—Decriminalization; Discrimination; Devlin, Patrick; European Law; Jurisprudence; Privacy; Utilitarianism; Violence.
CUSTINE, Astolphe de
Astolphe, Marquis de Custine (1790–1857), was at the origin of a great homosexual
scandal
that took place in France in the nineteenth century. Born into the French nobility, his family’s privileges ended when both his father and grandfather were guillotined for sympathizing with the monarchy during the French Revolution. Raised by his mother Delphine (who was the writer Chateaubriand’s mistress), Custine knew from a very early age that he was attracted to boys. In order to ensure her son’s financial independence, Mme de Custine embarked on a plan to get him married, and found a girl for him named Claire de Duras. Astolphe asked for Claire’s hand in marriage but the engagement broke up in 1818, stirring up the first wave of nasty rumors (it was claimed that the German naturalist Alexander de Humboldt had proven to the girl that Custine had the handwriting of an invert). This did not prevent him from marrying a wealthy orphan of the upper class, Léontine de St-Simon Courtemer, in 1821; a year later, she gave birth to his son. The same year, 1822, he traveled without his wife to England and Scotland, after having met Edward St-Barbe (a gentleman who would change his name to Edouard de Ste-Barbe), who became Custine’s “close friend” (he later lived with the Marquis and stayed faithful to him until his death). Their meeting and the premature death of Léontine in 1823 had the effect of intensifying the sexual needs of Custine, who started chasing after handsome soldiers.
The scandal in question broke out on October 28, 1824. On his way to a rendezvous at St-Denis with a young gunner, Custine was ambushed. In the stables of an inn, he was attacked by three of the gunner’s comrades-in-arms, who decided to teach him a lesson: they stripped off his clothes, beat him to a pulp, and left him bleeding and naked on the side of the road. Custine’s friends tried to make it out as a vicious, unprovoked attack, but the truth spread quickly. The new king, pious Charles X, had no pity for Custine. The minister of the
police
informed Custine that he could not file charges against his attackers. The following day, he was refused entry into the society clubs of St-Germain: he was now nothing more than a fallen nobleman, whose reputation would remain scandalous until the day he died.
In 1824, Anne-Sophie (“Madame”) Swetchine wrote: “Never have I seen such a widespread outburst, an indignation more lively and venomous; all of society is enraged, as though it were a personal betrayal. He has to account mostly for the esteem in which he used to be held.” According to another, “Custine has fallen right to the bottom, from where he will never be able to lift himself up.” Custine spent the next years writing poetry and novels, and eventually became enamored with travel writing. But twenty years later, a witness to all that had transpired remarked: “Everyone read him, savored him, but no one held him in any esteem.” And in 1848, the publisher of the
Revue des Deux Mondes
received many letters demanding that the magazine be closed to “the friends of M. de Custine.” Those rare few who remained in touch with him shied away from shaking his hand, as though even his body were sullied. Even the most benevolent of people, such as Philarète Chasles, the French man of letters, saw his habits as a sign of biological extenuation, a symptom of the end of the human race. As for Ste-Barbe, in his obituary, a magistrate described him as a paragon of all
vices
: “He had, beneath his handsome appearance, something even more monstrous than his infamous habits: he reeked of murder.”
The Custine affair clearly illustrates the magnitude of aristocratic homophobia in nineteenth-century France, and represented the culmination of several lines of thought. First, it marked a return to Christian tradition, as the nobility turned again to Catholicism after the French Revolution and wished to cut itself away from the libertinism of the previous centuries. Add to this the mystique of family lineage and the desire to be part of an unbroken chain, for which heterosexuality and
marriage
are prerequisites. Finally, there is the code of honor that attributes a large importance to virility, associated in a quasi-etymological way to the virtues of the group, the nobility standing as a confirmation of natural character and the stark opposition of sexual roles. As such, the “inverted” were constantly sneered at in society clubs (Custine, who was not particularly effeminate, was still often referred to as “Madame, the Marquise de Custine”). The Custine affair also serves to show how the disgrace of such a scandal was shared by the entire family: in the weeks that followed, fingers were pointed at Custine’s relatives as well.
