Volume 41, Number 15 · September 22, 1994
As You Like It
By Keith Thomas
Queering the Renaissance
edited by Jonathan Goldberg
Duke University Press, 388 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities
by Jonathan Goldberg
Stanford University Press, 295 pp., $12.95 (paper)
In 1986 the US Supreme Court in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick ruled that the Constitution of the United States recognizes no fundamental right of privacy for consensual acts of homosexual sodomy. Delivering the majority opinion, Justice Byron White declared that 'sodomy was a criminal offense at common law and was forbidden by the laws of the original thirteen states when they ratified the Bill of Rights.' Homosexuals engaging in sodomy were therefore not entitled to protection against state laws, like those of Georgia, which criminalized their behavior. Yet, as commentators were quick to point out, the original laws against sodomy, including the Georgia statute under consideration, had drawn no distinction between homosexual and heterosexual sodomy. Henry VIII's statute of 1533 had prescribed the death penalty for those convicted of 'the detestable and abhomynable vice of buggery commyttid with mankynde or beaste,' but had said nothing about the gender of those involved, or indeed about fellatio, which was the offense involved in Bowers v. Hardwick. The effect of the Supreme Court's judgment was to give tacit protection to heterosexual sodomy, but to allow states to outlaw the homosexual kind. Its objection was not to the act as such, but to the gender of the persons who committed it.
Review, 3647 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |