ABSTRACT
Michael Wigglesworth's diary illustrates a contact point between Puritan attempts to regulate sodomy and modern discourses of sexuality. It is significant in the history of American thought neither because it provides evidence of a previous history of homosexuality now brought to light nor because it reveals the mythic origins of Anglo-American discourses of homosexuality, which are more easily located in nineteenth-century medical and psychological sources. Wigglesworth, as is well known, was a preacher in Puritan Boston and a teacher at the institution that would grow into Harvard University. The English social historian Alan Bray argues that from the close of the Middle Ages until the mid-1600s, homoerotic behavior in England 'was, quite simply, not socialized to any significant degree at all'. Still, Wigglesworth's diary does not tell us anything about how and when that potent symbol, the sodomite, came to be so overwhelmingly associated with the homoerotic.
