queer masculinities

Theo van der Meer: Holland 59
The events of 1730 did not just mean that the Republic entered an
era of persecution of homosexual behavior – waves of arrests like the
one in that year repeated themselves several times during the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries – but also changed the meaning
of the crimen nefandum. The discovery of networks of sodomites in
which men of all social strata participated, as well as of public and
private meeting sites, the realization that many participants had developed
an effete body language and a sodomite-lingo – in short subcultural
phenomena – caused homosexual behaviour to become part of
public discourse.
Following the discoveries the administrative council in the province
of Holland issued an edict instructing local courts to execute convicted
sodomites publicly. 6 The prosecutions were accompanied by scholarly
and popular publications. Ministers of the reformed church began to
publish books, because, as one of them wrote, there was a time to be
silent and a time to speak out and, with the discovery of the sodomite
networks, the latter had now begun. 7 They especially addressed the
issue as to why sodomy had ‘suddenly’ become so widespread. Literary
and other journals followed suit, sentences were published and even
advertised abroad. Street-singers produced ditties, sung at the occasions
of the public executions. Poems honoring the pursuit of the courts and
some prints picturing the recent discoveries and executions were sold. 8
Extensive trial records from that date onwards were kept, not least of
all to show posterity that everything had been done ‘to wipe this vice’
from the face of the earth. 9 Whereas knowledge about homosexual
behavior previously had been considered dangerous since it might
provoke unnatural desires, from 1730 onwards, knowledge was
thought to deter people from engaging in such behavior. Yet, rather
than putting an end to the violation of certain bodily boundaries, new
ones emerged, which would eventually separate men from women and
the majority from a minority. The prosecutions, the social organization
of homosexual behavior and the sodomites’ reaction to persecution, as
well as the public’s response to all of these, gave a shape to the subjective
experience of homosexual behavior.
Despite the claim, made in 1730, that sodomy had hardly been
known by previous generations, from the final quarter of the seventeenth
century onwards, a steady increase in the number of sodomy
trials occurred as well as trials related to blackmail. A couple of times
they included between four and ten men. The year 1730 marked a
turning point as far as the number of people prosecuted on sodomy
charges were concerned. Series of arrests repeated themselves: in 1764,