ABSTRACT

Postmodern theoreticians, stressing the ever-shifting social constructions of sexuality and identity, have countered such attempts to posit any individual sexual identity or group homosexual consciousness, however embryonic and sporadic, in that era. This chapter investigates that process along three intertwined axes: life, work, and historiography. It deals with a more personal historiographical meditation on the controversy over whether embryonic homosexual consciousness can be located in early modern culture. Sodoma’s sartorial tendencies and other biographical details connect him to a contemporaneous homosexual demimonde in ways that Vasari himself was perhaps unaware of, but which is well attested in social history of the period. Exchange of rare and costly textiles or clothing could betoken homosexual relationships, either as gifts for love or payment for services. Greco-Roman texts and images served Sodoma, like other homosexual artists and patrons from Michelangelo to Caravaggio, as validation for their all’antica desires and pretexts for visualizing male beauty and eros.