The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

232 chapter 19No one before the late nineteenth century thought of same-sex affectionas defining a whole class of human beings. Homosexual acts even in culturallybackward America were never, after the totalitarianism of the earlyPuritans, viewed with enough distaste to evoke the Biblical penalty—thepenalty in Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13) is, of course, death, as it is there forother appalling crimes, such as cursing your parents or committing adultery(20:9–10). Abraham Lincoln, it now seems somewhat plausible, was gay;Walt Whitman was without any doubt. Nobody cared much. In fact duringmost of the nineteenth-century, homosexual acts in America were ignored,until the turn after the Civil War to purity in the Comstock Law and the like,putting the United States in the van of antisex countries. Consentingsodomy was not against the law in New York state until the 1890s. Until 2003it was illegal in Texas. We have emerged from one hundred years of virulenthomophobia, comparable to a similar episode in the thirteenth century.St. Thomas was in this matter conventional, ranking homosexual acts justbelow murder. 2 As John Boswell shows in detail, the thirteenth century wasa local maximum of such attitudes, and Aquinas was going along with them,illogically. 3 Likewise the modern hysteria about unnatural acts.Public attributions of passive homosexuality in Western societies wereshaming always, at any rate for an adult. See, for example, Catullus 57’ssmirking commentary on the sex life of Julius Caesar. But to be ashamed ofan active role was something new in the late nineteenth century. Wilde wasled into the first of his three disastrous trials by a manly desire to challengefor this reason the Marquis of Queensbury, a wretchedly bad choice of sparringpartner. In France at about the same time Marcel Proust, though notoriouslygay, was ashamed of it, and in order to defend what he imagined washis good name against the charge of unusual tastes, engaged repeatedly incourageous if stylized dueling with pistols. No one was ever hurt. Comparebucks in spring. He went to lengths in Remembrance of Things Past (1913) torecast the good loving by a man as love for a woman (“Albert” → “Albertine”),which unfortunately, as he explained to an indignant André Gide, leftall the bad loving to the many homosexual characters in the novel.In France, however, homosexuality was merely a matter of social shame,and of occasional high-handedness by police and judges, not of explicitlegal sanction. The sole exception was the law passed under the Vichy government,repealed in 1982, raising the legal age of consent to twenty-one forhomosexual liaisons; for heterosexuals it was fifteen. As Scott Gunther puts