European colonial societies

Abstract

Abstract The history of sodomy in European colonial societies reflects the differences between Southern and Northern Europe, while also raising other issues. Known cases in the English colonies of North America and the Dutch colonies of Indonesia were rare—even in Puritan New England, with its high levels of moral vigilance. The Iberian American colonies yield much larger totals. Some cases involved the exploitation of black slaves, or of the indigenous ‘Indians’. Male–male sex had already existed among many Indian cultures, where berdache boys, formally re-gendered, submitted to male sex; such traditions might partly explain the vibrant sodomitical subculture in Mexico City, exposed by a trial in 1657–8. The role of race in cases of interracial sodomy is difficult to assess, as it was often a concomitant of a difference in status and power; but some cases of non-Europeans taking the sexual initiative are also known.