Sodomy, possessive individualism and godless nature

Eighteenth-century seeds of homosexual emancipation

Authors

  • Harry Oosterhuis Department of History University of Maastricht

Abstract

When organized homosexual emancipation took root in the late nineteenth century, it was largely based on the then prevailing biomedical and psychiatric conceptualizations of homosexuality. These presented it as an innate inclination of a minority, while science-based knowledge was seen as the road towards societal acceptance. In this article it is argued that as early as in the eighteenth century, distinct efforts were made towards ‘homosexual emancipation’, if preliminary and less coherent perhaps, yet also quite radical in tone and contents. While the modern gay movement largely steered a defensive course way into the twentieth century, based on a clearly demarcated minority group’s sense of ‘being different’ and ‘having no other option’, in the eighteenth century there were voices that appealed to homosexual behaviour as a matter of self-determination and choice by deriving inspiration from early liberalism, libertinism, cultural history and literature. The examples provided in this article are derived from (mainly English and French) court archives, pamphlets, political-philosophical treatises, personal documents and (semi-pornographic) literary texts.

Author Biography

  • Harry Oosterhuis, Department of History University of Maastricht

    Harry Oosterhuis (1958) studied history at University of Groningen (1976-1983) and sociology at the Graduate School for Social Science of the Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden (1987-1991). His dissertation (1992) is about the changing attitudes of Dutch Catholics  towards homosexuality in the twentieth century as a result of shifting relations between religion on the one hand and medical and mental health care on the other.

    Since 1992 he is a lecturer in history at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University. He is also affiliated to the Huizinga Research School for Cultural History in Amsterdam. He teaches courses on the modernisation of the Western world, historiography, and the history of the biomedical and human sciences. His research focuses on the cultural and social history of psychiatry and mental health care, of sexuality and gender, of health and citizenship and of bicycling. Between 1999-2008 he co-directed a NWO-funded research-project on the twentieth-century history of psychiatry and mental health care in the Netherlands.

Published

2023-09-18

Issue

Vol. 32 No. 3 (2023): September

Section

Studies