queer masculinities

174 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
other hand, in 1659, 14 young men were burned alive in a public spectacle
in Mexico after having been convicted by civil authorities. 32 Yet
we have no extant evidence of other similar civil proceedings against
sodomites in colonial Latin America.
No one is quite sure where the boundaries of jurisdiction began and
ended for the crime of sodomy. In Spain jurisdiction was locally determined
and whereas some inquisitional tribunals were vigorous in prosecuting
sodomy, like Valencia and Aragon, others, like Castile, virtually
ignored it. 33 Lack of historical investigation into jurisdiction and a
paucity of sources obscure the case of the Spanish Americas even more
than that of the metropole. Nevertheless, numerous ambitious works
have come to grapple with the questions of homosexuality, male
friendship, and sodomitical ‘culture’ in colonial Spanish America from
which we can draw some provisional conclusions. First, sodomy was
far from acceptable. In fact, it was considered the most heinous offense
to God, Crown, and society imaginable, at least if one trusts the elite
and official sources. Likewise, there was a distinction between the
active and passive partners. This seems to have been largely a functional
distinction and in fact the active partner seems to have been
considered even guiltier from the point of view of natural law and
Aristotelian metaphysics. As in the case of Portuguese law, Spanish law
relied on the religious view that any sexual activity that did not have
procreation as its goal was a sin against nature and a violation of the
Sixth Commandment. 34
Despite the absence of a legal distinction between active and passive
partners, some historians insist on the corollary of the honor–shame
model that suggests that the passive partner is rendered female and the
active partner escapes opprobrium. The most forceful proponent for an
ideology of strict active–passive identities in the Spanish Americas is
Richard Trexler, who published such a theory under the aptly titled
book, Sex and Conquest. 35 Written in a polemic tone, Trexler ignores a
vast body of early-modern theological and natural law scholarship,
archival evidence, and important secondary material to conclude
(dubiously) that all sex is rape. This is a somewhat clichéd rendering of
the Andrea Dworkin dogma that assumes that given the opportunity
all men would be rapists and that intercourse is necessarily a reflection
of patriarchal values. 36 Thus Trexler attempts to prove the corollary of
the Paz mythology with syllogism rather than with evidence. His logic
can be summarized: if all intercourse is rape and conquest was fraught
with sexual symbolism and actual rape, then conquest is rape and
therefore to penetrate is to conquer; ergo, the penetrator is a conqueror