¹ Brown, Keith M., Kingdom or Province? Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603–1715 (New York, 1992), 88Google ScholarPubMed.

² Among royalty, only Henry III of France would rival James for this distinction. See Cady, Joseph, “‘The Masculine Love’ of the ‘Princes of Sodom’: ‘Practicing the Art of Ganymede’ at Henri III’s Court,” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Murray, Jacqueline and Eisenbichler, Konrad (Toronto, 1996), 123–54Google Scholar; Potter, David, “Kingship in the Wars of Religion: The Reputation of Henri III of France,” European History Quarterly 25, no. 4 (October 1995): 485–528CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scott, Paul A., “Edward II and Henri III: Sexual Identity at the End of the Sixteenth Century,” in Self and Other in Sixteenth-Century France: Proceedings of the Seventh Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium, ed. Banks, Kathryn and Ford, Philip (Cambridge, 2004), 125–42Google Scholar.

³ Rocke, Michael, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar.

⁴ Trumbach, Randolph, “Renaissance Sodomy, 1500–1700,” in A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex between Men since the Middle Ages, ed. Cook, Matt (Oxford, 2007), 52–54Google Scholar.

⁵ Smith, Bruce R., Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago, 1991), 192Google Scholar.

⁶ Coelum Britannicum, in Carew, Thomas, Poems (London, 1640), 207–20Google Scholar. Kevin Sharpe wrote that Carew “evidently framed his masque in accordance with the king’s tastes and values—and possibly under royal direction” (Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England: Essays and Studies [London, 1989], 172). For a fuller discussion of the meaning of this masque, especially its relevance to King James, see Young, Michael B., King James and the History of Homosexuality (New York, 2001), 109–10Google Scholar. For the tradition of Ganymede, see Saslow, James M., Ganymede in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT, 1986)Google Scholar.

⁷ This way of interpreting the evidence, especially the work by Curtis Perry on the subject, is discussed below.

⁸ Sir Henry Widdrington described James’s expressiveness toward the duke of Lennox in these words: “he can hardly suffer him out of his presence, and is in such love with him, as in the open sight of the people, oftentimes he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him” (Joseph Bain, ed., Calendar of Letters and Papers Relating to the Affairs of the Borders of England and Scotland, 2 vols. [Edinburgh, 1894–95], 1:82; spelling modernized). James was also observed kissing the earl of Huntly: “yea he kissed him at times to the amazement of many.” The reporter added, “It is thowght this Kinge is to[o] muche caryed by yonge men that lyes in his chamber and is his mynions” (William K. Boyd, ed., Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots, 1547–1603, 12 vols. [Edinburgh, 1898–1969], 9:701). In England, James’s familiarity with Robert Carr was famously reported by Thomas Howard who wrote that James “leaneth on his arm, pinches his cheek, smoothes his ruffled garment” (Norman E. McClure, ed., The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington [Philadelphia, 1930], 32–34). Bray’s, Alan alternative interpretation of this evidence in The Friend (Chicago, 2003) is discussed at length belowGoogle Scholar.

⁹ von Raumer, Frederick, ed., History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Illustrated by Original Sources, trans. Lloyd, H. E., 2 vols. (London, 1835), 2:219, 234Google Scholar. On the subject of Henry III’s reputation, see n. 2 above.

¹⁰ Ibid., 2:265, 269, 274, 278. There is a significant difference here in that Tiberius did not take his infamous catamite Sejanus with him to Capri. Tillières further reported that James compared himself and Buckingham to “the heroes of friendship of antiquity,” who were presumably such well-known pairs as Achilles and Patroclus or Alexander and Hephestion. Tillières was not impressed by such lofty comparisons, however. “Under such specious titles,” he wrote, “he endeavours to conceal scandalous doings” (Ibid., 2:265–66).

¹¹ Hippeau, M. C., ed., Mémoires Inédits du Comte Leveneur de Tillières (Paris, 1862), 1–3, 16Google Scholar.

¹² Bourcier, Elisabeth, ed., The Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 1622–1624 (Paris, 1974), 57, 87Google Scholar.

¹³ Ibid., 92–93.

