queer masculinities

42 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
rather more appropriately, indecent touchings (‘tocamentos torpes’).
This leads one to think that the laws were a kind of judicial
Gongorism, grotesque in its exaggeration of the gap from judicial prohibitions
and social reality.
Just as the church considered masturbation as a sin so the law was to
consider it a crime although in practice confessors and judges took this
lightly. This reaches back to the deeply-rooted campaigns against masturbation
in the confessional manuals of Catholic Europe.
By the last third of the eighteenth century things were quite different.
After 1760 the pursuit of lay sodomites was rare indeed. Priests
who made sexual advances to penitents or to servants were reported
and investigated, and so too was a child rapist.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a medicalized discourse
emerged, dating from Tissot and others, which taught that
‘wasteage’ of seed was bad for health. Melo Franco argued in that way
in 1794 in a book published in Lisbon. 18 It has been argued that this is
a Protestant-based posture where semen, like capital, should be accumulated.
However it figured in much Catholic penitential writing. The
age cohort of prepubescent boys had its own internal lines of interdiction:
‘good’ boys knew it was not pious to masturbate, and nonplaying
boys were uninterested in doing so with partners. Others saw
masturbatory activities as age complicit: it was outside of the grown-up
world, and above all was self consciously a preliminary to more adult
activities with the opposite sex. In demonstrating that masturbation is
a mortal sin Caetano included among other causes the sight of bodies
of the same sex. He also warned against touching the body, excepting
boys who do so unintentionally when swimming, but if they do so
deliberately it is sinful.
Medical discourse
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the kind of medicalized
investigations, which were the Portuguese contribution to an international
movement, included some historical references to time before
1800. Adelino Silva’s 1896 book on sexual inversion was the first work
on homosexuality to be published in Portugal. Subsequently Francisco
Ferraz de Macedo, Arlindo Camillo Monteiro, Asdrubal António
d’Aguiar and others would publish texts dealing with male homosexuality.
19 That of Monteiro in 1922 was significantly published in a
limited edition of five hundred copies all of which were signed by the
author. A note printed on the front page says it was for the use of the