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Centaur MC

on another historic gathering of the Leather Tribe!

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How gay was the Renaissance?

he Renaissance (Western history roughly between 1400 and 1650),

was a time of exploration and great artistic endeavor in Europe, marked by a revival of interest in classical civilizations. A closer look at that age suggests that the Renaissance was also an era buzzing with homosexual

activity. Scholars have found considerable evidence of samesex relations between adult men and between men and boys in Renaissance Europe, and much of this evidence comes from. church and court records.

Sodomy was both a religious and a criminal offense, subject to severe punishment by church and state. As part of Henry VIII's religious reformation, in 1533 the English government took over from the church the prosecution of "sodomites," making anal intercourse ("buggery") a felony punishable by hanging. Ireland followed suit in 1634. In the mid-16th century, Geneva, Switzerland, instituted several gruesome punishIments for sodomy, including beheading and drowning. Under a 15th-century Florentine body called Uffiziali di Notte (Officers of the Night), designed to sniff out and prosecute homosexuals, the great artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci was twice charged with sodomy and twice exonerated for lack of evidence.

Many men of the Renaissance, especially those of the upper class, would probably be called bisexual today. According to custom, noblemen married and procreated to carry on their titles,

but they kept young pages and attendants on the side as sexual play things-a model taken from classical times. In the all-male world of the clergy, intergenerational same-sex relations were also common. Two popes, Paul II and Julius

In the mid-16th

century Geneva instituted several

gruesome punishments for sodomy, including

beheading and drowning.

II, were both notorious for seducing young men. (The latter was a benefactor of Michelangelo, who himself is said to have had same-sex attractions he doesn't seem to have acted on.) In the artisan class, too, homosexual relations often occurred between craftsmen and their appren-

tices, though historians have also found evidence of sexual

BY DAVID BIANCO, M.A.

relationships between adult working-class men.

The theatre was another all-male province: young men and boys played all the female roles. As a consequence, same-sex relations between older and younger actors abounded, and acting itself became a dishonorable profession. In his play, Poetaster, Ben Jonson noted the horror a father experienced when he realized his son was going to be an actor: "What? Shall I have my son...an ingle ('boy favorite') for players?"

In addition, two canonical English playwrights of the Renaissance period, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, are often claimed today as gay. While there is no evidence to answer the question whether Shakespeare himself had sex with men, 126 of his 154 sonnets rhapsodized about the beauty of an unnamed young man and were published only after his death. A number of his plays either had homoerotic content (Troilus and Cressida) or employed gender-bending comedy (Twelfth Night).

Marlowe, Shakespeare's contemporary, wrote the homoerotic play, Edward II, in which he sympathetically

METRO

WEEKLY

January

21. 1999