¹⁴ “The Warre of the Gods,” the commonplace book of Tobias Alston (ca. 1639), Osborne manuscript b197, 112–13, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. I have modernized the spelling. This poem is now available with similar works at http://www.earlystuartlibels.net.

¹⁵ Scott, Thomas, The Belgicke Pismire (London, 1622), 10–12, 37–40Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Tom Tell Troath, Or a Free Discourse Touching the Manners of the Tyme, Directed to His Majestie by Way of Humble Advertisement (London?, 1630?), 8, 25, 28.

¹⁷ A tract published after James’s reign complained that libels such as this damaged the monarchy, eroding the aura of majesty surrounding the throne. It singled out the passage quoted here as the single most damaging (George Calvert, Lord Baltimore[?], The Answer to Tom-Tell-Troth [London, 1642], 2).

¹⁸ Corona Regia (n.p., 1615), 89–92, 104–5. This Latin work has only recently been translated into English (Fyotek, Tyler, trans., Corona Regia [Geneva, 2010]), with an introduction by Winfried Schleiner. The corresponding pages in this edition are 79–81, 89.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Hammond, Paul, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford, 2002), 140CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hammond is wrong, however, in accepting the author as Isaac Casaubon. It remains a great mystery to this day who the true author was. Winfried Schleiner summarizes the possibilities in his introduction to the new edition of Corona Regia cited above, 7–24.

²⁰ Readers will find a much more complete assemblage of the evidence in my King James. See esp. chap. 3, “Base Fellows.”

²¹ Akrigg, G. P. V., ed., Letters of King James VI & I (Berkeley, 1984), 337Google Scholar.

²² Bergeron, David, King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City, 1999), 179Google Scholar.

²³ This earlier literature is briefly surveyed in Bergeron, David M., “Writing King James’s Sexuality,” in Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, ed. Fischlin, Daniel and Fortier, Mark (Detroit, 2002), 344–68Google Scholar.

²⁴ Matthew, David, James I (London, 1967), 292Google Scholar.

²⁵ Donaldson, Gordon, Scotland: James V to James VII (Edinburgh, 1971), 173, 186Google Scholar.

²⁶ Lee, Maurice Jr., “James I and the Historians: Not a Bad King after All?” Albion 16, no. 2 (Summer 1984), 158, 161, 163CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana, IL, 1990), 240–42, 248–49. See also Bergeron’s opinion of Lee in “Writing King James’s Sexuality,” 357. Lee, Maurice Jr., review of Young, King James, in Albion 32, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 636CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Unlike previous authors like Matthew and Donaldson, Lee does not characterize sex between men as guilty or gross behavior, but he does observe that James’s public displays of affection and the love letters that he wrote are “certainly not appealing or attractive to modern eyes” (Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon, 234).

²⁷ Bingham, Caroline, James I of England (London, 1981), 83Google Scholar. One cannot help but wonder whether Bingham, as a woman, found James’s sexuality less threatening than did the men who wrote about the subject. Antonia Fraser’s biography appeared earlier and also presumed that James’s relationships with his favorites involved sex, but her treatment of the subject is more cursory and ambivalent (King James VI of Scotland I of England [London, 1974], 36–37, 168).

²⁸ Lockyer, Roger, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (London, 1981), 22Google Scholar. At least some reviewers of Lockyer’s book seemed convinced. Reviewing Lockyer’s book in the English Historical Review, Simon Adams concluded: “We are provided with the first clear evidence of an active homosexual relationship with James I, and Mr Lockyer advances the convincing argument that Villiers’ willingness to gratify the king was of major importance in the transfer of his affections from the Earl of Somerset, who refused to” (English Historical Review 98, no. 388 [July 1983]: 626). In his review in The Times Literary Supplement, Patrick Collinson observed that Buckingham’s “meteoric rise owed less to his unproven administrative and political talents than to a pretty face and the capacity to afford James I certain private consolations” (The Times Literary Supplement, 29 October 1982, 1187).

²⁹ Bergeron, David M., Royal Family, Royal Lovers (Columbia, MO, 1991), 28–31, 165–66, 170, 183–84Google Scholar.

