Our last set of readings arrived to one conclusion: there were homosexuals or gay people in the Middle Ages. Any other metaphor, poetic image or even any convention about using male pronouns to talk about women cannot keep our attention away from this fact: the elephant in the room. The idea of sex in the Middle Ages was strongly identified to intercourse, a possibility given by nature only to men, therefore, the absence of lesbianism in the discourse about (against) homosexuality should not surprise us.
The Catholic clergy has been always a common place of sexual tension: sex of any class was forbidden. One can think that many of men enclosed together and talking about love could find a lot of temptation, even though if they were not originally gay, as happens in our prisons nowadays. Young boys without secondary sexual characteristics were appealing to the old priests and the boiling activity of their adolescence was also an open door for temptation and consummation.
Women dressed as males are also a common place in the Middle Ages, beginning with Jean D'Arc herself. However, the male clothes on a woman often were justified by some higher purpose, but the question about the sexuality of those virgins in male garments is at least intriguing... or may be not, and the answer is more obvious than what The Romance of Silence wants to admit.
In both cases, male and female, friendship was in fuzzy place, and the terms to refer to it were quite ambiguous. Except in some poems, as in the Jewish poets studied in our last sessions, the terms to describe men are quite feminine, as Perceval's red lips.
Personally, I think that sexuality of any kind is impossible to repress and that it finds always the ways for its consummation. The Middle Ages seems to be not an exception. However, was it not a veiled subject? The Roman of Silence did not talk about sex, except for Eufeme who was under a wrong impression. There were rules of alleged grammar that allowed the poet to use male pronouns to talk about women. Were not those a strategy to actually talk about men and make the poems pass as an stylistic innovation, even though if they were used to actually talk about women many times?
Probably sexual indiscretions were not weird, and only characters as this Allan of Lille were actually concerned about the offenses against Nature and not only about only keeping the face. Anyway, sex of any kind was illicit outside of marriage, and, if we believe our texts, Middle Ages were plenty of it!
What I think we need to be careful of is that, despite the fact that their desire may have been directed toward those of the same sex, these male poets would probably not have identified as homosexual, since the idea of sexual identity is a modern invention. Of course now, removed from their context, we can feel free to identify these poets as we see fit, and we could feel safe in saying that they were homosexual or gay.
ReplyDeleteMore interesting to me than simply saying that sexual desire, though illicit, was present in medieval times, is examining the ways in which that desire was expressed within strict frameworks, the ways that writers of fiction were able to subvert expectations to tell stories, or write poems that were true to their desires, if not the acceptable desires of their times. In the case of the Arabic poet, this meant caging a little bit on whether the object of his desire is male or female - in "covering" the genitals, as our reading said. But we can see this "contained subversion" (to borrow a phrase from Aia's presentation) operating in almost all of our reading this semester. Whether it is Silence's ability to be the best knight before she is married off to the king, or the Saracen knights in Roland demonstrating traditionally Christian values, these characters are far more complex than we may have expected.
And if we say sodomites?
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