ABSTRACT
Alan Bray has argued that the visible signs of male friendship and of sodomy in Elizabethan England were queerly similar, even though ‘The reaction these two images prompted was wildly different; the one was universally admired, the other execrated and feared’ (1994, 40). Mario DiGangi has countered ‘that an historical analysis of early modern sexuality must distinguish between socially “orderly” and socially “disorderly” forms of male homoeroticism’ (1997, ix), arguing that ‘an emphasis on sodomy’ on the part of Bray and others has prevented recognition of ‘the pervasiveness of nonsodomitical or nonsubversive homoerotic relations’ (1994, 9). Yet it is DiGangi, more than Bray, who succumbs to the negative force of what Michel Foucault famously termed ‘that utterly confused category’ (1990, 101), ‘sodomy’. Like ‘queer’, the term is worthy of reclamation.
