Once taboo, the history of same-sex relations has attracted a good deal of scholarly interest in recent decades. Oxford University’s Noel Malcolm is dissatisfied with much of that scholarship. Sifting through a horde of legal and literary material, Malcolm has composed a pan-Mediterranean, trans-Atlantic account that includes the Ottoman Empire as well as European colonies in the new world.
One of Malcolm’s aims is to rectify the careless application of prevailing theories. According to followers of Edward Said’s “Orientalism” thesis, all those stories of widespread “sodomy” in the Ottoman lands was culturally demeaning propaganda. Unlike them, Malcolm actually went to Ottoman sources and found that male-male sexual relations were almost pervasive, especially among the ruling classes—but in one socially acceptable form only: older men with “beardless” teenage boys. Harsh penalties (including death) were in place across the Near East and Europe, yet rates of punishment were inconsistent, spurred by occasional moral panics.
Malcolm also takes on Michel Foucault’s theory that homosexuality as “a distinct way of being a person” (as opposed to men who simply enjoyed sex with men) was a late 19th century creation (“molded by hidden power structures”). Reading more deeply into the historical record, Malcolm detects the existence of distinct subcultures in Northern European cities well before the 19th century. Forbidden Desires is a monument of careful scholarship.
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