Guest Post: A same-sex marriage ceremony in... Renaissance Rome?

Gary Ferguson, University of Virginia

In the late 16th century, the famous French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote about two marriages between people of the same sex. The first involved women in eastern France, the second a group of men in Rome. At the time, same-sex marriages were not recognized by religious or civil law, and sodomy – a term that included a wide range of sexual acts – was a crime. As a result, when those involved were discovered they were usually brought to trial and punished, sometimes by death.

These episodes, along with many others, reveal that even in Renaissance Europe, marriage was a highly contested issue.

Marriage between two men or two women might seem like a concept that has emerged only in recent decades. For centuries, however, same-sex couples have appropriated marriage in their own ways. I investigate a particularly notable example of this – the second of the two cases recounted by Montaigne – in my recent book “Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity and Community in Early Modern Europe.”

An evolving institution

Throughout the Middle Ages, marriage involved not only two individuals but also their relatives, local communities, and secular and religious authorities. Each of these had different – sometimes conflicting – ideas, priorities and goals.

From the 12th century on, the Catholic Church considered matrimony a sacrament that required only the free consent of the spouses, in the form of an exchange of vows. As a social institution, however, marriage was usually based on a legal contract for the transfer of property (the bride’s dowry), which was signed in front of a notary.

French essayist Michel de Montaigne once described a ceremony between two male lovers at Saint John at the Latin Gate in Rome.
Gary Ferguson, Author provided

The 16th century was a watershed period that saw sweeping changes and the introduction of stringent new requirements designed to prevent clandestine (or secret) unions that heads of families opposed. In countries converted to one of the new Reformed or Protestant faiths, marriage ceased to be a sacrament, and laws were passed strengthening parents’ control over their dependent children.

In response to pressure from secular governments, the Catholic Church also modified its position considerably in 1563, when the Council of Trent decreed that a wedding must henceforth be performed in a parish church, by an authorized priest, in the presence of witnesses, and following the proclamation of “banns” (the public announcement of the ceremony).

Changes in legislation did not always translate immediately into changes in practice, however. Situations of doubt or dispute were common and frequently ended up in court.

On the margins of the papal city

This is the volatile background against which the marriages between men in Rome were set.

After piecing together information from several sources – diplomatic dispatches, newsletters, fragments of a trial transcript and brief wills – a much fuller, if incomplete, picture of what took place emerges.

Michel de Montaigne.
Wikimedia Commons

On a Sunday afternoon in July 1578, a sizable group of men gathered at Saint John at the Latin Gate, a beautiful but remote church on the outer edge of Rome. Many of them were friends who had met there on previous occasions. They were mostly poor immigrants from Spain and Portugal but included several priests and friars. They ate and drank in an atmosphere that was festive, yet strangely subdued. It turned suddenly to confusion and fear with the arrival of the police, who arrested 11 of those present. The rest fled.

The Roman authorities had been tipped off about the group’s plans to celebrate a marriage, perhaps not for the first time, between two of its members. In the end, the wedding between Gasparo and Gioseffe hadn’t taken place: The latter – reportedly ill – failed to appear. But Gasparo was among those taken prisoner, and, following a trial that lasted three weeks, executed.

The exact nature and purpose of the intended ceremony remain uncertain. Some sources describe a marriage celebrated after Mass. Others refer to the giving of rings, a hermit who officiated or adolescents taking part under constraint or even disguised as women.

What we know for sure is that the afternoon was to culminate, like most weddings at the time, in a celebratory feast and the consummation of the union – that is, in the couple (and, in this instance, perhaps others) having sex.

Like husband and wife?

Although the same was not true of all the group’s members, Gasparo and Gioseffe conformed to established gender norms when having intercourse: According to evidence from the trial, the latter took a “male” (penetrative) role, the former a “female” (receptive) one.

In other respects, however, their relationship didn’t resemble that of traditional spouses. Most importantly, Gioseffe was a friar, prevented from marrying in the eyes of the Church. Gioseffe’s attachment to a convent also means that it’s unlikely the pair planned on living together. This distinguishes them not only from men and women who married but also from the female married couples we know about from the period, who – like the women described by Montaigne – often did establish a common household, with one cross-dressing and living as a man.

In light of the group’s generally promiscuous behavior, it seems equally unlikely that Gasparo and Gioseffe intended to embark on a sexually exclusive relationship and thus that they believed the sacrament would remove the sinfulness that the Church attached to all extramarital sex.

Finally, the purpose of the feast following the planned wedding was not personal or religious but communal. Despite the fact that it greatly increased the chances that the men would be caught, it was clearly important to them as a way to express and build a sense of community. The socially marginalized friends at the Latin Gate had, in fact, developed several of the characteristics of a sexual subculture, like those that would later be found in large European cities in the 18th century. In a number of ways, they anticipated the networks of “mollies” in London and Paris’ “gens de la manchette” (“men of the cuff”), with their regular meeting places, social activities and a shared slang.

