It is interesting that the discourse about Muslim sodomy rarely alluded to the destruction of Sodom, which in Genesis had provided Christendom with a divinely authoritative explanation of how homosexuality had originated and an assurance of damnation for homosexuals.
Deprived of this allusion, British travelers and captives found themselves having to explore theories about homosexuality that were outside the range of the biblical explanation, but that would apply exclusively to Turks and Moors. Some writers, therefore, proclaimed that sodomy was a sin generated by a hot climate. Although a link between geography and homosexuality is found among earlier Spanish and continental writers,51 no contemporary writer in England or Scotland proposed it. But writers about the Ottoman Empire did. Francis Osborne wrote in his description of the seraglio that the reason the Turks institutionalized concubinage, as the Israelites had done before them, was to prevent “Sodomy, and Bestiality; sinnes infesting these hot Countrys.”52 For him, heat activated the blood into the sexual excess of sodomy. “A strange Fancy,” wrote T. S., who was a captive in North Africa, “possesses the minds of all the Southern People; they burn with an unnatural Fire, which consumed Sodom and Gomorrah.”53 A hot climate, which England fortunately did not have, was the reason for sodomy.
Writers believed that England was fortunate not only in enjoying a cold climate, but also in not having built its civilization on the land and heritage of the Greeks. In the minds of some Britons, the source of Turkish sodomy lay in Greek sodomy: having conquered the land of the Greeks, and having absorbed the learning of the Greeks, the Muslim Turks had fallen under the spell of Greek unnatural lust, references to which abound in classical literature and philosophy. Both the Persians and the Turks, wrote Thomas Gainsford in The Glory of England, have adopted “that horrible corruption of the Grecians.”54 The Turks were continuing what the Greeks had started. Blame fell particularly on the Greeks because of the theory of Platonic love. Plato’s Symposium had spoken clearly of the homosexual relationship, but in the revival of Platonism in Renaissance Christendom, particularly by the Florentine Neoplatonists, the homosexual element was dismissed, and Platonic love came to be seen as a purely spiritual relationship. Alan Bray has stated that there was no link in European history between Plato’s theory and the actual practice of homosexuality.55 Although early church fathers extrapolated from Plato a favorable view of homosexuals,56 and although Michaelangelo’s homosexuality may well have been associated with his Platonism,57 Bray did not find any writer in Renaissance England who made the link between Platonic love and homosexuality. Nevertheless, English writers about the Muslims did; the most elaborate discussion of this link appears in that highly acclaimed and often reprinted work, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668) by Paul Rycaut.
Rycaut invoked the theory of “Platonick love” to explain homosexuality among the Turks. In a book that proved to be seminal, Rycaut described every feature of the Turkish Empire, including the educational training of Turkish administrators. These future administrators, he wrote, started their lives as scholars in the seraglio where, they were made to follow a special curriculum that perfected their knowledge of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. As a result of their extensive reading in literature they developed “a kind of Platonick love each to another, which is accompanied with a true friendship amongst some few, and with as much gallantry as is exercised in any part of the world.”58 Their reading in literature so refined their souls that it created spiritual amity among them.
This description of “love” between the Turkish scholars corresponds to the European theory of Neoplatonic love that writers such as Castiglione and others had described as a relationship of harmonious nonsexual male friendship.59 Rycaut believed that this “love” among the Turkish youth was not unlike other “Platonic” loves elsewhere in the world. The Turks in this respect were in the mainstream of European Neoplatonism. Unfortunately, however, continued Rycaut, such exclusive male friendship—even at the highest level of spiritual purity—could only lead to imbalance. Sexual deprivation generated by the absence of women compelled men toward homosexuality, a homosexuality that was stated in the Symposium but not, in his view, intended by Plato to be taken literally. Eager to exonerate Plato of responsibility for Turkish sodomy, Rycaut proposed his own explanation of homosexuality based on psychological premises.
