queer masculinities

40 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
were signs of a ‘homosexual panic’ in Inquisitorial practice: in October
1620 the Inquisitor General wrote to the king that sins of sodomy and
witchcraft were spreading in the kingdom and it was necessary to
respond with rigorous punishment to avoid great ills. 11 In August 1624
and again in 1628 there were calls for punishments to appease an
angry divinity and to satisfy public opinion. 12 In 1631 it was said that
divine anger has been revealed by ‘things which have taken place
against this monarchy’ and that the remedy is punishment of ‘evil sins
of a scandalous and bad quality.’ 13 The height of the campaign against
sodomy took place after the restoration in 1640 of a Portuguese
dynasty, the Braganza family.
The study of evolving clerical commentary on matters of sexuality is
informative. 14 Rodrigo do Porto published various manuals of confessors
and penitents in the sixteenth century (1549, 1552, 1579). He had
much to say on ‘pollution’, particularly if ejaculation resulted from
fantasizing about someone or the wish to ‘carry out this vile delectation’,
although he excused involuntary nocturnal emission or ‘flux’ of
semen. He addressed these thoughts particularly for the adolescent
male: ‘Whence they say that the chaste youth is a martyr without shedding
blood, because of the continence of a man youth, which according
to the scriptures is only given by God to man.’ 15
The publications of one late Inquisitor General and Confessor of
Queen Maria I, Inácio de São Caetano (1719–88) addressed with some
precision issues of sexual behaviors and included among them samesex
practices. This penitential literature with the approval of the state
offered the paradigm of repentance and chastity as the desirable lifetime
option for males who felt attracted to sexual relations with their
own sex. Six volumes (in Portuguese) of the Idea Of A Perfect Priest
Instructed In His Obligations And Instructing His Flock In Solid Piety
(1772–85) could be complemented with his Compendium Of Evangelical
Moral Theology To Train Worthy Ministers Of The Sacrament Of Penance
And Spiritual Directors, Much Extended In This Second Printing (1784) 6
vols. He stressed that spiritual directors should be aware of the uses,
customs and royal laws in force in the kingdom and that they should
explain truth in Portuguese and not in Latin.
As a youth São Caetano had been a military cadet and had probably
heard and seen more than spiritual exercises. There was a long discussion
of impurity and he warned his clerical readers against it not only
for temporal goods and bodily health but because of the damage this
vice caused to the soul of whoever gave himself up to it. In volume
three of the Compendium he dealt with sexuality, and there he dis-