‘You’re not men.​  You’re boys. If there was no social media, you would be my concubines.’ One of the weirdest lines of the 2024 US election came from Robert J. O’Neill, a pro-Trump former Navy SEAL who claims to have been one of those who shot Osama bin Laden. Respondents to O’Neill’s post on X, which was directed at a gaggle of young, male campaigners, wondered whether it was a lexical flub. But O’Neill followed up. He replied to the Democratic influencer Harry Sissons: ‘I’m telling you exactly what Betas like you will be used for: food and sex.’ Fucking and devouring, or fucking as devouring: enough to keep a psychoanalyst busy.

It’s not surprising for a Trump fan to see sex in terms of physical domination, given the ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ precedent. O’Neill’s choice of another man as his object – however gamine and glabrous – is stranger, given the American right’s swivel-eyed homophobia. A surprising number of gay men top the Trumpist pyramid (Peter Thiel, for instance, or the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent) and others lurk on its digital outskirts, but O’Neill isn’t one of them. He obviously didn’t believe his statements undermined his heterosexuality. Presumably this would be a risk only if he were the one being penetrated, and thus dominated (like a ‘Beta’) and feminised.

Tweets are trivial, but revealing. Klaus Theweleit’s sociological study of fantasies among the Freikorps comes to mind: the soldiers’ fear of contamination and penetration, their yearning for violent social restitution. O’Neill’s respondents – like most people when the subject of sex comes up – assumed he had revealed something about himself, that he had been caught with his psychic pants down. Some alleged he had contracted the fantasy while stationed in Afghanistan.

The East has overheated the erotic imagination for centuries. Christian travellers often remarked on the Ottoman fondness for catamites, especially among military men. Uluç Ali and Hasan Veneziano – both important 16th-century corsairs, both converts – were said to have quarrelled bitterly over a boy; one Western spy claimed Ali was ‘very much given to the unspeakable vice, taking pleasure in more than three hundred pageboys’. The habit of sodomy was often supposed to have been acquired from foreigners. ‘Buggery’, the English legal term, derives from ‘Bulgar’, referring to Bulgarian Bogomil heretics, who were accused of elaborate and obscene sexual practices. Sodom could be much closer to home, however, and for much of early modernity Italy was a byword for the unspeakable vice. ‘Am I perhaps in Italy,’ a Spanish servant asked, rebuffing his master’s advances, ‘that Your Grace wants to do this to me?’ One 17th-century student installed a prophylactic basket around his buttocks before visiting an Italian barber, just in case.

Readers of Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire might find O’Neill’s comments less surprising. The book’s central argument is simple: between 1400 and 1750, sex between men followed distinct patterns in different places. In the Islamic and Christian cultures of the Mediterranean, pederastic sodomy was widespread. Typically it involved an adult man – in Christendom, usually under thirty – and a beardless youth, usually a teenager. Age also determined the sexual role, with the boys taking the passive position (willingly or otherwise). Criminal courts were especially attentive to anal sex (‘buggery’ or ‘perfect sodomy’) and punishment sometimes varied by role; bottoms historically got a raw deal. Punishment for other forms of sex varied. In far smaller numbers, court records describe incorrigible or ‘inveterate’ sodomites, who persisted with undiminished enthusiasm throughout adulthood. These ‘untypical’ cases often broke the pattern, taking place between adults, or with adult men taking pleasure in being sodomised, and occasioned the ire of priests and lawmakers alike. For the preacher Johann Geiler von Kaiserberg, any sodomite over the age of 33 (the symbolic age of Christ, but also an age by which marriage was expected) was irreformable; the 1539 penal tariff in Lucca instituted a regime of fines and imprisonment on a sliding scale according to age, but any man over fifty faced immediate execution.

In Northern European cultures no such pattern can be discerned: prosecutions for sodomy are much sparser – it is rare even as a slanderous accusation – and no systematic age differentiation emerges. This presented historians with a conundrum. Proto-homosexuality emerges in the records in around 1700, with reasonably coherent common practices and locations for cruising and semi-public sex. Initiating tactics were not always sophisticated or subtle: they involved a lot of perilous dick-grabbing as an opening gambit. But what about before then? Occasional evidence suggests a tantalising underground: a 1630s chronicler records a society of sixteen men, ‘sworen Brothers’ in the ‘sinne of Buggeri’, who meet each Sabbath day in Southwark. The same story of ‘a peculiar Society, or Body’, now swollen to fifty secret sodomites, appears in a Jesuit polemic of the same decade. Such evidence is unusual, sufficient only to prove that the ‘beast-like confederacy’ of sodomitic subculture did not spring into existence on the first day of the 18th century. The first wave of gay historians assumed, on the basis of thin literary evidence, that the Mediterranean sexual culture of catamites and Ganymedes must have obtained in Northern Europe too, but gone largely unrecorded. For Malcolm, speculative defences of this assumption – that in this part of the world homosexual behaviour was prosecuted only in cases of gross social infraction, that the death penalty deterred reporting or that the relative unpopularity of torture in England meant that fewer names were betrayed – fail to stack up. The simpler reading is true: such broad absence of evidence really is evidence of absence.