The evidence, then, points to a handful of motivations behind the Roman weddings. Since the friends took the ceremony seriously enough to put themselves at considerable risk, it very likely served to recognize and sanction Gasparo and Gioseffe’s relationship, claiming that such a union should be possible. At the same time, it may also have had a playful element, parodying and subtly criticizing elements of a traditional wedding.

An argument for marriage equality?

In one sense, the context for extending marriage rights to same-sex couples today is very different from the 16th century, when most marriages weren’t based primarily on love and didn’t establish legal equality between the spouses.

It was after the changes effected by the women’s rights movement in the second half of the 20th century to make the institution more equitable that gay and lesbian activists adopted marriage equality as their major goal.

Nevertheless, the stories from the 16th century show that marriage has never been a universal and fixed phenomenon. It has a contested history, one that both excludes and includes same-sex couples, who have claimed marriage on their own terms.

When viewed through this lens, the ceremony planned that summer afternoon in Rome overturns the narrative that recent political victories were only the culmination of a modern, 20th-century campaign. The friends who met at the Latin Gate offer a striking example of how same-sex couples have long claimed the right to marry and, at the same time, challenged some of marriage’s traditional norms.

Gary Ferguson, Douglas Huntly Gordon Distinguished Professor of French, University of Virginia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Forgotten origins of the modern gay rights movement in World War I

Laurie Marhoefer, University of Washington

One of the World War I’s most enduring legacies is largely forgotten: It sparked the modern gay rights movement.

Gay soldiers who survived the bloodletting returned home convinced their governments owed them something – full citizenship. Especially in Germany, where gay rights already had a tenuous footing, they formed new organizations to advocate in public for their rights.

Though the movement that called itself “homosexual emancipation” began in the 19th century, my research and that of historian Jason Crouthamel shows that the war turned the 19th-century movement into gay rights as we know it today.

A death in Russia

In the winter of 1915, a German soldier died in a field hospital in Russia. The soldier, whose name is missing from the historical record, had been hit in the lower body by shrapnel when his trench came under bombardment. Four of his comrades risked their lives to carry him to the rear. There, he lay for weeks, wracked by pain in the mangled leg and desperately thirsty. But what troubled him most was loneliness. He sent letters to his boyfriend whenever he could manage it.

“I crave a decent mouthful of fresh water, of which there isn’t any here,” he wrote in his final letter. “There is absolutely nothing to read; please, do send newspapers. But above all, write very soon.”

German infantrymen aim machine guns from a trench near the Vistula River in 1916.
AP-Photo

This soldier, who had to keep his relationship hidden from those around him, was just one of the approximately two million German men killed in World War I. His suffering is not unlike what many others experienced. What his loved ones made of that suffering, however, was different, and had enormous consequences.

His boyfriend, identified in surviving documents only as “S.,” watched the man he loved go off to serve in a war that he did not fully endorse, only to die alone and in pain as S. sat helplessly by hundreds of miles away. S. told their story in a letter to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which published it in April 1916.

The Scientific Humanitarian Committee was then the world’s leading homosexual emancipation group, boasting a membership of about 100 people. The soldier’s story took a cruel twist at its very end: S.‘s loving replies were lost in the chaos of the war and never reached the soldier.

“He died without any contact from me,” S. wrote.

Demanding the rights of citizens

After the war, many believed the slaughter had been for nothing. But S. saw a lesson in his partner’s suffering and death.

“He has lost his bright life … for the Fatherland,” wrote S. That Fatherland had a law on the books that banned sex between men. But the sodomy law was just the tip of the iceberg: S. and men like him generally could not reveal their love relationships in public, or even to family members. Homosexuality meant the loss of one’s job, social ostracism, the risk of blackmail and perhaps criminal prosecution.

S. called it “deplorable” that “good citizens,” soldiers willing to die for their country, had to endure the status of “pariahs.” “People who are by nature orientated toward the same sex … do their duty,” he wrote. “It is finally time that the state treated them like they treat the state.”

A new phase of gay rights

A magazine put out by the League for Human Rights in 1930.
Author provided

Many veterans agreed with S. When the war ended, they took action. They formed new, larger groups, including one called the League for Human Rights that drew 100,000 members.

In addition, as I argue in my book, the rhetoric of gay rights changed. The prewar movement had focused on using science to prove that homosexuality was natural. But people like S., people who had made tremendous sacrifices in the name of citizenship, now insisted that their government had an obligation to them regardless of what biology might say about their sexuality.

