May 23, 2008

• yeah, right, they're always "unsuspecting..."
• There's a t-shirt!
• It appears he was giving them Ye Olde Blow Jobbe.
• Didn't the aldermen know? What happens in Beaconsfield, stays in Beaconsfield.
• Haha, excellent T-shirt. I love that he called himself Eleanor. Was "Eleanor" the "Tiffany" of the late 1300s?
• ...and one Carmelite friar and six foreign men committed the above-said vice with him... Damn sex-tourists. Explains why there were so many "pilgrims" and "crusades" though. And why couldn't Chaucer have written "The Tranny's Tale"? Would have made fourth-year English far more interesting...
• Nad now I telle the Tale of Elenor, Whose boddy did not match the Clothes hee wore. He was y-clapt in Gaol in olde Londonne, For double Crime - hee was bothe Whore and John.
• Prithee, Miladye, hast thou an Previewe Buttone?
• It flew away as the bodice ripped.
• Reading this, I think there is still so much we can't know about this man. We don't know that he was "gay" (ie attracted to men), we only know that he had sex with men for money, whether attracted or not. We don't even know how old he was; he may have been a child trained to prostitution. (The fact that he passes as a woman suggests he is very young). His transvestism, as well, could have been out of desire or any identity as feminine, or it could have simply been out of necessity -- it may have been a way to attract male customers who could later claim they didn't know he was male. Though he did apparently live as a woman for a period doing embroidery - choice? That said, I think that if anal, as opposed to oral sex, was involved, I seriously doubt that any of the men he had sex with were "unsuspecting", and would be clear indication that these men chose to have sex with a man. But claiming they were unsuspecting was likely a way to protect themselves - it may be also why he chose to wear women's clothing. But this is an interesting line - whereas he had earlier been living as a woman, in Oxford he "dwelt with a certain John Clerk at the Swan in the capacity of tapster", where he had sex with several men, but no mention is made of him being in women's clothing or the men being unsuspecting. Were women hired as tapsters? To sum up: this is a fascinating case, but I wouldn't like to see Rydecker swept up as some kind of medieval gay figure (as the tshirt implies). I think his life says more about prostitution and (possibly) the abuse of children than necessarily being gay. His customers - now that's another story.
• I think I'm going to have to get that t-shirt
• If it said "mine homegirl", I'd buy it. FAIL
• jb, the idea of homosexuality or set gender preference in sexual activity is a modern one. In ancient times, the more important factor was the passivity vs dominance in sexual encounters. By the time of Rykener, this was changing, but concepts of homosexuality per se had not yet evolved. To many 'gay' men in this period of history, it would have been a matter of expedience who they bonked. Desire was one thing, but you can't always get what you want, and if you try sometimes you might get pilloried or even hanged in an era when atheism, for instance, was a capital offense. Anal sex as a practice of gay sex was apparently not that common in this era, at least, it is not mentioned much in surviving records (that I know of). More commonly people would use the clasped thighs of their paramour as a receptive area. Oral sex, however, was very common, as much as it is now if not more so. As a quick way of getting your rocks off behind the arras, it was superior to most other sexual acts as a furtive transaction, because you could cover yourself up quickly and get out of there if someone rumbled you. Also, it did not require preparation, as buggery usually does. Unless you've got a bucket of lard nearby or something. Not that I know anything about buggery, I'm just repeating what my RE teacher told me.

• [...he] was staying at Oxford, and there, in women's clothing and calling himself Eleanor, worked as an embroideress; and there in the marsh three unsuspecting scholars - [... who] practiced the abominable vice with him often.

  The scholars had either spotty knowledge of anatomy or a rather developed understanding of the Law and deniability. Reminds me of a passage from a poet contemporary of John Rykener - from The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. Here's an excerpt from the Miller's Tale(or in original and Modern English) setting the scene for a dandyish would-be adulterer to kiss the arsehole of the other, successful adulterer, fresh from making it with the carpenter's wife:

  [the clerk (Nicholas) felt that the dandy(Absalon)] sholde kisse his ers er that he scape. And up the wyndowe dide he hastily, And out his ers he putteth pryvely Over the buttok, to the haunche-bon; And therwith spak this clerk, this Absolon, Spek, sweete bryd, I noot nat where thou art. This Nicholas anon leet fle a fart, As greet as it had been a thonder-dent, That with the strook he was almoost yblent;

  Unfortunately for the butt-kissee, the -kisser is holding a red-hot poker,

  And he was redy with his iren hoot, And nicholas amydde the ers he smoot. Of gooth the skyn an hande-brede aboute, The hoote kultour brende so his toute, And for the smert he wende for to dye.