The explicit argument of Forbidden Desire has two limbs: Mediterranean cultures shared a pattern of pederastic sodomy, and this pattern was absent from Northern European cultures; both pattern and absence were repeated in these societies’ respective American colonies and in their encounters with indigenous sexuality. A broader revisionism gradually becomes apparent as Malcolm lays out his evidence: he is sceptical about grand claims involving ‘aprioristic theorising’ of any kind, including those which seek ‘gay people’ throughout history. One of the effects of his chronological sweep is to undermine the idea, usually associated with Michel Foucault, that there is a clear watershed before which ‘sexuality’ is classified only as a series of prohibited or permitted acts, and after which it is thought of as an inner inclination and identity. As Foucault put it, ‘the sodomite was someone who committed a sin; the homosexual is now a species.’

Malcolm is a distinguished intellectual historian, but an outsider to the history of sexuality. A startling archival discovery during his research into Ottoman diplomatic relations eventually prompted an academic article, a draft of which provoked a ‘dysfunctional’ response rooted in ‘uninformed dogmatism’ and ‘blind deference to some of the familiar orthodoxies which I was seeking to challenge’. In return, Malcolm mastered a vast trove of scholarship on early modern sexuality, and brings an intellectual historian’s clarity to sodomy as a mutable and gradually evolving legal and theological category. Forbidden Desire is thus the resolution of a scholarly grudge, intended to represent Malcolm’s decisive victory.

Outsiders are well placed to puncture dogmatic consensus. But being an outsider has its limitations, too. Malcolm’s argument is not entirely novel: other scholars have observed similar pan-Mediterranean patterns or raised critical doubts about Northern Europe. Louis Crompton’s equally ambitious but far less detailed and rigorous study, Homosexuality and Civilisation (2003), made similar cross-cultural arguments, especially in comparing persecution in Christendom with Arab Spain. Like Malcolm, Crompton was interested in how often people referred to others as ‘de ce métier’ – of that type. Crompton’s book was also a reminder that the historical study of homosexuality has its own political history: Homosexuality and Civilisation emerged from a university programme that Nebraska state legislators drafted a bill to prohibit. The fear that deviant sexuality can be spread simply by describing it is not only a feature of early modernity.

Foucault argued that the transition from act to identity arose as a consequence of the new legal and medical norms of the 19th century. Historians of sexuality have since pushed that date back while retaining the distinction. One of the triumphs of Forbidden Desire is its demonstration that speculation about coherent sexual inclination – ce métier – is commonplace. Commentators on Aquinas discussed sexual motivation on the part of ‘a person of the improper sex’. The medical authority Pietro d’Abano suggested that adult sodomy arose from a biological malformation – a passage improperly distributed semen to the anus, which could thus feel pleasure. Sodomites themselves sometimes extrapolated from the ambiguity of ‘nature’: if God created the anus so that it was capable of giving pleasure, a Venetian priest observed in 1628, it couldn’t possibly be a sin to use it for that purpose. The Dutch preacher Andreas Klink excused his groping on the grounds that it was an inherited inclination: his mother had yearned too intensely for his absent father during her pregnancy. Towards the end of the period a more confident self-assertion can be detected, especially among the upper classes: French police records mention a chevalier caught cruising in 1720s Paris, who attacked the policemen with his sword and then threatened to have the senior officer dismissed, ‘adding further that he wanted to fuck in the middle of the Tuileries garden without anyone daring to stop him’.

