queer masculinities

Preface
xv
homosexuals as if the event were de rigeur a rite de passage without
which the particular society could move forward or progress. Until the
1970s, however, it was almost impossible to discuss genocide neutrally
and calmly: the subject was too explosive and politically charged, tantamount
in some ways to the incredible abuse and exploitation of children
today; the last taboo, it seems, in our brave new world in 2005.
Since the 1970s, however, much has been written about genocide
and its horrors. But we still cover our tracks when treading delicately
over the ground of sexual genocide, especially of the types found in
this book. The mass murder of men who have loved other men seems
shocking to us, whether in sixteenth-century Switzerland or Nazi
Germany, yet continues – even now – to be a politically explosive
subject in many quarters. It is asking the wrong question to inquire
what it is about countries and their rulers that compels them to murder
their homosexuals en masse. These new comparative essays demonstrate
how much genocide was carried out in the name of religion and
purification. Over and over again in these case studies of historical
retrieval the subject is murder in the name of purging to cleanse, obliterating
to purify. It is as if the anthropologist, among the scholars, is
best poised of all to explain why such genocide was then permitted.
Surely, the clues to same-sex genocide lie far from the spheres of
national character and national stereotype: one doesn’t want to be
essentialistic on the matter but there must be something almost universal
in the human psyche that solidifies itself, from time to time and
almost hysterically, behind the empowered prosecutors and murderers.
Genocide came early in Switzerland, later – in the 1730s – in the
Netherlands, later yet in Germany. Yet in all these places the historical
record reeks with the rhetoric of crimes purged, pollutions cleansed,
decadence eradicated. It goes too far based on the available evidence to
purport that all these devastations of a minority – men who loved
other men or abused them – were merely the dark work of Christianity;
if not the dirty work of church fathers themselves, then the hangings
of those persecutors justifying oppression in the name of the church.
The countries without purges and genocides are safer havens than the
rest. But even the Netherlands – historically among the most tolerant
of places on earth for sodomites and homosexuals – only became
‘enlightened’ about same-sex masculinity and love about a hundred
years ago as the Dutch historians and sociologists have shown.
These illuminating essays also amount to mini-histories of violence:
if not of groups pitted against other seemingly identical groups across
national boundaries, then of individuals plotting against others. The