Because of sexual deprivation among this exclusively male group, wrote Rycaut, homosexual activity inevitably developed. In what seems to be the first such theory by an English writer about homosexuality, Rycaut explained that as a result of the strict discipline of the scholars in the seraglio, and because female companionship was prohibited, they transferred their sexual desire for women toward each other. They “burn in lust one towards another, and the amorous disposition of youth wanting more natural objects of affection, is transported to a most passionate admiration of beauty wheresoever it finds it.”60 The source of homosexual desire was neither a depraved morality nor a hot climate but a harsh social system. Homosexuality was a result of repressed instinct.
In presenting this view of the youth of the seraglio, Rycaut had unwittingly portrayed, for the first time in English writings about the Muslims, what might accurately be described as a homoerotic relation. All previous allusions to homosexuality applied to sexual activity between an elder male and a forced youth who had been captured or enslaved. Here, in the middle of the seraglio, emotional and intellectual engagements led to sexual activity—exactly the same progression that Plato had proposed in the Symposium. Rycaut, however, believed that although the Turks’ homoerotic love was “Platonick,” it was really quite different from the Platonism that Christendom knew since Christian Platonism had no sexuality in it. In the next chapter, entitled “Of the Affection and Friendship the Pages in the Seraglio bear each other,” Rycaut examined this issue further and repeated that the Turks strongly believed in “the Doctrine of Platonick love.” This doctrine is about a “passion very laudable and virtuous, and a step to that perfect love of God.” But the Turks had not understood Plato correctly since they had transformed this “spiritual” love that prevailed in the seraglio into physical desire. The Turks did so against Plato’s teachings because of “their depraved inclinations.” “In reality this love of theirs,” concluded Rycaut, “is nothing but libidinous flames each to other, with which they burn so violently.” What in Plato and among Christian Platonists was an avenue to God, among the Turks was an avenue to uncontrollable lust and unnatural desire.
These observations by Rycaut are important because they show how a well-traveled and well-read Englishmen in the second half of the seventeenth century actually believed that Platonic love was no different from Neoplatonic love, and that homoerotic relationships were widely present among the Turks because of the influence of a misread Symposium. More important still is Rycaut’s establishment of a link between sexual repression and homosexual desire—if men are deprived of women, they turn to each other, especially if they are men in literary and intellectual training who are apt to develop “Platonick love” for each other. The reason Christendom had not degraded Platonic love into sodomy, Rycaut implied, was that love occurred among married males—unlike in Islam where it occurred among unmarried men. Still, much as Rycaut recognized a psychological and cultural context for homosexuality, his final evaluation remained informed by the morality of his society: whatever its cause, homosexuality was “libidinous” and depraved and characterized the empire of the Mahometan Turks.
Rycaut’s view on the origin of male homosexuality paved the way for examining lesbian sexual activity, a topic that was rarely linked in English popular thought with male homosexuality.61 Rycaut applied his psychological analysis of male homosexuality to women and stated that Turkish women turned to lesbian love because they lacked male sexual partners. Sexual repression, in his view, was the cause of male and female homosexuality. “This passion likewise reigns in the Society of Women; they die with amorous affections one to the other.”62 Significantly, a similar view had been proposed in the French account translated by Grimeston: women in Turkey “grow passionately in loue one with another, and giue themselues to false and vnlawfull loue.” They do so because they have enormous sexual appetites they cannot control, but also—and this view is in line with the psychological explanation advanced by Rycaut—because they seek to avenge themselves on their husbands for their husbands’ “vnnaturall loue.” For Grimeston, lesbian behavior was clearly a “disorder” that led women to “imbrace one another, and doe other actions which loue seekes, and modestie forbids to write.”63
It is quite likely that Rycaut acquired his insights about homosexuality from his reading of Grimeston’s very popular translation since he admitted that he had never been inside the harem64 and therefore could not have based his views of lesbian sexuality on personal knowledge. He could have also learned about lesbian attraction from Purchas, who had mentioned how Turks were given “in both sexes to vnnaturall lust (in these times) euen the women in publike Bathes.”65 In Pory’s translation of Leo Africanus there too was a reference to Mauretanian women “who were afflicted of that wicked vice of using one another carnally.”66 Regardless of what source Rycaut used, it is significant that his and Grimeston’s texts present an analysis of lesbian sexuality that does not occur anywhere else in English seventeenth-century sources. Theirs is the first interpretation of lesbianism in English sources that attempts to fit it into the framework of human sexual behavior.