  The carpenter/cuckold arrives on the scene afterwards to much comedic effect. Seems that the chance of mistaken identity is more dangerous for the deceiver than the perceiver, no matter how willful or oblivious the latter can be. Or perhaps i just wanted to use historical/topical proximity to flimsily justify posting literary butt jokes. Either way I feel like a contributor. A poet buried in Westminster Abbey's solemn stones, despite having written the phrase "nether [e]ye" just cracks and warms up the cockles of my heart, making scrambled eggs.
• Monkeyfilter: just repeating what my RE teacher told me.
• Monkeyfilter: use historical/topical proximity to flimsily justify posting literary butt jokes.
• Oh, Captain, my Captain, you missed this one: MonkeyFilter: giving them Ye Olde Blow Jobbe.
• Monkeyfilter: As greet as it had been a thonder-dent
• Hank - I'm aware that the identity of "gay" or "lesbian" is a modern one, but if one believes that orientation is biological (as I, and many other people, do), there there would have to be pre-modern examples of people who had a same-sex or both sexes orientation. How they express that orientation (their behaviour) would be culturally mediated, but wouldn't change the essential orientation. There are many people in the world today who are what may be called straight or gay adversive - who are actually adverse to sex with the sex which is wrong for them. Again, if we believe that orientation is biological, then it would have worked the same way in the past; there would have been not (just) dominance and submissiveness in sexual encounters, but real preferences for heterosexual or homosexual encounters for some, while many others exist on a spectrum of varying levels of bisexuality inbetween. There have certainly been times when a fairly large percentage of the population has engaged in same-sex activity, perhaps as a stage of life; in Florence, there was a strong culture of this.* But while sorting oneself into butch or femme (as lesbians divided themselves in the 1950s) or engaging in a period of same-sex activity but otherwise engaging in straight sex and identifying as "normal" (as in Florence)as opposed to bisexual (as they might today) would be culturally mediated, I don't believe that orientation itself is. What I was saying about this case is that as a prostitute, we do not know what kind of agency this man had in his relationships, and thus we don't know what his actions say about his sexuality. It may have, for example, been a chance for him to express his desire for other men (as well as women, as by his testimony he had sex with women as well). Or it may have been a survival strategy for someone who had no orientation towards sex with other men. We just can't know. It was more a statement about the nature and limits of this particular historical source and example - and on sexuality history in general. The field of sexuality history has some excellent research, but also some not very well thought out research. Years ago, I was reading on cross-dressing women, and I found many scholars just not thinking very critically about the issue. Some, for example, appeared to assume that most cross-dressing women did so because they were lesbian or felt male, while the historical evidence suggests that while this was definitely true of many cases, in many others there were economic or other reasons to pass as men. If we want to understand the history of sexuality - especially of often necessarily secret sexuality and even cases of transgendered people (and the past most definitely had gender, stronger than we do) - we have to take it on a case by case basis and think very closely about the limits of what we can know about what is essentially the inner lives of these people and why they made the choices they did.
• That said, this man's customers, however, clearly chose to have sex with man - considering that there were female partners available (it wasn't like they were at sea or in a prison), and that homosexual sex brought with it dangers which were greater - why would they make those choices? We are told that they, or some at least, were "unsuspecting", but we also have good reason to be suspicious of this. *(though knowing what I do of straight as well as gay adversive people, and considering that it was persecuted, I'm confused by the summary which says that "nearly all Florentine males probably had some kind of same-sex experience as a part of their "normal" sexual life." Why would it be persecuted as a crime if it were just accepted as part of normal sexual life? I need to reread this book to check out the numbers - historians are notoriously loose with them, especially around wiggle words like "nearly".)