Following the scandal, Custine retired to his estate. The social death to which he was condemned was also a sort of liberation: he no longer had to wear a mask. After losing his son and his mother, he traveled with Ste-Barbe (to Italy, England, Switzerland, Germany, and Spain), and began his writing career (in addition to poetry and novels, he also wrote a play,
Beatrix Cenci,
which was performed without success in 1832). A novel,
Aloys
, was published anonymously in 1829; strongly autobiographical, it tells the story of a young man (who confides, “No matter the condition under which Heaven had called me, I was certain to ruin it”) and his failed attempt to marry: after his betrothal to the daughter of his lover, he is revealed to be an invert through his handwriting and ends up joining the clergy. Returning to Paris in the early 1830s, Custine and Ste-Barbe, still frozen out of aristocratic society, befriended many writers who possessed a more open spirit (such as Hugo, Balzac, Nodier, and Stendhal), and whom the Marquis was able to charm with his art for conversation and sumptuous dinners. In 1835, however, Custine fell in love with a dashing young Polish man, Ignatius Gurowski, who moved in with the Marquis and Ste-Barbe. But when Russia demanded Gurowski’s return to Poland, Custine traveled for two months to St Petersburg and Moscow in order to obtain a pardon from Tsar Nicholas I. He failed to get the pardon, but he did accumulate enough material to write his most famous work,
La Russie en 1839
(Russia in 1839), published in 1843.
In 1841, the bored Gurowski left to secretly marry a young Spanish girl, which finally earned him expulsion from France. Gurowski’s departure was a terrible shock for Custine, and marked the beginning of his old age. He traveled some more, yet was bored, despite the relative fame afforded to him by his book on Russia. He died in 1857, whereupon the faithful Ste-Barbe inherited most of his considerable fortune. Custine’s cousins launched an appeal, requesting that the civil court nullify the inheritance on account of coercion “achieved through perseverance and by the most damnable means.” The request was rejected in July 1858, then again on appeal, in December of the same year. The French judicial system of the nineteenth century may have certainly been homophobic, but there was nothing it could do about a properly prepared will and testament.
—Pierre Albertini
Luppe, Marquis de.
Astolphe de Custine
. Monaco: Le Rocher, 1957.
Muhlstein, Anka.
Astolphe de Custine, le dernier marquis
. Paris: Grasset, 1996.
—France; Police; Scandal; Violence.
DAMIEN, Peter
Born in 1007 in Italy, Peter Damien was one of the most influential figures of the Catholic Church during the eleventh century, especially during the reign of Pope Leo IX. Damien was a monk, cleric, bishop, and cardinal who played an important role in the reform of the Church during the second half of the eleventh century. He is perhaps best known for his role in the Investiture Controversy, a significant crisis of power between the papacy and the Empire, in which Damien had defended the right of secular officials to choose and consecrate bishops.
But Damien was also the author of a little book written in Latin, entitled
Liber Gomorrhianus
(
Book of Gomorrah
). Written between 1048 and 1054, it was addressed directly to Pope Leo IX, but also to those he accused of sin. He began his argument by identifying the four categories of sexual sins that were “
against nature
”: those who sin alone, those who practice mutual masturbation, those who practice copulation between the thighs, and those who “commit the complete act against nature,” that is, anal penetration. According to Damien, these are the “four practices that stem from … a sodomite impurity, like a poisoned root.”
Damien goes on to explain that those who are guilty of these acts should not be welcomed into the clergy, and those already in the clergy who are guilty of these acts should be removed from office. He was particularly concerned about men who confess to those clergy with whom they had committed these sins, such that “those at fault become the judges.” And while Damien would state elsewhere that a bishop guilty of simony (the crime of paying for ecclesiastical positions, a significant problem between the tenth and fifteenth centuries) should nonetheless retain his title, he affirmed that a man of the Church who practiced sodomy was sinning against nature and as a result, was unable to fulfill his ecclesiastical function: “No sacred offertory that has been sullied by crimes of impurity may be received by God.”
