We will misunderstand these accusations if, beguiled by them, we uncritically assume the existence of the sexual relationship which they appear to point to, for the material from which they could be constructed was rather open and public to all…. Homosexual relationships did indeed occur within social contexts which an Elizabethan would have called friendship…. But accusations [of sodomy] are not evidence of it.35
It is here, perhaps, that we can catch a glimpse of an unacknowledged tension in Bray’s corpus: on the one hand, the open and public nature of friendship protected early modern men from suspicion of sodomy; on the other, it somehow provides an indication in the present that they were not involved in a “sexual relationship.” In his first book, after noting the difficulties involved in using modern conceptual categories, Bray adopted the solution of using “the term homosexuality but in as directly physical—and hence culturally neutral—a sense as possible.”36 How “culturally neutral” derives from “directly physical” has long puzzled me, especially since the meaning of “physical” seems here, by default, to imply anal intercourse—perhaps the least culturally neutral, most overdetermined erotic activity during the early modern period and today. Throughout the first book, then, homosexuality, implicitly conflated with a single erotic practice, is also functionally equated with sodomy. One result of this series of conflations is that the baseline meaning of homosexuality, its status as an analytical object, is foreknown and foreclosed—even as the locations in which it is expressed and the significations it accrues change over time.37 Another result is that friendship—for all its structural affinity with and proximity to homosexuality—is definitionally posited as something other than homosexuality: not, as it were, “directly physical.”38
This is in fact Mario DiGangi’s critique of the way that Bray manages the tension between sodomy, homosexuality, and friendship: “Bray effectively conflates ‘homosexuality’ with ‘sodomy,’ implicitly reduces both to the commission of sexual acts, and then cordons off these proscribed sexual acts from the nonsexual intimacy appropriate for ‘friends.’”39 In contrast, Jonathan Goldberg confidently affirms that the combined theses of Homosexuality in Renaissance England and the influential essay “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England” imply that “much in the ordinary transactions between men in the period … took place sexually.”40 The possibility of two such opposed interpretations of Bray’s core argument is symptomatic not of misreading or misappropriation but of a pervasive ambiguity animating his work. The analytic tension between eroticism and friendship became clearer to me while reading the manuscript of The Friend, where the embedding of intimacy in a vast range of social relations and the foregrounding of ethical considerations had the subtle but persistent effect of minimizing the possibility that the bonds being described were at all sexual. Throughout Bray’s work, there is a recurring expression of concern that the reader might be “misled” by the appearance of erotic meanings, leading him or her to “misconstrue” the forces at work in the construction of male intimacy.41 The Friend’s brief for the ethical import of friendship is particularly punctuated by such cautions against misconstruction. Indeed, the ambiguities and tensions present in Bray’s earlier work are heightened in his final book.
On the one hand, the intense emotional affects Bray excavates in The Friend—affects that give rituals and conventions their experiential salience and contribute to their social efficacy—would seem to belie any strict dichotomy between friendship and eroticism.42 Early on Bray notes that the ethical praxis he aims to uncover need not have excluded the erotic: “The ethics of friendship in the world I describe began with the concrete and the actual, and the only way to exclude anything would be by abandoning that starting point. That hard-edged world included the potential for the erotic, as it included much else.”43 And, throughout the book he acknowledges the erotic potential of the physical closeness that, at any given moment, might signify one way or the other: bonds that, because of their association with social excess and disorder, signified sodomy; bonds that, due to their coherence with legitimate forms of social organization, signified friendship, kinship, obligation, love. On the other hand, sometimes Bray dismisses the historian’s access to “the possible motives and nature of [a] physical relationship” by reducing such interpretation to “no more than speculations”—as in his discussion of Amy Poulter’s marriage to Arabella Hunt.44 Sometimes the potential eroticism of friends is specifically, even categorically, denied—most emphatically, perhaps, in the exposition of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s shared grave with Ambrose St. John, which forms the coda of Bray’s book: “Their bond was spiritual…. Their love was not the less intense for being spiritual. Perhaps, it was more so.”45 Whereas Bray in his final chapter pointedly asks (in response to the sexual escapades recorded in the diary of Anne Lister), “Would a sexual potential have stood in the way of the confirmation of a sworn friendship in the Eucharist? The answer must be that it would not, in that it evidently did not do so here,”46 at the telos of his argument he resurrects, seemingly without hesitation, a stark division between spiritual and carnal love.47 This division is apparent as well in Bray’s objections to John Boswell’s scholarship on same-sex unions; one of Boswell’s mistakes was his inability to grasp “that the expected ideals of the rite would not have comprehended sexual intercourse.”48 Here, however, the circumspection of the qualifier “expected” perhaps carries Bray’s central point: that is, the ease with which a distinction between love and sodomy was maintained in the official discourse of traditional society, whatever the actual nature of the relation.49 The analytic ambiguity at the heart of The Friend’s emphasis on erotic potential thus pulls in two contradictory directions. At times this ambiguity expands the meaning of homoerotic affect, rendering it as something more than “just sex,” a point about which Bray was explicit: “The inability to conceive of relationships in other than sexual terms says something of contemporary poverty.”50 But when this ambiguity slides into a categorical denial of eroticism, it risks conceding the defining terms of the argument to those who would protect the study of intimacy from eroticism’s embodied materiality.
The risk of dematerializing eroticism was articulated two decades ago when Goldberg warned that sexuality “can always be explained in other terms, and in ways in which anything like sex disappears.”51 This caution will be examined in Chapter 6. It is worth noting that, despite the symbolic centrality of the gift of the friend’s body in Bray’s book, bodies themselves play a very small part in his discussion. One is tempted to say that the materiality of the body is displaced onto the memorials—the gravestones and churches—that populate his account.52 Nonetheless, I wonder what Bray would have made of the triumphant proclamation on the inside dust jacket cover of The Friend: “He debunks the now-familiar readings of friendship by historians of sexuality who project homoerotic desires onto their subjects when there were none.”53 Certainly, Bray warned repeatedly against anachronism and misconstrual: he considered them bad history. But his own negotiation of this problem was considerably more nuanced than an effort to “debunk” the assertions of others; nor does the preemptive rejection of the mutual engagement between past and present implied in the term “projection” accurately convey his own historical method.54 “Readers of this book can and will appropriate the past for themselves, if I stick to my job of presenting the past first in its own terms,” he declares in the introduction to The Friend, and he follows up that remark with a pointed reference to the politics of the present: “Could it be that that very appropriation might prelude a resolution of the conflict between homosexual people and the Christian church today?”55 Insofar as Bray stressed repeatedly that his scholarship grew out of an activist engagement with contemporary gay life, I suspect that any denigration