Like several other medieval texts, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, a long poem in which a lover's confession of his sins is used as a tool for supplying advice to readers, interprets the myth of Narcissus as a warning against homosexual love. Mistaking his image as female (disrupting gender categories) and falling in love with himself (a male falling in love with another male who is taken as a woman), Narcissus' desire, Gower tells his readers, is contrary to nature.

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Similar ideas emerge in the anonymous poem Cleanness, which, in its retelling of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, discusses homosexual activity as a violation of proper masculine behavior, a turning away from natural law, and a pollution of the male body as God's vessel. The poem's disapproval is made clear on a thematic and linguistic level: In one passage, the choice of words describing sodomy imitate the act of spitting.

And William Dunbar's Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins graphically singles out homosexual behavior as the kind of lecherous sin that will send mortals to hell: Each ugly and stinking man leads another man by the penis, which is later to be inserted into another male's anus.

Since these texts situate their condemnation in contexts pointing out the ultimate destructive outcome of the "unnatural vice," they all play on the fear of punishment and suffering to control homosexual desire.

Though certainly not as explicitly condemnatory, some selections from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales could be included in this list as well.

Conclusion

For the most part, the history and texts of medieval English literature, though stunning in many ways, are not ones in which same-sex erotic behavior and desire--apart from their use for representing homosocial bonds--find much sympathy or affirmation.

But for modern gay readers trying to understand the different cultural forces at the root of modern day homophobia and oppression, these writings are an invaluable starting point, for they underscore the way that earlier literature does not always question but rather frequently participates in policing cultural and theological sexual norms.

And for lesbians attempting to understand why they have been silenced for much of the English tradition, it is with the silence of medieval English texts that they should begin.

Perhaps no other book has been more influential--for better or worse--in determining the construction of gay and lesbian identity in the modern world, as well as social attitudes toward homosexuality, than the Bible.

Ranging from depictions of acts "against nature" to representations of sexual ambiguity, queer medieval art may be richer than is generally recognized.

Although historical sources are comparatively scanty, they do indicate that homosexual behavior occurred throughout the period, and they give insight into its forms and the varying attitudes toward it.

Although the question of homosexual identity is a complex one, it has polarized activists, theorists, and literary critics into two primary camps, essentialists and constructionists, both of which can contribute usefully to an understanding of the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

A twelfth-century English abbot, Aelred of Rievaulx was a specialist in friendship who used the image of John, the beloved disciple, as an icon of masculine love.

In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer uses homosexual relations and desires as a means to cast moral judgments on characters and to satirize them.