One of Malcolm’s touchstones is Michael Rocke’s Forbidden Friendships (1996), a study of Florence’s Office of the Night, which operated from 1432 until 1502. Over its seventy years, the anti-sodomy magistracy investigated as many as sixteen thousand men – among them Leonardo da Vinci – and levied more than 2400 convictions. (The total population of Florence was then between forty and fifty thousand.) The majority of these cases adhered to the pederastic pattern: the active partner was typically a young adult man – fewer men over the age of thirty (the average age of marriage for a Florentine) are mentioned in the legal record. The records cut across class and occupation, though informers often complained that the office was lenient to the powerful. ‘Infamous’ sodomites were fewer in number but may have persisted throughout adulthood, pursuing relationships with other adults or taking the passive role. Rocke gives an average age for those men of 39 as opposed to 27, and they often remained unmarried. It is clear that Florence was unusual, though it’s not clear whether it was unusually prone to sodomy, unusually assiduous in recording it, or unusual in exercising a relatively mild punitive regime, which has helped make it more visible to posterity. Contemporaries were in little doubt: a German euphemism for sodomy was florenzen, ‘to Florence’. Certain Florentines delighted in their reputation: after Savonarola’s downfall, one city official said: ‘Thank God, now we can sodomise!’

Malcolm rightly says that Rocke’s book is ‘superbly researched’, but it has been taken to imply a broader pattern of toleration than actually existed elsewhere. Forbidden Desire’s astonishingly varied (if sometimes wearing) catalogue of sexual combinations is also a detailed record of brutal punishments. Whatever the perils of historical overidentification, it is hard to quell rage when reading of the two 17-year-old boys burned at the stake in Seville in 1579 for ‘immoral touchings’; of the Sienese law which decreed hanging from the genitals; or of the Venetian cleric placed in a cage in the Piazza San Marco in 1407 so that he could starve to death for the edification of the public – and so that the agents of the law could avoid the moral turpitude associated with killing an ordained man using a more direct method.

Gay history​ gains political urgency from its concern with redress and restitution. For all its various forms of sophistication, its ultimate motive is often a search for people like us, even if they might not have recognised themselves as such. Untypical relationships, distinguished by their long duration or articulations of affection, are the most promising. Florentine records preserve cases of older men besotted by their Ganymedes: the unmarried weaver of whom it was said ‘he sees no other god’ but his boy, or the doctor who ‘commits the greatest follies in the world’ for his. The risible and tragic implications of one-sided boy infatuation were understood long before Thomas Mann.

Traces of real affection are discernible in the archives. A Portuguese sacristan sent plaintive love letters to a guitarist, recalling ‘the heart in your loins, when I touched it with my fingers, and instantly it sprang up!’ The letters survive because the guitarist passed them to the Portuguese Inquisition, confirming modern dating advice about musicians. The same archive holds another set of letters, from a monk to ‘my little bewitcher, my puppy’, in a clearly reciprocated affair of the heart. In his lover’s absence, the monk says, with a taste for understatement still characteristic of modern gay culture: ‘You have already begun to kill me. I die, my dear! Help me; I die with longing for you!’

The kernel of Forbidden Desire is Malcolm’s archival find: an investigation conducted in 1588 by the Venetian high representative in Istanbul, the bailo, into two young members of his household. One, Gianesino, was the son of a local Christian family. The other, younger man, Gregorio, was a barber, recently arrived from Venice. It is difficult to assign precise ages, but Gregorio would have completed an apprenticeship and Malcolm suggests he was ‘just a few years younger than Gianesino’, perhaps in his late teens. By the time of the investigation, Gianesino had been ejected from the household and contact between the two prohibited. An inquiry into whether this prohibition had been flouted evolved into a wider investigation of the relationship itself. Across sixteen manuscript pages, fifteen witnesses from the household and two external merchants are recorded verbatim. Many of them recount seeing the two young men kissing at the window of Gianesino’s little room, or gazing longingly at each other over dinner; ‘everyone in the house’ believed them to be having sex. Gianesino had given Gregorio tokens: silks, satin gloves and cap, a knife. Gregorio had crept out at night even after Gianesino’s eviction and insisted he would see him ‘even if the gallows were prepared for him’. The verdict of the kitchen boy was that ‘the barber was in love with Gianesino, and Gianesino with him.’ Gregorio, when questioned, agreed: ‘I shall tell you the truth,’ he said. ‘I loved him greatly, I took pleasure in his company and I slept with him several times.’ Yet he said they had not had sex, a denial reiterated when a disbelieving bailo asked outright whether he had taken the active or passive role. Gregorio then stated that he had, however, twice had sex with Antonio the carver.