At the turn of the century, the traveler George Sandys had surmised that there was lesbian activity among Turkish women because of punishments that had been subsequently imposed: “women with women; a thing vncredible, if former times had not giuen thereunto both detection and punishment.”67 Earlier in the sixteenth century Nicolay had described lesbian behavior in the Ottoman Empire: women in the Levant, he wrote, “sometimes become so feruently in loue the one of the other as if it were with men.” They “handle & grope” each other in “luxuriousnes & feminine wantonnes.” For Nicolay, however, the explanation of such behavior did not lie in repression but in geography: Levantine women, both Christian and Muslim, developed such tendencies because they were descendants of the “Tribades, of the nu[m]ber wherof was Sapho the Lesbia[n] which transferred the loue wherwith she pursued a 100 women or maidens vpon her only friend Phaon.”68 Lesbian activity came from Lesbos, and whether the inhabitants were ancient Greeks or modern day Turks, they were bound to fall under the spell of lesbian love because they shared the same geography with Sappho. For Nicolay, the Muslims were conditioned by their geography to adopt sexual deviance; for Rycaut a century later, the Muslims were conditioned by their social organization and political structure. For these as well as the other writers in between, sexual deviance among the Muslims was seen to be unavoidable: having observed the Muslims, but not their own societies, all the above writers declared that “sodomy” was a category of the Levant and not of Europe, of Mahometanism but not of Christendom.
In 1607, Thomas Shirley included the following statement in his treatise on the Turks: “Theyre [Turks] mannor of liuinge in priuate & in generalle is moste vnciuille & vicious; & firste, for theyre vices they are all pagans & infidelles, Sodomittes, liars, & drunkardes, & for theyre Sodommerye they vse it soe publiquelye & impudentelye as an honest Christian woulde shame to companye with his wyffe as they doe with theyre buggeringe boyes.”69 As the rest of his treatise shows, Shirley did not like the Turks; he had, after all, been captured and imprisoned in Istanbul. Was he therefore, like other English and Scottish writers, referring to empirically verifiable evidence of homosexual activity among the Turks, or were his references a product of theological and political models of representation, of ideological assumptions that were being developed in an atmosphere of anti-Islamic polemic? It is interesting how uninhibited Shirley was in “naming” and explicitly mentioning the words “sodomy” and “buggery.” Was he trying to create a scenario wherein the unfamiliar Other becomes familiar because of his deviance and difference?
In medieval Europe homosexuality was treated “primarily as a non-Christian vice.”70 Britons did the same in the seventeenth century; sodomy was the sin of the Other and therefore conveniently provided them with a much awaited venue for exploring this taboo. If, as Jonathan Goldberg has argued, homosexuality was an “open secret” in early modern England—a known fact about which people did not talk or did not publish much71—then the Muslims must have appeared as a gift from heaven for writers who were not daring enough to examine that topic within their own society, but who felt free to examine it among the “Mahometans.” Furthermore, the possibility of discussing sodomy among the Muslims would have satisfied what Winthrop Jordan has described as the “appetite for the ‘wonderful’” that “civilized Englishmen” showed, especially as they read reports about “cosmetic mutilation, polygamy, infanticide, [and] ritual murder” that were practiced in North Africa and North America.72 Sodomy can safely be added to this list of “wonderful” topics that English readers would have wanted writers to describe. There is little doubt that as Renaissance readers turned to a book about the Muslim world, they expected it to titillate them with information about the outrageous, the sensual, and the deviant so they could feel secure in their moral and political spheres.