The language Damien used was particularly severe: “Truly, there is no way to compare this
vice
to any other vice, because it surpasses the scope of all vices. In effect, this vice means the death of the body, and the destruction of the soul. It pollutes the flesh; it extinguishes the light of the spirit, it opens the door to Hell, and closes the gates of Heaven…. This vice can tumble men from the heart of the ecclesiastical community, and forces them to pray alongside the possessed and those who work for the Devil.” Further, after examining the penitentials written by his predecessors, Damien condemned them for being too lenient on homosexual practices. To Damien, the only way to fight this form of hedonism was to meditate upon the reward brought about by chastity, i.e. Heaven.
At first glance, Damien’s treatise seems to be quite conventional. The ideas that it conveys are familiar enough: the description of homosexuality as an act against nature, its connection with the Biblical events of
Sodom and Gomorrah
, and the fear of sexual relations between clergy and those whom they guide. However, the ideology as presented in this opuscule was something that was completely new. Naturally, there were interdictions against homosexual practices during the first millennium of the Christian era, but these were not very rigorous, and in most parts of Europe homosexual acts were in fact tolerated, permitted, and sometimes even acceptable. Prior to this treatise, there was no clear definition of “sodomy,” and this work is one of the earliest in which sodomy was so clearly associated with (or rather against) nature.
Under these conditions, Peter Damien’s ideas were considered particularly radical at the time they were published, and as historian John Boswell has indicated, “Peter did not succeed in convincing anyone that the problem of homosexuality required such severe attention.” In a letter to Damien, the Pope thanked him for having written the treatise, but informed him that it would not be possible to remove clergy from office except for those who had been committing these acts for a long period (or alternatively, with many men for a shorter period), or those who had “sunk to the level of engaging in anal practices.” The Pope recognized that these acts constituted a sin, but he did not treat them as severely as Damien had demanded.
Nevertheless, the
Liber Gomorrhianus
found its audience during the next century. Damien’s extraordinarily severe
rhetoric
concerning sodomy was codified by the for the first time in 1179, during the Third Lateran Council, in the following way: “Let all who are found guilty of that unnatural vice for which the wrath of God came down upon the sons of disobedience and destroyed the five cities with fire; if they are clerics, they are to be expelled from the clergy or confined in monasteries to do penance; if they are laymen, they are to incur excommunication and be completely separated from the society of the faithful.” The religious sensitivity of the era, having already introduced many oppressive measures against other groups (such as Jews, heretics, and lepers), used the ideology developed by Damien a century before to justify its own attitude toward homosexuality, an attitude whose effects are still felt today.
—Adam Weiss
Liber Gommorhianus
,
Patrologia, Series Latina
[ed. Migne]. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1844. [Published in Canada as
Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh Century Treatise Against Clerical Homosexual Practices
. Translation with an introduction and notes by Pierre J. Payer. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 1982.]
Boswell, John.
Christianisme, tolérance sociale et homosexualité
. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. [Published in the US as
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980.]
Jordan, Mark.
The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology
. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997.
Leclerq, Jean.
Saint Pierre Damien, ermite et homme de l’Eglise
. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1960.
Tierney, Brian.
The Crisis of Church and State
. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1988.
—Against Nature; Bible, the; Catholic Church, the; Heresy; Inquisition; Paul (of Tarsus); Sodom and Gomorrah; Theology; Vice.
DANCE
In a scene from the 2000 British film
Billy Elliot
, the young twelve-year-old protagonist, an aspiring dancer, argues with his father, who had caught the boy taking a classical dance lesson instead of the boxing lessons in which he had been enrolled:
What’s wrong with ballet?
What’s “wrong” with ballet?
It’s perfectly normal.
“Perfectly normal”?
I used to go to ballet.
See? Aye, for your nanna. For girls, not for lads, Billy.
Lads do football, or … boxing, or … wrestling. Not frigging ballet.