Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain’s Golden Age
by Cristian Berco
University of Toronto Press
248 pages, $55.
DURING THE SUMMER of 1625 in the region of Valencia, Spain, three adolescent boys, Nicolás González, Joseph Carna, and Juan de la Vega, were accused of sodomy. Sons of local citizens, all three were of working-class families engaged as apprentices and laborers.
In the ensuing Inquisitorial trial, what was uncovered to the horror of many people was a web of prostitution in which the three boys engaged in sex with Muslim slaves in exchange for money and food. The slaves, while certainly on the lowest end of the social hierarchy of Valencia, worked for many of the wealthiest families and labored beyond these households, attaining money and food that they used to hire the boys for sex. The boys, in turn, traded sex for money as a way of supplementing their meager incomes. In the trial, one witness recounted that when the boys needed money, “Vega would say that he could get some,” and the witness described how Vega would meet up with a slave, returning later with money. One slave named Beli testified that González was at fault for “what happened with all the slaves and Christians” because he was their pimp.
What emerged in the trial was that the inquisitors’ concerns rested as much on the fact that the Christian boys had taken the passive role in the sex act as on the act of sodomy itself. The Inquisitorial court’s response was swift and violent. In the fall of 1625, all nine accused slaves were burned at the stake and, in an unusual act, the inquisitors also sent the adolescent González to the stake. The other Christian boys were sentenced to extended terms working in the galleys—a more usual punishment for the crime of sodomy.
This case sets the stage for Cristian Berco’s fine study of homosexual sodomy in Spain from the 1500’s to the 1700’s. Working from 500 Inquisition trial proceedings involving homosexual sodomy in Aragon, Spain, Berco situates these court cases within the complexities of the period’s social landscape. Berco, a historian at Bishop’s University in Canada, looks at these cases from three perspectives: the men accused and denounced by fellow citizens, the ideologies of masculinity and gender, and the complex legal processes of an Inquisitorial trial.
Sexual Hiearchies, Public Status is at times a dense, academic book. Readers wanting a narrative history of the homosexual world of early modern Spain will be disappointed. Berco resists writing a history of the period that privileges homosexuality over other topics in the social-sexual history of imperial Spain. While noting the limited amount of scholarship on homosexual relations during this period, Berco stakes out a different approach to the rich archive of court records, and with it he not only deepens our understanding of this particular time and place, but also moves the historiography of sexuality in an intriguing direction.
Delineating two dominant models of historical analysis of sexuality, Berco shows the limits of the identity-category approach, arguing that the men brought before the Inquisitorial courts “did not view their behaviour as a defining characteristic of their personalities.” Similarly, he rejects the historical approaches of queer theory, arguing that in its efforts to question the rigidity of sexual categories, it “can do nothing more than demonstrate the problematic nature of these very categories.” In opening a third door into the archive, Berco situates homosexual behavior itself as a particular “focal point” for understanding the social hierarchies of the period. Instead of seeing homosexual sodomy as indicative of a type of sexual identity, or even, through its prosecution, a heterosexist policing of same-sex sexual practices, Berco focuses on the intersections of legal and social definitions of sodomy, thereby illuminating the ways in which homosexual practices were “inextricably linked to social processes, structures, and hierarchies.” Indeed, it is not sexual “identity” that mattered but rather the sex act itself and the physical position of each partner in the sex act.
Berco argues that an understanding of male erotic relationships by the Inquisitorial courts rested on an ideology of gender whereby passive and active roles signified more than simple sexual positions. The social prohibitions against sodomy by citizens and courts relied on a social ideology of masculine virility and feminine submission. But this hierarchy also shaped the ways men engaged their erotic, homosexual encounters, or, more intriguingly, how men subverted social status through sexual encounters.
While using gender as a framework for erotic male relationships is hardly new or unique to Spain—historians have shown this kind of gendering of homosexual sex in Elizabethan England and 19th-century New York—how it intersects with social status, citizenship, and ethnicity is intriguing. Aggregate data of the court trials shows, for example, that while foreigners were more likely to be denounced by citizens for sodomy, they were better at avoiding the fiery stake than Spanish citizens. As the case of the adolescents and the Muslim slaves in Valencia demonstrated, the spectacle of these sexual exchanges, in which Muslim slaves paid to penetrate the Christian youths of Spain, inverted a social system that went well beyond religious taboos pertaining to acts of sodomy.
The trials themselves were complicated affairs, launched by a denunciation of the accused by either one of the men involved or a witness to the act. Through careful analysis of individual trials and aggregate data across the archive, Berco shows that the Inquisitorial courts were in fact complex dramas shaped by popular concerns, local laws, and legal traditions. Indeed, denunciations of homosexual sodomy were at times dismissed due to lack of evidence; or the men were given lesser sentences depending upon the evidence at hand. Foreign men were more often accused of sodomy, though their cases frequently lacked substantive evidence, suggesting a gap between citizens’ accusations and the legal reality at hand.
In his conclusion, Berco asks provocatively: “why should we make identity the defining issue of the history of sexuality?” Underneath this question is another, more challenging one: what is gained by throwing aside the concept of sexual identity when we look to the historical archive? Our histories tell us as much about our own period as they do about the past. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status is in many ways a post-history of sexuality, for it moves beyond constructing a “gay world” in early modern Spain and shows instead the particular meanings accorded homosexual sex by men who engaged in it and those who prosecuted it. In this way, Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status asks us to reconsider the significance of the sex act itself—as a nexus of private imagings and public status—towards a much expanded vision of sexual history.
James Polchin, a frequent contributor to this journal, teaches writing at New York University.
