History 1450-1789: Homosexuality

From: History 1450-1789

Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, by the Gale Group, Inc.

Self-Perceptions

By the late eighteenth century, sodomites in northwestern Europe had not only developed a distinctive societal role, but also perceived themselves as a separate category from men and women. They also talked about these issues among one another. Early in the eighteenth century they would refer to other sodomites as men who liked to do this kind of thing as well. Some seventy years later sodomites talked about "being a member of the family," "people like us," and "you and me and thousands like us." It especially allowed devout men to look upon themselves as morally responsible human beings. From the 1750s onward sodomites arrested in the Dutch Republic would refer to the biblical story of David and Jonathan, and increasingly they would claim to have been born with their inclinations intact. More than half a century before Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in Germany in the 1860s formulated the theory of the existence of a third sex—men born with a female soul—sodomites in the Netherlands spoke among one another of their "condition" or "way of being" as an inborn weakness. There is no documentation about women who clearly spoke in such a way of themselves. For men, one might say this newfound homosexual identity culminated in the contents of a love letter from one Dutch male servant to his male lover early in the nineteenth century. He used still-current terms for boyfriend, talked about "being of the family," and he called upon innate weaknesses to explain their desires, while also legitimizing those desires by telling his lover that God had not created any human being for its own damnation.