This denial and admission invites speculation. Maybe Gregorio and Gianesino had not yet had penetrative sex, though the baker who shared Gregorio’s room had his doubts. Maybe Gregorio wanted to deflect any potential punishment of his lover by emphasising his more transactional sex with the carver. The transcript mentions a letter from Gregorio’s mother telling him to behave and to refrain from doing anything to cause gossip: formulaic advice, or the urgings of a mother who had reason to be concerned? A servant reminded the bailo that he had predicted Gregorio would be ‘the shame of the household’: it was rumoured that he had offered himself to an Ottoman official in exchange for a ride on his horse. Eventually Gregorio was deported to Crete, where he disappears from the record. Antonio the carver also lost his job. But Gianesino later returned to service, a break in employment being his only recorded punishment. Malcolm suggests that, habituated to Ottoman culture, Gianesino may already have been well acquainted with the pleasures of sodomy.

This body of evidence is extraordinary and rare. An internal inquiry, rather than the record of a trial, it is interested in motivation and the texture of the relationship as much as in sexual acts. Witnesses, and one of the accused, speak in their own words. A scandal among Westerners in the capital of the East is perfect for Malcolm’s argument. Few of the witnesses seem troubled; the bailo himself is most interested in reputational matters, whether anyone outside the household knew of the relationship. Perhaps the tokens of affection and frank expressions of love mean it should be classified as an untypical case, different from the ‘radical separation between affection and sex’ we find elsewhere. Yet if this story had come down to us only as a record of a sentence – guilty of sodomy, resulting in expulsion and deportation – it might easily have been assimilated to that pattern. Countless Gregorios and Gianesinos, and their sincere loves, are lost to us.

One reason Gregorio was not deported immediately was the bailo’s fear that he might convert to Islam. The idea that Christian renegades might convert to take advantage of Ottoman permissiveness was a propagandist’s staple, but not without foundation. The most famous and damaging case was that of Ladislaus Mörth, a senior official at the embassy of the Holy Roman Empire. Mörth had been punished for an affair with a kitchen boy; after his conversion and defection in 1593, he led a raid on the embassy, allowing him to pass secret documents to the sultan. A letter survives, apparently sent from Mörth to Hansel the kitchen boy, in which he declares that ‘it is because of you that I have stayed in this country so that I could – and will – avenge you.’ Malcolm doesn’t mention it, but an eyewitness alleged that Mörth attempted to liberate the boy during the raid.

Apostates attracted lurid slanders of all kinds, and sodomy – a rebellion against natural order – provided an easy analogy with rebellion against religious truth. Spurious material on Islamic libertinism regularly featured in such polemics. Accordingly, scholars have been suspicious about the historical reality behind reports of Ottoman sodomy, even those of foreign residents or visitors to the Ottoman world, tending to dismiss them as literary constructions. Malcolm deplores the influence of Edward Said on this strand of scholarship, in which all European accounts are reduced, in Said’s words (rather less subtly than in his readings), to ‘a way of controlling the redoubtable Orient’. Whatever its convenience for ideological opponents, Malcolm demonstrates conclusively that sex between men was ‘widely existing, and widely known to exist’ in the Ottoman world.

Much of Malcolm’s material will be new to Anglophone readers. A 16th-century fatwa permitted an imam to ban a boy from standing at the front during prayers, lest he distract men from their devotions (though only if the boy was deemed attractive enough to pose such a risk). An 18th-century poet celebrated the dancing boys of the taverns, including ‘girlish Memed’ who ‘has thousands of husbands’. In the tavern’s back rooms they ‘extract milk from the sugar cane’. One Turkish genre laments the appearance of down on the cheeks of the emred – the young boy – and his exit from desirability (‘twink death’ has a long pedigree).

Sodomy was widespread, and the erotic desire for boys was thought ‘not only normal but the norm’ (jurisprudential opinion differed on how severely actual sex should be treated). Seekers of pleasure did not even think boys had to be conscious: some poets celebrate dabīb, ‘crawling like a scorpion’ on sleeping prey, and a rapist’s handbook offers tips such as hooking a thread to find a sleeping boy in the dark, or wearing soft, soundless slippers. Less predatory expressions of desire survive too, promoting putatively chaste contemplation of the divine beauty manifest in the beloved boy. Somewhere between the two is Evliya Çelebi’s celebration of slave boys proffered by their owner, ‘radiant as congealed light’. The Ottoman world was not a sodomite’s paradise, though. Malcolm emphasises that Çelebi’s radiant slaves were ‘vulnerable and powerless’. And desire between adult men was always a different matter: a normal man could desire a boy, and even sodomise him without being considered abnormal, but the ma’būn, an adult man who sought pleasure from being fucked, was thought to suffer from a dangerous and contemptible pathology.

