"Masculine love," Renaissance writing, and the "new invention" of homosexuality: an addendum.

Abstract

Joseph Cady's recent article, "Masculine Love," Renaissance Writing, and the "New Invention' of Homosexuality," Journal of Homosexuality 23.1-2 (1992): 9-40, did much to shed new light on the controversial issue of whether homosexual identity is a relatively late phenomenon (late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century at the earliest according to scholars of the "constructivist" persuasion) or already existed in the age of the Renaissance and before. Cady argues that homosexual identity is at least as old as the Elizabethan age, and cites from widely divergent sources several early modern instances of the term "masculine love," a term that seems to have been used exclusively to refer to the sexual preference of men for members of their own gender. The present note adds a further example to buttress Cady's case-namely the term "masculine conversation" from Arthur Wilson's History of Great Britain (1653), an account of the reign of James I (who was widely recognized to be sexually attracted to men). The term "conversation" often referred to sexual intercourse, being used in legal discourse to define adultery, and therefore constitutes an even more explicit example of denotative language than those Cady cites. Since Wilson discusses Sir Francis Bacon as well as James I, this brief article explores the historically documentable sexual preferences of these two figures in addition to that of the dramatist Christopher Marlowe and of Bacon's brother Anthony, a diplomat, all of whom seem to have been strongly oriented to "masculine love" and "masculine conversation".