ABSTRACT
How and where can we read traces of homosexuality in early modern England? What sources can we use, what questions should we ask of them, and what do we find in them-acts of sodomy or actual sodomites, transhistorical or cultureproduced desires, pre-or proto-modern sexual roles, pervasive homoeroticism or a minority subculture? Such questions are easily posed but answered with difficulty, in part because the social constructionist debate that has revealed the many factors comprising the history of homosexuality has simultaneously demonstrated how fraught with intellectual and political hazards any of our configurations of them are-not least our choice of terminology. In brief, ‘[e] ssentialists hold that a person’s sexual orientation is a culture-independent, objective, and intrinsic property, while social constructionists think it is culturedependent, relational, and, perhaps, not objective.’1 Thus, seriously heeding constructionist teaching can make one wary about labelling premodern same-sex experiences as ‘homosexual’ at all. Not taking a sufficiently constructionist stance may get one labelled ‘essentialist’—as John Boswell discovered when he posited the existence of ‘gay people’ in the early Christian Era.2 Yet if the controversy about Boswell’s methodology at times promoted an unhelpful ‘essential’ polarity between essentialists and constructionist approaches, conflating into a single camp the many differences among constructionists themselves,3 it also usefully voiced how diverse, contested, and overdetermined are any of our constructions of the history of homosexuality.