But the question remains: were the Britons who described Muslim sodomy describing what they knew or were they describing what they heard and perceived? Or was it that the word itself, sodomy, was so sufficiently charged with evil, deviance, and barbarity that its association with the Muslims was enough to demonize them beyond redemption? In 1600, George Manwaring wrote an account about his journey with Anthony Shirley to the Persian court. While traveling through the Ottoman domains, Manwaring was beaten by a Turk—an episode that understandably caused him to hate them. So once he turned to describing the Turks, he emphasized that the Turks kept boys who are called “Bardashes, which they do use in their beastly manner, instead of women.”73 A similar reference was made by his companion William Parry, who along with the other English group had been humiliated by the Turks in Cyprus. He denounced the Turks as “damned infidels and sodomitical Mahomets.”74 Both believed that by mentioning one word, sodomy, they could win for their coreligionists the moral conflict with the Muslims and the ontological conflict with Islam. But how precise was their description? When their companion, a Frenchman by the name of Abel Pincon, wrote an account of his journey, he did not mention sodomy at all. Upon arriving among the Persians, the English group was well received, and therefore, Manwaring asserted, while “it is allowed in the Turks’ kingdom for the men to have the use of boys, it is not so here, for the Persians do severely punish that vice.”75 This pro-Persian assertion contradicts other reports about male sexuality in Persia.76 For a man such as Manwaring, who spoke neither Turkish nor Persian, and who could never describe anything without comparing it to England, and who presumed to describe what his friend Parry indicated had been off limits to them—such as the inside of the mosque court where ablution took place—it is evident that the allusions to homosexuality stemmed not from direct observations but from the desire to denigrate the religious adversary. And he was well aware that no other accusation needed less explanation or demonstration than sodomy. To mention it was to confirm it and to condemn the perpetrator; sodomy was a self-explanatory judgement, a cognitive keyword that proved that Muslims had no family structure, no “natural” sexuality, and therefore no place in the civilized world.
There are no texts in seventeenth-century England that place homosexuality in English cultural history, while nearly every text on the Muslim dominions does—even if it is anecdotal and brief. Between describing the horses the Turks used and the market price of roosters, hens and pheasants, the traveler Thomas Coryat inserted the following words: “The Turkes are exceedingly given to Sodomie, and therefore divers keep prettie boyes to abuse them by preposterous venerie.”76 To describe sodomy among the Muslims was, for Coryat, as commonplace as talking about hens and market prices; sodomy was not just part of Muslim immorality, it was part of everyday life. By repeating the reference to sodomy in every context associated with the Muslims, by reminding English readers in every text about the Levant of the depravity of the “Mahometans,” and by relentlessly exposing the Christian to the Otherness of the Moors and Turks, English writers transformed sodomy into a structural transgressiveness that defined the character, religion, and dominions of the Muslims. The sodomite was the Muslim writ large.
Just as sodomy had functioned ideologically in the conflict with the Indians, it was also made to function in the conflict with the Muslims. Britons developed an analogy that was logical but not empirical: since their existence among the Indians was an existence among the sodomites, who were destroyed, their existence among the Muslims was also an existence among the sodomites, who would also be destroyed. The alleged prevalence of sodomy among the Indians and Muslims presaged their moral and subsequent military decline before the sinless Christians of England. In the discourse about the American Indians there was, as the cultural historian Djelal Kadir has pointed out, a collusion of deed and language—“action and rhetorical infrastructure.”78 The rhetorical infrastructure of the discourse about the Indians emphasized their moral and sexual illegitimacy—thus the “action” of domination and conquest. A similar collusion can be seen to have operated in the English discourse about Muslim homosexuality: just as the Indians were demonized in English writings by being associated with the heinous sin of sodomy, so were the “Turks.” Sodomy served to legitimate Christian/European moral superiority and to prepare for holy war.