A single sexual pattern may be detectable throughout the Mediterranean, then, but responses differed sharply. In the East, theoretical disapproval was modulated by open cultural celebration and a legal regime that made actual conviction difficult, sustaining a culture of open but discreet sodomy. In Western Christendom, moral disapproval and a harsh legal structure produced a much more secretive, paranoid culture, fearful of socially corrupting vice and anxious about exposure. This peculiar dance of hiding and revealing, shame and secrecy, colours our post-Christian attitudes to sexuality (even in the reversed injunction to ‘come out’). Nor is it difficult to see why a European from the Western Mediterranean, who had acquired a taste for the ‘unspeakable vice’ in his mother culture, might have seen relative freedom in turning renegade.

Sartre once asked:​ does the homosexual exist? It’s not as strange a question as it may seem. In Saint Genet (1952), he was interested in Genet’s homosexuality as ‘the choice of a mind’, an ‘absolute consciousness, which approves of itself and chooses itself’. The willed quality of Genet’s identity, in its compulsive pursuit of vice and abjection, seemed to Sartre more promising than Proust’s ‘cowardly’ detachment from his own sexuality. To present, as Proust had done, the homosexual as a ‘natural species’, an ‘expression of a psychophysiological mechanism’, seemed to him a way of ducking difficult subjective questions. Modern arguments over whether homosexuality is a natural identity, or the subjective product of powerful social forces, would have seemed secondary to Sartre: ‘If homosexuality is the choice of a mind, it becomes a human possibility.’

Actual homosexuals have not usually shared Sartre’s priorities. To have a history is to be real, and to possess political legitimacy. Gay identity is not generally acquired in youth, however, at least not in the context of the family. It is sought out later, often secretly, sometimes transgressing familial expectations. Sex, whether sublime or desultory, does not automatically produce self-understanding. All teenagers experiment in self-fashioning, but gay adolescent Bildung can acquire a peculiar intensity that persists into adult quests for historical and cultural recovery. (My own teenage canon – an overdose of Derek Jarman, Herbert List’s photography, the music of Coil, a little Allen Ginsberg – did not prove overwhelmingly attractive to the pop boys of mid-noughties Soho.) For those who grow up paralysed by shame and self-disgust, the discovery of people like oneself in history, or of the mutability of sexual customs and social mores, can act as a catalyst for self-acceptance and sexual flourishing.

If the Proustian ‘natural species’ of homosexual recurs through global history, and especially in ‘primitive’ cultures free of the disfiguring neuroses of civilisation, then we can present a cogent case for natural rights, political equality and institutional participation. Homophobia is both a moral and historical category error. Score one for Marcel and Lady Gaga: we were born this way. Strategic essentialism of this kind has been a route to rapid social change, of which legislative advances (decriminalisation, age of consent, marriage) are an index. But it has also been attended by uncertainties and evasions. As Malcolm, who has written extensively on Balkan history, remarks, pioneering gay historians resembled ‘the patriotic historians of newly formed nations’ in their eagerness for legitimation and their willingness to see what they so ardently wished to see.

History breeds discomfort. Foucault’s basic question is still of great interest: what is it about sex that makes people believe it expresses fundamental truths about the self, and when did that belief arise? Being neither entirely alien nor entirely familiar, early modernity can engender particular anxiety when thinking about this question. If the prehistory of homosexuality cannot be disentangled from that of pederasty, exhuming it from the archive might offer persecutors a powerful weapon (not that they have been restrained by a lack of pretext). Even allowing for incentives to betray or misrepresent, and the inevitable slant of legal records, it is a history, in part, of coercion, domination and rape, often of boys we now think of as children. These facts do not become less uncomfortable if we admit that historical views of maturity are not our own. Malcolm is not detained by ‘presentism’, but it is harder for a reader to avoid these issues.

Modern homosexuality is more than, and qualitatively different from, its antecedents (as is modern heterosexuality). But our present standards aren’t without hypocrisies. The long historical view might prompt examination of our own norms, which conceive of all parties as free agents making free choices, but often conceal compromise, compulsion or desperation. Nor do these norms adequately address the erotic thrill of inequality – of age, class, power, attractiveness – sought by many, consciously or otherwise.