³⁰ These letters were previously published and available to assiduous researchers in Yorke, Philip, second earl of Hardwicke, ed., Miscellaneous State Papers from 1501 to 1726, 2 vols. (London, 1778)Google Scholar; and the appendix to Hugh Ross Williamson’s Villiers, George, First Duke of Buckingham, Study for a Biography (London, 1940)Google Scholar. Williamson apparently appreciated the importance of the Farnham letter, putting it first in the appendix, 235.

³¹ Bergeron also wrote, “By all sensible accounts, Buckingham became James’s last and greatest lover” (Letters of Homoerotic Desire, 27, 29, 98, 110–11, 133–39, 179n, 197). Alan Bray’s interpretation of the “marriage” letter will be considered below.

³² Sharpe, Kevin, “Stuart Monarchy and Political Culture,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Morrill, John (Oxford, 1996), 244, 247Google Scholar.

³³ Croft, Pauline, King James (Houndmills, 2003), 98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also 16, 36, and 87. In my own study of the subject, I concluded that James “did have sex with his male favourites, and it is nonsense to deny it” (Young, King James, 135).

³⁴ Goldberg, Jonathan, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, 1983), 142–46Google Scholar; Smith, , Homosexual Desire, 14, 75, 176–78, 202–3Google Scholar.

³⁵ Lockyer, Roger, James VI & I (London, 1998), 12, 170Google Scholar. See also 68–69, 205–6. In two other books written by Lockyer, favorites are simply referred to as such. They come and go, but there is no attempt to define what a favorite was or address the possible sexual implications. The Early Stuarts, 2nd ed. (Harlow, 1999), and Tudor and Stuart Britain, 3rd ed. (Harlow, 2005).

³⁶ Lockyer, Roger, “Villiers, George, First Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols., ed. Matthew, H. C. G. and Harrison, Brian Howard (Oxford, 2004), 56:489Google Scholar.

³⁷ Hirst, Derek, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–1658 (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 97, and England in Conflict, 1603–1660 (London, 1999), 93Google Scholar.

³⁸ Stewart, Alan, The Cradle King: The Life of James VI & I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain (New York, 2003), 51–54, 257–59, 271Google Scholar.

³⁹ Adams, Simon, “Rigging and Bending,” review of Stewart, Cradle King, in London Review of Books, 9 October 2003, 31Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Wormald, Jenny, “James VI and I: Two Kings or One?” History 68, no. 223 (June 1983): 187–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ SirWeldon, Anthony, The Court and Character of King James, Written and Taken by Sir A. W., Being an Eye, and Ear Witness (London, 1650)Google Scholar. Weldon’s authorship of this work cannot be proved. Wormald and many other authors asserted that Weldon was a bitter man sacked by King James and wrote the Court and Character as an act of revenge. Wormald wrote, “The consequences of the loss of his job have lasted to the present day; few men in history have had quite such revenge” (“James VI and I,” 191). It recently has been shown that this story is apocryphal. See Joseph Marshall and Sean Kelsey, “Sir Anthony Weldon,” in Matthew and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 57:980–82.

⁴² SirScott, Walter, ed., Secret History of the Court of James the First, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1811)Google Scholar.

⁴³ In 1983, Wormald did make two telling comments that would figure, as we shall see, in her later writing on the subject. She noted that “nineteenth-century distaste for his sexual morals” had hurt James’s reputation, and she claimed that “Archbishop Abbot and Queen Anne brought George Villiers to James’s attention” (Wormald, “James VI and I,” 190, 207; see also 187 and 188n).

⁴⁴ Jenny Wormald, “James VI and I (1566–1625),” in Matthew and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 29:647; italics mine.

⁴⁵ Wormald, Jenny, “James VI & I,” History Today 52, no. 6 (June 2002): 33Google Scholar. Similarly, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, Wormald wrote that “it must be emphasized that neither in Scotland nor in England were the king’s sexual proclivities of as much interest in his day as they later became” (Wormald, “James VI and I (1566–1625),” 29:648).

⁴⁶ Akrigg, Letters, 98.

⁴⁷ Before his marriage, James was described as someone who “never regardes the company of any woman, not so much as in any dalliance.” At the time of the marriage negotiations, he was described as a “cold wooer” who was “not hasty of marriage” (Boyd, Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, 9:655, 10:122, 124).

⁴⁸ Although some would consider it too anachronistic, if we accept the modern dichotomy assumed by Wormald, then Rictor Norton’s description of the “married homosexual” could be applied to James (The Myth of the Modern Homosexual [London, 1997], 55).

⁴⁹ Wormald, “James VI and I (1566–1625),” 29:647.

⁵⁰ Bruce Smith wrote about this coincidence that “it is hard to decide where art leaves off and life begins” (Homosexual Desire, 203).

⁵¹ These quotes are taken from Abbot’s reminiscence published in An English Garner: Stuart Tracts, 1603–1693 (New York, 1964), 347–48Google Scholar. Abbot’s account was published earlier in Nichols, John, ed., The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols. (London, 1828), 3:80–81Google Scholar. It was originally published in John Rushworth, Historical Collections, 7 vols. (London, 1659–1701), 1:460–61.

⁵² Stuart Tracts, 347–48.

⁵³ For Anne’s political activities and this episode, see Barroll, Leeds, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England (Philadelphia, 2001), 134–49Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Kishlansky, Mark, Geary, Patrick, and O’Brien, Patricia, Civilization in the West, 5th ed., 3 vols. (New York, 2003), B:511Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Kishlansky, Mark, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603–1714 (London, 1996), 96Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Kishlansky also makes the following odd defense of James: “If he was prurient, he was not predatory” (Ibid., 69). It is hard to know exactly what Kishlansky has in mind here unless he wishes to emphasize that, although James chose younger males for his lovers, these were nonetheless consensual relationships.

⁵⁷ Stuart Tracts, 349.

⁵⁸ Lockyer, Buckingham, 16–20.

⁵⁹ Stuart Tracts, 347.

⁶⁰ McClure, Norman E., ed., The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1939), 2:144; Young, King James, 76Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (Boston, 1982), 76Google Scholar. See also pages 57 and 67.

⁶² Commonplace book of Tobias Alston (ca. 1639), Osborne manuscript b197, 188, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. I have modernized the spelling. This verse can also be found as libel no. 10, “Heaven blesse King James our joy,” at http://www.earlystuartlibels.net, lines 37–44.

⁶³ Weldon, Court and Character of King James, 136.

⁶⁴ Trumbach, “Renaissance Sodomy, 1500–1700,” 56.

⁶⁵ DiGangi, Mario, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 1997), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Borris, Kenneth, ed., Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470–1650 (New York, 2004), 81Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, “Enacting Opposition: Queen Anne and the Subversions of Masquing,” in Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 15, 26Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ For a more thorough analysis of the dynamics of the royal marriage, see Young, Michael B., “Queen Anna Bites Back: Protest, Effeminacy and Manliness at the Jacobean Court,” in Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe, ed. Munns, Jessica and Richards, Penny (London, 2003), 108–22Google Scholar. See also Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers.

⁶⁸ In that note, Bray did appear to acknowledge the sexual role of James’s favorites. Bray wrote, “On the homosexual element in James’s life, see the beautiful and sensitive biography by Caroline Bingham, James I of England” (Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 121 n. 14).

⁶⁹ Ibid., 52, 79.

⁷⁰ In his chapter “The Social Setting,” Bray wrote, “What determined the shared and recurring features of homosexual relationships was the prevailing distribution of power, economic power and social power, not the fact of homosexuality itself” (Ibid., 56).

⁷¹ Ibid., 76.

⁷² Bray, Alan, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop Journal 29, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 1–19, quote on 13–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The essay was reprinted in Goldberg, Jonathan, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC, 1994), 40–61Google Scholar.

⁷³ Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship,” 4–5, 13–14.

⁷⁴ O’Donnell, Katherine and O’Rourke, Michael, eds., Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800 (Houndmills, 2003), xiGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁵ Perry, Curtis, Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006), 135CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Perry saw the “all-powerful royal favorite” as “a cultural fantasy” that is “best understood in larger mythic or ideological terms” (2). See also Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men, 128–50. Andrew McRae was much more willing to venture an opinion. See his Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge, 2004), 79, 143.

⁷⁶ Bellany, Alastair, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge, 2002), 30, 137Google Scholar. Bellany’s work on the duke of Buckingham is among the most eagerly awaited in the field, and it will be interesting to see whether he remains as agnostic when he turns his attention from Somerset to Buckingham.

⁷⁷ Bray, The Friend, 268–69.

⁷⁸ Freccero, Carla asked, “why should the one female relationship discussed at length in this book also be the one relationship that includes sex in its evidentiary archive? I wonder whether Bray was countering two tendencies here, the one to sexualize male friendship narrowly (as he argues both Boswell and his detractors did), the other to overspiritualize its feminine forms. It does seem a strange apotheosis for a book about male friendship, and it sits uneasily at the conclusion of this work” (“Passionate Friendship,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 [2004]: 506–7)Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ Bray was emphatic that he wanted “to let the past speak for itself,” but this was a surprisingly naive view, especially in light of his explicitly stated objectives (The Friend, 11).

⁸⁰ Ibid., 7, 38, 316.

⁸¹ Ibid., 2, 8.

⁸² Ibid., 5.

⁸³ Ibid., 136–38.

⁸⁴ Carla Freccero observed: “For the most part, the homosexuality that modernity would want to identify in these friendships is missing,” and she described The Friend as “inspired by faith,” driven by “an ethical imperative, first to repair, in some sense, the relationship between homosexuality and Christianity” (“Passionate Friendship,” 504, 506, 507). Gert Hekma described The Friend as “illuminating the tensions between the author’s academic pursuits, his gay political activism and the Roman Catholic faith to which he converted.” Regarding the similar trajectories of Boswell and Bray, Hekma found it “disappointing that both historians have become so Catholic that they rather overlook the sexual content of modern gay relations and seem to be satisfied merely with making loving friendships acceptable” (“New Histories of Masculinity,” European History Quarterly 35, no. 2 [April 2005]: 331–32). Jackson, Russell expressed the opinion that Bray went “out of his way to minimize the importance of any physical element in these ‘friendships,’ and inevitably pushes his thesis too far” (“What Friends Were For,” Gay and Lesbian Review 11, no. 2 [March/April 2004]: 38)Google Scholar. Peter Nardi complained that “it is easy to get impatient with his attempts to minimize the sexual component of these relationships and his assumption that the Church’s positions are the dominant explanations” (review of The Friend, in Journal of Homosexuality 50, no. 4 [2006]: 222). Michelle Appleton was blunter, writing that “the devout, Roman Catholic convert Bray is determined to deny that these ceremonies mark gay or lesbian relationships without explicit proof to the contrary,” and “in his drive to prove that, he seriously underestimates the number of gay relationships that did occur” (review of The Friend, in Gay and Lesbian Humanist [Spring 2004], http://www.pinktriangle.org.uk/glh/233/bray.html). Lorna Hutson wrote, “The book is implicitly committed to the project of seeing ‘in the past ways of transcending … the looming confrontation … between Christianity and homosexuality,’ and it is this investment in Christianity as alone capable of expressing the spiritual and social value of same-sex friendship that is, I think, most likely to make Bray’s readers uneasy” (review of The Friend, in Clio 34, no. 3 [Spring 2005]: 335). For another consideration of the way Bray’s faith affected his scholarship, see Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke, “In Memoriam—Alan Bray,” in Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship, 83. As these observations illustrate, Bray’s personal life profoundly influenced his interpretation of the past. On an even more personal level, Bray’s exploration of past friendships was motivated by the death of his own dear friend Michel Rey and the “waves of dying friends that so many knew during the years of the AIDS crisis” (The Friend, 5). As Freccero phrased it, Rey’s “early death haunts the work” (“Passionate Friendship,” 505).

