The Sodomite's Tongue and The Bourgeois Body in Eighteenth-Century England

The anonymous author of Satan's Harvest Home (1794), offering “Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy” in mid-eighteenth-century England, conjures a resolutely masculine vision of the glorious British past, describing the normative fashioning of the “Gentleman of former Days” ¹ in an account that even contemporary readers must have recognized as needing the Augustan equivalent of a warning from the surgeon general: “Caution: retroactive bourgeois mythologizing may be dangerous to your health.” More exactly, as I hope to suggest in this essay, to the extent that such mythologizing plays a central role in the normalization of homophobia not in but as male socialization in the course of the eighteenth century, this mythologizing imposes a standard of health that constitutes a significant danger in itself. ² Indeed, it is the very discipline of health, tendentiously articulated as the health of discipline, that shapes the essentially middle-class trajectory of the gentleman's life that Satan's Harvest Home imagines unfolding in a fantasmatic England before the growth of sodomy.