One thread of Sartre’s argument was that homosexuality poses questions about the wider system of which it is part, about the scope of human identity in general. Those questions can become very broad: Gramsci speculated that as each historical epoch alters the way it lives and works, successive crises of puritanism and libertinism reshape families and sexual relations to sustain the new order. This pattern of repression and release has always interested queer and feminist historians, offering the possibility that one could analyse changes in the family or the status of sexual minorities and thereby gain an insight into wider alterations in political and economic structures. No gay reader of Gramsci can fail to see an uncomfortable homology between a culture of individualist hedonism, often billed as subversive, and the preferred virtues of neoliberalism.

Causal inferences of this kind are hard to establish credibly, and often fall prey to wishful thinking; truly persuasive large-scale accounts are rare (Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony, posthumously published in 2020, is a bold but sketchy attempt). Queer studies, in particular, can be pulled between the desire to accord marginal sexualities proper recognition and attention, and the political intuition that doing this might somehow help unstitch the social order in which they are seeking recognition, or even capitalism itself. As a former Spectator and Telegraph columnist, Malcolm is unlikely to favour such projects. Forbidden Desire is agnostic about broad socio-economic pronouncements, preferring a more modest comparative analysis of marriage age, and noting the larger proportion of unmarried and working women in Northern Europe.

What about women? Forbidden Desire lacks the guilty appendix on lesbian history that often concludes studies of male sexuality. Lesbianism’s archival presence is comparatively tiny, but Malcolm also rejects a ‘distinctively modern’ unitary conception of homosexuality. Women thus appear only sporadically, occasionally included in the category of sodomy as participants in unnatural – i.e. non-vaginal – sex, and sometimes as a negative cause of sodomy, as being repellent to some men. Effeminacy, with its implied injury to masculinity, is a perennial anxiety; writers on sodomy reserve special contempt for the effeminate. The assumption – based on a crude translation of gender roles – that effeminacy entailed sexual passivity was not corroborated in reality.

Interpreting cross-dressing or gender play is hard. Evidence from the Molly houses, early 18th-century pubs where men met for socialising and sex, some wearing women’s clothes, only underscores the difficulty. Some scholars have attempted to link the Mollies with dandyism and wider changes in attitudes to gender, but the episode was brief, confined mostly to London and to a specific class – not gentlemen. Dressing in women’s clothes did not necessarily imply a more durable effeminacy: Lucy Cooper was, in ordinary life, ‘a Herculean Coal-heaver’. But subjectivity is always mysterious: could this Hercules have felt briefly more real, or freer, as Lucy? Did he feel a loss each time he took off the wig?

One individual, the indelibly named Princess Seraphina, seems to have lived more widely in that identity. According to court testimony she took ‘great Delight in Balls and Masquerades, and always chuses to appear at them in a Female Dress, that she may have the Satisfaction of dancing with fine Gentlemen’. Yet this evidence exists only because the princess – under her male name, John Cooper – unwisely took a man to court for stealing her male clothes. It would be a wishful misreading to call this a trans prehistory, but nor is it obviously and simply gay. It is evidence of a much more fluid relationship between sexual orientation and gender display than formal categorisation allows for, but one which can be observed in many queer spaces today. The list of names provided by Malcolm, none of which would be out of place on RuPaul’s Drag Race, suggests how playful this brief subculture was, a joke that was not entirely a joke: Miss Kitten, Moll Irons, Flying Horse Moll, Pomegranate Molly, Dip-Candle Mary, Aunt England, Orange Deb, Nurse Mitchell, Susan Guzzle, Miss Sweet Lips, Green-Pea Moll, Plump Nelly.

Malcolm is a superb reader of the legal archive. But scholars searching for historical traces of homosexuality often look to culture for their evidence. Malcolm cites Alan Bray’s warning that plays or poems are easy to misread and make weak bases for social generalisation – a rule of thumb Bray himself disobeyed – and takes obvious pleasure in exposing academic clangers. Most of these misreadings arise from some combination of poor scriptural literacy, spotty primary reading and a determination to see in texts ‘exactly what they want to find’. Literary historians, Malcolm claims, read too much into the satirical trope of the roué’s debauched progress from whore to catamite to goat, or inflate the presence of same-sex desire in Elizabethan theatre, or cynically rebrand innocuous texts ‘on the basis of little more than word association’. By the end of the book, the phrase ‘literary historian’ has acquired an unmistakable stench.