⁸⁵ Bray, The Friend, 154. Some of Bray’s arguments regarding James appeared earlier in a much briefer form in Bray, Alan and Rey, Michel, “The Body of the Friend: Continuity and Change in Masculine Friendship in the Seventeenth Century,” in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Hitchcock, Tim and Cohen, Michèle (London, 1999), 65–84Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ DiGangi was perceptive, even prescient, when he wrote in reaction to Bray’s article on signs that Bray was moving toward a “construction of friendship [that] avoids the erotic” (Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, 10–11).

⁸⁷ The letter is printed in Bergeron, Letters of Homoerotic Desire, 173–75.

⁸⁸ Bray, The Friend, 96–104, 125.

⁸⁹ Bergeron, Letters of Homoerotic Desire, 173.

⁹⁰ Bray, The Friend, 103.

⁹¹ Harington, John, Nugae Antique, 2 vols. (London, 1804), 1:390–97Google Scholar. The letter quoted here is attributed to 1611, but its contents indicate it must have been written in 1607.

⁹² Macray, W. Dunn, ed., The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641, by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1888), 1:10–11Google Scholar. See also Young, King James, 73–77.

⁹³ McClure, Letters of John Chamberlain, 2:144.

⁹⁴ Young, King James, 49.

⁹⁵ Bergeron, Letters of Homoerotic Desire, 192.

⁹⁶ Bray’s discussion of this letter occurs in The Friend, 166–72.

⁹⁷ Ibid., 166.

⁹⁸ Borris, Same-Sex Desire, 76–79, 97. Sodomy was always an extremely ambiguous term. See Jordan, Mark D., The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁹⁹ Bray, The Friend, 168–72.

¹⁰⁰ Buckingham must have known that the contents of his letters to the king would be heard, seen, or reported on by others at court. See Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, 143.

¹⁰¹ Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 10, 26. Only around 1700 did Bray think that the picture became “radically” or “brilliantly” different (80).

¹⁰² Stewart, Alan, “Boys’ Buttocks Revisited: James VI and the Myth of the Sovereign Schoolmaster,” in Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Betteridge, Tom (Manchester, 2002), 131Google Scholar.

¹⁰³ Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men, 85, 129. Some authors still lapse into using the word “homosexual” where it is simply the most intelligible. For example, the subtitle of Michael Rocke’s highly respected Forbidden Friendships is Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. To be precise, of course, in the idiom of Renaissance Florence, Rocke’s subject is sodomy, and that is certainly the way he most often refers to it. Yet at the same time, he observes that he is studying “homosexuality in the sexual and social life of Florence,” and he refers repeatedly to “homosexual relations,” “homosexual behavior,” and “homosexual activity” (Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 4–5).

¹⁰⁴ Trumbach, “Renaissance Sodomy, 1500–1700,” 52.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 49.

¹⁰⁶ Halperin, David M., One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York, 1990), 8Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁷ See, e.g., Hitchcock, Tim, English Sexualities (Houndmills, 1997), 65Google Scholar; Trumbach advocated this view in numerous publications. See esp. his Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago, 1998), and “Modern Sodomy: The Origins of Homosexuality, 1700–1800,” in Cook, , Gay History of Britain, 77–106Google Scholar. For a dissenting view, see Murray, Stephen O., Homosexualities (Chicago, 2000), esp. 11, 159Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁸ Alan Stewart, “Homosexuals in History: A. L. Rowse and the Queer Archive,” in O’Donnell and O’Rourke, Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship, 56. See also 66 where Stewart refers to “the Rowsian fantasy of the homosexual in history.”

¹⁰⁹ Halperin, David M., How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago, 2002), 16Google Scholar. Halperin makes this declaration after citing a list of famous historical figures from Larry Kramer’s semiautobiographical play The Normal Heart. For a quite different viewpoint, see Crompton, Louis, Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, MA, 2003)Google Scholar. Crompton emphasizes the “commonality” between past and present homosexual individuals. He writes, “But we must not be complicit in this dehumanization. These ‘sodomites’ were human beings with whom the modern gay man may claim brotherhood and the modern lesbian recognize as sisters. To divide history in two in 1869 at the moment when the word ‘homosexual’ was coined is to deny this bond. To adopt Michel Foucault’s view that the homosexual did not exist ‘as a person’ until this time is to reject a rich and terrible past” (xiv).

¹¹⁰ Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 14–17.