The Same-Sex Definition of Sodomy

In the medieval West, renewed attentiveness to the principle of same-sex object choice derived from Paul's epistle to the Romans 1:26-27, verses that conjure up images of women in unnatural pursuit of women and males burning with lust for one another.

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Two great Dominican theologians at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, the German Albert the Great and his Italian pupil Thomas Aquinas, propagated the same-sex definition.

Albert defines sodomy (sodomia) as voluntary intercourse with a person of the same sex (ad similem sexum), male with male and female with female. It is neither masturbation nor anal copulation with a woman, nor is it copulation with an animal. It is unnaturally disordered copulation with a person of the same sex (coitus cum simili sexu). The Sodomites practiced it and Paul condemned it in the first chapter of Romans. "Even today," Albert reports, "the same filth spills into the courts of kings and the rulers of the world, pollutes the holy dwellings of bishops and priests, and fills with iniquity the paradise of the religious" (that is, the monasteries).

What distinguishes sodomy from the other sins against nature are same-sex desire and the choice of a person of the same sex with whom to satisfy it.

(Among the competitors to the neologisms "homosexual" and "homosexuality" in the verbal flux of the late nineteenth century were "similisexual" and "similisexualism," both of which go back to the phrases ad similem sexum, coitus cum simili sexu, or in sexu consimili of Albert and his contemporaries.)

Thomas Aquinas (ca 1225-1274)

Later authorities quoted Thomas repeatedly. "When an orgasm is procured for the sake of sexual pleasure without intercourse, this belongs to the sin of uncleanness, which some call masturbation (molities). Second, by intercourse with a member of another species, and this is called bestiality. Third, by intercourse with a person of the wrong sex (ad non debitum sexum), that is, male with male, or female with female, as the Apostle [Paul] says in Romans, and this is called the sodomitical sin (sodomiticum vitium). Fourth, when the natural mode of intercourse is not observed, either because an illicit vessel is used [he means heterosexual anal intercourse] or because other monstrous and bestial modes of intercourse are practiced."

Sodomy: A Confused Category?

It is widely asserted that the word "sodomy" was used in so many different senses in the Middle Ages and early modern times that we can find in it no intelligible thread of common meaning. This is an unnecessary exaggeration.

Between the sixth century and the end of the thirteenth, the idea of sodomy was reasonably clear. Sodomy was same-sex intercourse--for males anal penetration, for females penetration with a dildo, though the orifice remained in doubt.

(The doubt would be dispelled by seventeenth and eighteenth-century theorists who defined sodomy as "intercourse between persons of the same sex in the improper vessel, a male with a male and a female with a female," and argued that a true female sodomy did indeed exist, but required one of the women, with a dildo or an enlarged clitoris, to "emit semen in the anus (intra vas praeposterum) of the other.")

There was, nevertheless, one source of real confusion. Hostility to homosexuality had long oscillated between moderates and rigorists. Moderates, like Albert and Thomas, tended to confine the definition of sodomy to the single act of anal intercourse in order to remove the stigma from sexual acts they judged to be of lesser consequence, such as masturbation or intercourse between the thighs. In contrast, rigorists wished to curb desire and subject irregular sexual behaviors to harsher punishments. They categorized all unnatural sexual acts as sodomy.

They reflect in this the darkening climate of the later Middle Ages: the criminalization of sodomy by secular governments and the introduction of the death penalty, the ritual association of sodomy with treason, heresy, and witchcraft, and the conviction that the plague, everywhere rampant, was God's judgment on a world forgetful of the prohibitions of Leviticus and Paul. In this scenario, the principle of potential procreation trumps those of anal penetration and same-sex desire.