queer masculinities

226 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
entered France from Italy in the sixteenth century, it provoked a rejection
of the Italian style in culture and politics as foreign and ‘unnatural.’
At the same time, ‘French popular opinion drew a strong
connection between Italians in France and homosexual behaviour’,
such that one historian describes the anti-Italian rhetoric of the period
as ‘xeno-homophobic’. 73 These negative connotations of ‘Italian taste’
may have faded by the late eighteenth century; indeed, Olivier Blanc
argues that by then the phrase was ‘straightforwardly positive’ because
the educated looked on Italy as ‘a cradle of civilization.’ 74
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its emphasis on Reason
and human rights, helped to modify attitudes toward sodomy, at least
among the elites. Enlightenment writers and philosophers never
endorsed homosexuality and frequently charged their enemies with
practising it – even Voltaire ridiculed his clerical enemies, particularly
the Jesuits, as prone to sodomy – but they did engage in serious philosophical
and scientific discussions of it. As Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., has
explained: ‘At a time when a distinct sodomitical subculture was becoming
increasingly visible in Paris, philosophes and pornographers started
to set out the kinds of arguments that could be made to defend same-sex
sexuality. Without always realizing the radical implications of their projects,
they undermined the church’s condemnation of sodomy, and they
decried the cruel penalties the law prescribed for sodomites. As part of
their more general efforts to study culture and nature, they also found
same-sex sexuality throughout history and around the globe.’ 75
Was this why, on the eve of the French Revolution, some pederasts
were becoming more defiant of authority and more willing to stand on
their rights? In February 1781, when police suggested to one suspected
sodomite, a 26-year-old unemployed clerk, that he was wasting his
time in the disreputable taverns of the Porcherons district, he replied
‘that everyone takes his pleasure where he finds it.’ Ten months later,
when the police reproached a 19-year-old for frequenting the public
promenades ‘at suspect times,’ he replied ‘that it was to take walks
there and that everybody is free.’ Arrested as a pederast in May 1785, a
28-year-old assistant tailor declared ‘that he was not the only one, that
he was harming nobody but himself, that he had given himself over to
it very young, and that it was in his blood.’ 76
At the beginning of the French Revolution, a number of satirical
pamphlets purported to call for recognition of the rights of sodomites.
In The Little Buggers of the Riding School (1790), for example, ‘M. de. V.’
(the Marquis de la Villette) declared that, according to the principles of
‘individual liberty, decreed by our most august and most respectable