They left science behind. They went directly to a set of demands that characterizes gay rights to this day – that gay people are upstanding citizens and deserve to have their rights respected. “The state must recognize the full citizenship rights of inverts,” or homosexuals, an activist wrote in the year after the war. He demanded not just the repeal of the sodomy law, but the opening of government jobs to known homosexuals – a radical idea at the time, and one that would remain far out of reach for many decades.

Respectable citizens

Ideas of citizenship led activists to emphasize what historians call “respectability.” Respectability consisted of one’s prestige as a correctly behaving, middle-class person, in contrast to supposedly disreputable people such as prostitutes. Throughout the 20th century, gay rights groups struggled for the right to serve openly in the military, a hallmark of respectability. With some exceptions, they shied away from radical calls to utterly remake society’s rules about sex and gender. They instead emphasized what good citizens they were.

In 1929, a speaker for the League for Human Rights told an audience at a dance hall, “we do not ask for equal rights, we demand equal rights!” It was, ironically, the ghastly violence and horrible human toll of the World War I that first inspired such assertive calls, calls that characterized gay rights movements around the world in the 20th century.

It would take nearly a century for these activists to achieve one of their central goals – the repeal of sodomy laws. Germany enjoyed a 14-year period of democracy after World War I, but the Nazis came to power in 1933 and used the sodomy law to murder thousands of men. A version of the law remained in force until the 1990s. The United States struck down its sodomy laws only in 2003.

Laurie Marhoefer, Assistant Professor of History, University of Washington

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Rude Radio Hosts?

In a touching Washington Post Outlook section piece on how World War I is, for Americans, a "forgotten war," University of Virginia history professor Edward G. Lengel writes:

I recently asked the hosts of a Charlottesville radio talk show on war and remembrance why Americans seemed so uninterested in World War I. It all boiled down to circumstances, they answered. The United States wasn't in the fight for long and suffered relatively few casualties. Then the Great Depression intervened, followed by World War II, and people naturally forgot old sorrows. There must be more to it than that, I protested. World War I was hardly a forgettable conflict; during six months in 1918, 53,513 Americans were killed in action -- almost as many as in Vietnam, and over a much shorter period of time. Perhaps, I suggested, Americans simply found trench warfare too depressing. Annoyed, the hosts cut me off with a flippant remark. As the receiver clicked, I could not help feeling that they had helped prove my point.

Trying to discern who these rude radio hosts were, I came up empty. They couldn't be either Coy Barefoot or Rob Schilling, who are so polite to their guests it borders on indulgence. It's possible that this happened on WINA's morning show with Jane Foy and Rick Daniels but, if it did, the perceived rudeness was more likely the effect of shortage of time rather than indifference to Professor Lengel's point. Of course, he could have been talking to radio personalities on another station (maybe WVAX, the left-wing counterpart of WINA, or WCHV, which carries Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity).

I can offer my own theory as to "why Americans seemed so uninterested in World War I": We are taught in school that the roots of that war are found in European rivalries of the 19th century, the breakdown of the regime established at the Congress of Vienna, and Germany's desire to compete with Britain in world markets and attain at least equality in seapower.

Most of us no doubt also learned about the disarray of European diplomacy before and during the war, and how the aims of the war changed rapidly and several times between August 1914 and the Armistice. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, and their various allies on both sides, simply couldn't decide what it was they were fighting for. (I summarize to the point of parody, but I don't want to belabor the issues.)

In other words, none of this had anything to do with the United States. There was no legitimate reason for the United States to intervene in "the Great War," and, it could be argued, the entry of the United States on the side of the Franco-British alliance upset the balance of power in Europe so that the Europeans could not settle the war for themselves.

Moreover, Woodrow Wilson's crusading and dissembling spirit (all that balderdash about the war being fought to defend democracy and that it was the "war to end all wars" -- Kellogg and Briand, call your office) led to an unjust post-war settlement that eventually led to the rise of fascism and Hitler's coming to power in 1933. (Keynes might have been wrong on most things, but he certainly knew about "the economic consequences of the peace.") As every schoolboy knows, the Second World War was nothing more than the second half of World War I, the completion of a process that began 31 years -- or more -- earlier.

With this historical background, it makes perfect sense that Americans would be detached and uninterested in World War I.

That doesn't make it any less sad in regard to the 53,000-plus soldiers, sailors, and Marines who died and the hundreds of thousands of other casualties. On Memorial Day, and especially on Armistice Day (Veterans' Day), they should be remembered.

Postscript: It is noteworthy that both Professor Lengel and George F. Will mention the sole surviving doughboy of World War I, 107-year-old Frank Buckles, in their columns today. Will adds near the end of his article:

The First World War is still taking American lives because it destroyed the Austro-Hungarian, Romanoff and Ottoman empires. A shard of the latter is called Iraq.

Those who fail to understand history may not be compelled to repeat it, but they certainly are compelled to live with its consequences.