ABSTRACT
This collection of essays on sex and death in eighteenth-century culture closes with a discussion of homosexuality and masturbation as morbid, secret, and unproductive crimes. Typically associated with the death sentence as punishment, the sex crimes identified as sodomy were the nexus for a semantic web of multiple threats to the traditional family unit and to a well-regulated community, colony, or nation. Sodomy was also threatening as the contagious force of the unprocreative and was accordingly perceived to be against Nature as well as contrary to divine law outlined in the Scriptures. Allied to sodomy as the ‘unspeakable' and secret crime was ‘Onan,' the heinous sin of self-pollution; it was defined as wasteful scattering of human seed on barren ground. The cultural prohibition and apparent invisibility of onanism in the eighteenth and nineteenth century only served to stimulate curiosity and led to a proliferation of texts on these topics that were pitched in socio-medical discourses. 1 Although in one sense it is tempting to think of Sodom and Onan as the outer reaches of sex and vice, they were in fact symbolically central as evidence of a decay in moral fiber and a move toward social disintegration. Because their acts threatened human survival, personal health, and the political order, it is unsurprising that the perpetrators of these acts typically faced death sentences in cases of sodomy, or self-obsessed self-destruction in cases of onanism.