Some of Malcolm’s contempt is deserved, and the tortuous academese he quotes suffers when set against his own sharp prose. Of course it is bad reading to reduce all devotional language to oblique expressions of a secular theme, whether sociopolitical power or, in this case, sublated libido. But some of Malcolm’s reservations concern debatable expressions of methodological difference: a satirical trope might be a poor indicator of social reality, as he says, but does that mean we should infer nothing from its use by multiple satirists? Is it really ‘inconceivable’ that Donne’s readers might have found some residue of the erotic in his plea to ‘ravish me’ at the conclusion of Holy Sonnet 14, or that this gains its power by remaining unregenerate and divinely transfigured all at once? It is true, as Malcolm suggests, that devout readers of the frankly erotic Song of Songs understood it as an allegory for the relationship between God and Church, or Christ and the individual soul. But this is less an explanation of Donne’s poem than its enabling precedent.

Astudy​ that spans 350 years will necessarily treat some evidence peremptorily, and when Malcolm touches on one’s personal canon it stings. The chaste homophilia of Marsilio Ficino should surely be balanced by the franker eroticism of Angelo Poliziano (named twice in the records of the Office of the Night). Poliziano’s Greek epigrams to his golden-curled Ganymede, plead with him to ‘intertwine your tongue with mine’; it was a posthumous slander that he died raving of love for a boy, but not a baseless one. Passignano’s Bathers at San Niccolò (1600) is indeed a ‘remarkable’ painting, which ought to be more widely appreciated, but it doesn’t seem plausible to explain away the frank look of love between the male couple at its centre as a hallucination on the part of the modern viewer, simply because they do not fit the dominant age differentiated pattern.

Poetry is especially tricky. Malcolm only briefly mentions Dante, who sits outside his period, but still manages to dismiss any link between humanism and sodomy. Yet Dante’s treatment of sodomites is more complex than Malcolm allows. It is certainly true that some critics have been puzzled by Brunetto Latini’s placement in the circle of the sodomites, and have sought to explain his ‘crime against nature’ by framing it as a perversion of language or reason, or by deliberately misreading the Inferno’s moral geography. All this shows is that straight critics, too, make wishful readings. Gay readers of Dante have been more attuned to the complex and tender respect that Dante accords Latini, who was his teacher, and to the presence of saved sodomites expiating their lust in Purgatorio 26. Even in hell, his images are striking. In Inferno he describes the crowd of sodomites:

                                        ciascuna
ci riguardava come suol da sera
guardare uno altro sotto nuova luna;
e sì ver’ noi aguzzavan le ciglia
come ’l vecchio sartor fa ne la cruna.

                                        each
stared steadily at us, as in the dusk,
beneath the new moon, men look at each other.
They knit their brows and squinted at us – just
as an old tailor at his needle’s eye.

I am not the only gay reader of Dante to wonder if this image, of men searching each other’s faces in the almost dark, reflects some culture of public cruising. (In later Florence, 28 per cent of the Office of the Night’s recorded cases took place outdoors.) The gay dantista, Robert Duncan, took this close reading as the core of a sonnet written in 1964, balanced on an exquisite double negative, about a love ‘of which Dante does not speak unkindly’:

Sharpening their vision, Dante says, like a man
seeking to thread a needle
They try the eyes of other men
Towards that eye of the needle
Love has appointed there
For a joining that is not easy.

Boccaccio, one of the earliest commentators on the Commedia, claimed that Dante was well acquainted with the sin of (heterosexual) lust, and thus was prone to sophisticated reflection on it. Other early readers detected his generosity, but found it suspect: one important anonymous commentary suggested that Dante was ‘stained with this vice’ because he is kindest to sinners whose sin he shares. Benvenuto da Imola simply thanked him for outing Latini and friends for the edification of posterity. Dante wasn’t an anachronistic gay liberationist, but his earliest readers saw that there was something unusual in his treatment of sodomites; his poem is more than a gross condensing of contemporary dogmas.

Shakespeare, who has not lacked for gay readers, is more important to Malcolm’s argument. He mentions a small cluster of classicising late 16th-century homoerotic verses, including Marlowe’s frankly homophile Neptune in Hero and Leander and Richard Barnfield’s Ganymede sonnets. It seems impossible not to add Shakespeare’s sonnets to this group, but according to Malcolm the ‘whole character of Shakespeare’s work is very different’. Unlike the Barnfield sonnets, which seek sexual consummation, the Shakespearean sonnets take the erotic attraction (which the speaker ‘explicitly eschews’) as a predicate for meditation on ‘age, youth, time, hope, regret, self-love, self-abnegation, possession, loss and so on’.

