A Homophobic Project

As Mark Jordan (1997) reminds us, the period of the medieval West is the time when the word/concept sodomy (L. sodomia) is invented as a clearly homophobic device. Furthermore this invention can be localized to a person and a text: Peter Damian and his Book of Gomorrah. This text was addressed to Pope Leo, who reigned from 1048 to 1054, so this invention can also be located very narrowly in time. As seen in Chapter 5, the invention of sodomy was rehearsed several times in the first Christian millennium, but only one of these attempts clearly foreshadowed Damian's move in its homophobic intent. I will be arguing that Damian should perhaps be better understood as the midwife at the birth of sodomy, a concept that had been gestating in the textual/cultural matrix of Latin Christianity. Before analysing Damian's work, I will explore some of that textual world in the form of medieval Latin penitential literature and biblical commentary. Following from Damian's achievement, however, exegesis will become stamped on language such that language is exegesis. Whereas Peter Damian is concerned solely with male-male sexuality, Peter Cantor (d. 1192) completes his project to incorporate female-female sexuality. This move will enable Thomas Aquinas to classify same-sex desire and sexuality as a specifically sodomitic species of the unnatural realm. Semantically, a disaster story, same-sex desire and homophobia are now fused in the lexicon.