Sodomy’s Penumbra

This article advocates a sodomitical approach to sodomy. Its approach is framed alongside and against three historical glosses on sodomy law: first, that sodomy law instantiates homophobia; second, that sodomy law targets sexual violence against boys; third, that sodomy law reaches assaultive sex against women that did not register as assaultive enough to qualify as “rape” by sexist juries. The first story of sodomy law is mostly wrong. The other two glosses pivot on protection: protection of boys or protection of girls and women. These accounts, tethered to identitarianism, underplay sodomy law’s multiplicity, as a source and symptom of our conflicted understandings of when sex is sex and when sexual violence is rape.

The first part of the article explains my choice of sodomitical sites. The second part complicates the story of sodomy as phobic. The third part complements the historiography of sodomy as protective against boys. The fourth part argues that the gloss on sodomy law as a corrective to disbelieved women is appealing but untrue. The final part makes the case that fellatio matters. The prevalence of forcible oral sex in sodomy cases intimates a cultural pluripotence of oral sex, as well as shifting definitions—in law and life—of sex and rape. This last story of sodomy law remains undetected under an identitarian radar.     

Rights Versus Morality: Online Debate About Decriminalization of Gay Sex in Singapore

This article presents a quantitative content analysis of 10,473 comments from two opposing online petitions related to the legal status of a section of the penal code in Singapore used to ban sex between men. Results indicate numerous significant differences in how the two sides discussed the law and its significance. In particular, they used different types of arguments to support their views and expressed different kinds of concerns over the potential impact of changing or maintaining the law. The patterns of language use seem to reflect distinctly different approaches to the debate and suggest the difficulty of finding common ground amid this contentious social issue, but they also reveal similarities to how Western cultures have framed the debate.     

“Old Sodom” and “Dear Dad”: Vanbrugh's Celebration of the Sodomitical Subject in The Relapse

Although the sodomitical discourse of the early-eighteenth century was fraught with competing ideologies and significations, this did not preclude the formation and expression of a sodomitical identity founded upon male same-sex desire. Orvis takes the case of Coupler, the sodomite staged in Sir John Vanbrugh's play The Relapse; or, Virtue in Danger (perf. 1696; pub. 1697). Vanbrugh's portrayal of this unabashed, unapologetic sodomite—a sodomite, moreover, who is accepted by the dramatis personae of the play he inhabits—suggests not only that the possibility of a sodomitical desiring subject was widely acknowledged by the theatergoing public of early-eighteenth-century England, but also, and perhaps more importantly, that sodomites were not always understood as monstrous Others against which normative identities were constructed.     

The Birth of Modern Criminology and Gendered Constructions of Homosexual Criminal Identity

There is a dearth of engagement with LGBTQ populations, and sexual orientation and gender identity more broadly, in the field of criminology. This article analyzes the treatment of sexual orientation and gender identity at the birth of the discipline around the 1870s. Through an analysis of Cesare Lombroso’s writings, the article argues that a multifaceted stigma of deviance attached to homosexuality and gender nonconformity in early criminological theory. The article explains this multifaceted stigma in terms of broader political, social, cultural, and legal developments before and during the late nineteenth century that shaped modern Western conceptions of sexual orientation and gender identity.     

The HMS African Revisited: The Royal Navy and the Homosexual Community

The article contains both a survey of writings on homosexuality in military organizations since the early 1970s, and a reexamination of the homoerotic involvements on the Royal Navy's HMS Africaine from 1811 to 1815. The Africaine affair, first studied by Arthur N. Gilbert in 1974, involved a sexually active coterie on board the ship that included a large segment of the crewmembers. Analytical structures for studying all-male sexuality 30 years ago have gradually been superseded by new theoretical paradigms, and these more recently developed approaches can be used effectively to provide a greater understanding of the events that led to a series of courts martial and the hanging of four of the Africaine's men in 1816.