Many Shakespeareans have been discomfited by the sonnets. In the preface to his edition of 1964, Auden, in a gesture of characteristic cowardice, refused ‘to secure our Top-Bard as a patron saint of the Homintern’. Coleridge thought the male addressee ‘a purposed blind’. A contemptuous (but perceptive) early reader simply scrawled on his copy ‘what a heap of wretched Infidel Stuff’. For Malcolm, the clincher is Sonnet 20, addressed to the ‘master mistress of my passion’, which laments that, since nature has ‘pricked thee out for women’s pleasure’, he must abandon any attempt at sex. Not all readers have found this apparent naivety so convincing.

Making inferences about Shakespeare’s sex life is a fool’s game, and usually says more about the critic than the playwright. But Malcolm is unusually coy about whether he believes the sonnets to have been driven by any real erotic attachment, or whether they are only masterful uses of a convention. He is surely right that Shakespeare stretches the sonnet, which his plays sometimes mock, far beyond its conventional bounds for purposes that transcend the erotic. But Malcolm’s particular focus on the act of sodomy, and his tendency to dissolve queer readings of Shakespeare into early modern friendship culture (this is also the basis for his dismissal of homoerotic readings of Coriolanus), obscures the sonnets’ homophile intensity, which extends far beyond the sequence’s early disclaimer: Shakespeare is tortured with sleeplessness and in bondage like a slave, a condition he both desires and deplores. C.S. Lewis, an honest reader, thought the language was ‘too lover-like for ordinary male friendship’, finding ‘no real parallel to such language between friends in 16th-century literature’.

Given Forbidden Desire’s careful exposure of premodern thinking about sexual inclination, it might surprise some readers that in its conclusion Malcolm comes out, moved by his evidence, as a ‘moderate constructionist’. It shouldn’t. Malcolm cites as his reason the ‘significant difference’ between modern understandings of sexuality and the ‘same-sexuals’ he discusses. As John Boswell observed when reflecting on the reception of his own work in the 1980s, advocates of either pure essentialism or pure constructionism mostly exist as straw men. Our own desire can strike us as alien and predictable by turn, make us seem fools or madmen, even to ourselves. Its hybrid character, our own and not our own, accounts for some of its fascination. If there is any lesson from history, it is that few sexual orthodoxies endure. Our own socio-sexual architecture, with its fissile taxonomy of identities and non-identities, its monogamies (absolute, conditional or hypocritical) and chaotic experiments in openness, might well strike future generations as quaint or barbaric.

So vast and learned a book deserves to change its field. The patterns it identifies will become a common heuristic for studies of sexuality in early modernity, and ought to inspire research into comparatively neglected Greek and Slavic sources, which might help substantiate Malcolm’s suspicion that the Mediterranean pattern was a diminished survival of ancient pederasty, stripped of its social and affective components. (France, the only country to display both of Malcolm’s patterns, also cries out for more attention.) Just as important, the book restores actual sex to its central position in a field which can lose itself dilating on the act’s symbolic value as a marker of a vague, if politically agreeable, ‘otherness’.

But sex is not all we are. It is Gianesino’s gift of silks to his beloved, and Gregorio’s insistence, stood in front of his powerful inquisitor, that he loves Gianesino, that lingers in the imagination. Bray remarked of his pioneering choice to write on ‘homosexuality’ in the Renaissance that contemporary terms – ‘Ganymede, pathic, cinaedus, catamite, bugger, ingle, sodomite’ – survived, if at all, as slurs. The types they refer to are mostly lost to us. Malcolm suggests that the ‘limited and particular identities’ of early modern sodomites might attune us to the ‘different kinds of modern homosexual’, though what these types may be, why the unitary category of ‘homosexual’ deserves such scepticism or what historical or political advantage there may be in breaking it apart, is left to the reader to imagine. It is possible to admire Malcolm’s sceptical intelligence while wondering if his detachment has produced a monumental collection of individual cases, which provides the modern gay reader with his history while depriving him of an easy way to talk about it. As Crompton put it in his preface to Homosexuality and Civilisation, ‘the sexual fact and the possibility of human love and devotion’ remained constant over time, whatever the vocabulary. ‘These “sodomites” were human beings with whom the modern gay man may claim brotherhood and the modern lesbian recognise as sisters.’ Such an injunction might trouble the historian. But as Bray put it in the preface to his final book, readers can and will – and must – appropriate the past for themselves.