queer masculinities

50 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
in 1799, probably because the Inquisitors noted what the reader two
hundred years later sees. There was no clear evidence or witness from
any participant in the sodomy, save the tailor who claimed to have
seen the muleteer João Tiago in flagrante. When questioned, the then
married João Tiago said nothing about it. The investigators thought he
was not telling the truth. No other witnesses could or would name the
‘moços solteiros’ and none of the latter actually volunteered or testified
to committing an offence, which would cause them to be liable to punishment.
Probably there was here a kind of village solidarity against an
external intrusion of moral retribution. Collective community disapproval
over the butcher’s appetite for the unmarried young men in the
village was one thing, but it was quite another to denounce and ruin a
man born and raised in their community and whom many had known
all their lives. 33
Another enquiry from the 1790s, this time of a Portuguese immigrant
in his fifties in Minas Gerais, Brazil, also had references to
attempts to verify if his genitals were those of a man or a hermaphrodite.
In 1796 a secular priest normally resident in São José in Minas,
but who made his denunciation at the Carmelite monastery in Rio de
Janeiro, identified a habitual and recidivist receptive sodomite, Manuel
José Correia. The priest claimed the individual, also from São José and
at present in the city of Rio, was notorious for ‘illicit dealings with men
in the abominable sin of sodomy, being the patient.’ He enumerated
nine partners: two free and two slave mulattoes, and five white men.
Because of the notoriety of these ‘insults’ he was ordered into the presence
of the local judge ordinary and two doctors who examined his
body in São José. They attested he was anatomically male ‘a complete
man’ – and not a woman. The priest said he was denouncing Correia in
Rio because he knew of this sin which could bring about the excommunication
of the accused, and that he was troubled by the ‘most
grave scandal’ aroused by the appetites of the denounced.
The accused man was a militia captain who had already fled to the
coastal city having sold almost all his property. The priest who made
the denunciation before the Carmelite Nascentes in Rio in November
1796 had been anxious for the arrest of the sodomite the year before,
in Minas, as laid out in a letter to the commissioner sent from São José
do Rio das Mortes. Further enquiries were ordered from Lisbon. These
revealed that the denouncer priest, Doutor Manuel Rodrigues Pacheco,
had avoided the follow-up investigation. It also transpired that a
brother of Pacheco and the accused had a lawsuit for damages, which
added to more than nine thousand cruzados. That dispute produced