Randolph Trumbach

Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology.

From the Restoration through the 18th century, the sexuality of actors and actresses was written about in ways that stirred the public imagination. Actors were frequently suspected of heterosexual promiscuity or labelled effeminate, and actresses were often viewed as prostitutes or sexually ambivalent victims of their profession. This depiction of players, argues Kristina Straub, greatly shaped public debates over what made women feminine and men masculine. Considering a wide range of literature by or about players - pamphlets, newspaper reports, theatrical histories, biographies, as well as the public correspondence between Alexander Pope and the actor Colley Cibber - she examines the formation of gender roles and sexual identities during a period crucial to modern thinking on these issues.

Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume One: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London

A revolution in gender relations ocurred in London around 1700 that resulted in a sexual system that endured in many aspects until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. There emerged three genders: men, women and a third gender of adult effeminate sodomites, or homosexuals. This text reconstructs the worlds of 18th-century prostitution, illegitimacy, sexual violence and adultery. In those worlds the majority of men became heterosexuals by avoiding sodomy and sodomite behaviour. Women generally experienced the new male heterosexuality as its victims, but - as prostitutes, seduced servants, remarrying widows and adulterous wives - also pursued passion. The text explores the sexual underworld of extramarital behaviour as central not only to the sexual lives of men and women, but to the very existence of marriage, the family, domesticity and romantic love. London emerges as not only a geographical site but as an actor in its own right, mapping out domains where patriarchy, heterosexuality, domesticity and female resistance take vivid form in our imaginations and senses.

The Transformation of Sodomy from the Renaissance to the Modern World and Its General Sexual Consequences

Europeans before 1700 presumed that all males desired both women and adolescent boys. In the generation after 1700, some Europeans began to think that most men desired only women and that only a deviant minority desired other males who might be either adults or adolescents. This is documented in legal, literary, and visual sources. The new sexual regime first appeared between 1700 and 1750 in England, France, and the Netherlands. By 1800 it was present in central Europe, but it did not arrive in southern and eastern Europe before 1900. Relations between women are harder to document because there are fewer legal sources. It is likely that women before 1700 were (like men) attracted both to men and women and that their relations with women were usually structured by differences in age. After 1700 it is likely that the modern lesbian minority had less of an impact on the lives of the female majority than the male sodomite minority had on the lives of most men. These changes first occurred in a single generation after 1700. The abruptness in the changes was no greater than the changes in politics and economics brought on by the French and Industrial Revolutions, each in a single generation. The revolution in sexual and gender relations is no easier to explain than those in politics and the economy.