Sodomy

This chapter focuses on histories that might seem, at first glance, liminal or tangential to “the history of American sexuality.” It draws on questions of institutional memory and popular perceptions of the Catholic Church and of sexually abusive priests, anchoring such debates in the present but looking into the colonial past. The historical, political, and cultural significance of sodomy in the United States cannot be separated out, or analyzed in isolation from, its broader hemispheric and transoceanic colonial contexts. Sodomy produces a particular structure of meaning, and the genealogy of the term goes back a long way. Historically speaking, sodomy itself has long been subsumed under the broader category and formulation of the “sins against nature” in a long, institutionalized chain of reasoning that goes back to early Church Fathers like Saint Augustine and medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas