queer masculinities

112 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
Petr Basmanov. 23 In Muscovite political symbolism same-sex love
between men could be an emphatically negative charge.
The actual value attached to everyday sexual intimacies between
men may not, however, have been as negative, as a recently discovered
petition of 1616, held in Swedish state archives, suggests. In this document
an unnamed petitioner complains (to someone in authority who
is also unnamed) that a man called Fedor exploited his youth and
‘stupidity’ to have sex with him over four years. Fedor then extorted
hefty sums of money from him by threatening to tell his father about
their relations. The author does not complain about the nature of the
sexual relationship but rather about the extortion he has suffered. 24
Whether as symbol of political disgrace, or as a facet of everyday intimacy,
sodomy in early modern Russia had complex meanings that
cannot be lightly equated to an imagined gay golden age of classical
antiquity.
Karlinsky’s interpretation also suffers by downplaying the
significance of Russian Orthodoxy. The numerous religious texts available
for the period deserve more careful attention from historians of
sexual diversity. These texts are significant because Muscovites created
them themselves, and thus they can tell us something about how early
modern Russians thought about sexually transgressive behaviour. Eve
Levin’s study of early Orthodox ecclesiastical material – penitential
manuals and especially guides to clerics for questioning the faithful
during confession – situates ‘homosexuality’ among the sexual practices
regarded by clerics as ‘unnatural’, along with sodomy (anal intercourse
regardless of the gender of partners), bestiality and
masturbation. 25 Levin notes some of the characteristics of ‘male homosexuality’
in the Orthodox world that these manuals reveal. Priests
asked questions that betray a hierarchy of sexual practices, from masturbation
to anal penetration, which valued the preservation of masculine
gender roles. The Church regarded acts that did not imitate
male–female copulation as relatively harmless. Younger men were
treated more leniently when ‘sin’ between men was under consideration.
26 The penitential guides, if examined systematically by scholars
familiar with the social and cultural history of same-sex relations in
other jurisdictions, would probably yield further insights about
popular eroticism between Muscovite men. A recent Russian-language
publication of these guides suggests two themes that could be pursued.
Muscovite priests of the fifteenth century thought that men saw in the
male youth (otrok) a fair substitute for ‘women and girls’ with whom
they might have sex. 27 An examination of age thresholds in male–male