queer masculinities

172 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
The second important contribution of Vainfas’ study is the suggestion
that bisexuality was much more common than many scholars,
like Mott and Boswell, have been willing to admit. Indeed, Vainfas
seems to point out the obvious when he reminds the reader that many
of the men accused of sodomy were married or engaged to women.
This does not prove they were not exclusively interested in men while
using marriage as a shield, but it does complicate the proposition of
such men being ‘gay.’ This is fraught with complexity, for it hinges on
the man’s personal conception of himself, and as such may ultimately
be inaccessible to the historian. Functionally, however, Vainfas is
correct to call such men bisexual in the sense that they did not dedicate
their entire lives to sodomy as an erotic expression. 24
A third scholar who has touched on homosexuality in colonial
Brazil, though to a lesser extent, is the above-mentioned Emanuel
Araújo. Like Mott and Vainfas he depicts the nexus of moral and religious
condemnation of homosexuality with its apparent frequency in
colonial Brazil. His is a more legally oriented study and places emphasis
on the ways that law overlapped with and drew upon the religious
view of homosexuality. In his study The Theater of Vices, Araújo offers a
succinct overview of the way that Portuguese law adopted a theological
metaphysics and anthropology of sodomy. This understanding drew
first on Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians where he says that neither fornicators,
adulterers nor sodomites will inherit the kingdom of heaven
(I Corinthians 6) and was essentially codified by Aquinas in his Summa
Theologiae. A religious exegesis may seem strange to a twenty-firstcentury
reader, but in Iberian law there was never a division between
religion and religious ‘truths’ and law since Iberian jurists always construed
the latter as a redaction of divine truths. 25 Araújo offers a
concise summary of this tradition and its relationship to the behavior
and prosecution of homosexuality in colonial Brazil.
The work by Mott, Vainfas and Araújo suggests new avenues for both
the history of mentality and homosexuality in other contexts, with
their assiduous eye for detail and the difficulties in examining a topic
usually left out of both the historical and historiographic record. Their
ability to recount not only the aspects of inquisitional investigation
but also their attention to the ways that such investigation reveal
details germane to social history have given flower to Costa Pôrto’s
suggestion that ‘between the lines’ one might reconstruct the mental
and social world of people otherwise accused of crimes. 26
Likewise, Vainfas’ discussions of sodomy demonstrate the difficulties
encompassed in simple inversion of elite sources. Some people rejected