Religion, Science, and the Remaking of Illicit Sexuality

Rachel Cleves’s Unspeakable is framed from the beginning as a “history of the social world of sex between men and children before the 1950s.” It is not a conventional biography but rather uses Norman Douglas’s story to develop a larger history of sexuality. And so, though it is most obviously a history of a form of sexual behaviour that is, as Cleves puts it, “the third rail of contemporary culture,” it is also a book that makes critical contributions to the cultural history of sexuality writ large, providing a model for the study of how sexual subjectivities are formed and understood in complicated relation to the cultural categories of a particular moment, often in unexpected and even disturbing ways. Cleves offers, as she puts it, “a full retelling of Norman Douglas’s life, highlighting the historical and interpretive questions that his life provokes, as a window onto the past.” Those historical and interpretive questions ramify and proliferate, making this an important intervention not just in the history of childhood, of children and sex work, or of sexual abuse and sexual crime, but also in fields where the contribution may be less immediately obvious (as is the case with my own research field, the intertwined histories of religion, science, and sexuality). Cleves frames her argument via Gayle Rubin’s idea of the “charmed circle” of sexuality. In Douglas’s day, Cleves argues, that “charmed circle” was not just narrower than it is today, but its very narrowness dramatically reshaped how it functioned in relation to the making of “deviance”: Cleves returns to and expands on this theme midway through her text. There she makes the crucial point that as long as the “charmed circle” contained only (for the most part) participants in married, heterosexual sex, that, in turn, created connections between sexual behaviours and identities that might otherwise seem entirely unrelated. According to Cleves, “When Douglas rose to fame, the rules governing sexual behavior lumped together a broad range of illicit sexual behaviors into one big grab bag of immorality. Pederasty may have been the worst of the worst, but it was still a part of the whole. The difference between pederasty and other sexual crimes like adultery and homosexuality was a matter of degree.” This was also a time when sexual inequality of all kinds was more “normal” than it is today, when sex was almost inevitably structured by inequalities of “class, gender, age, ethnicity, race, or some combination of all of the former.” The late nineteenth-century articulation of “a new model of same-sex love structured by ideals of equality and reciprocity” was part of a political strategy aimed at acceptance via assimilation; it also marked a profound shift in the way that sexual aberrance was mapped and understood. In that context, Cleves quotes John Addington Symonds’s late nineteenth-century lament that “we cannot be Greeks now” but also argues that Douglas himself played a key role in carrying those classical and supposedly “pagan” sexual practices forward into the twentieth century: “As a writer, Douglas didn’t just draw on the classical pederastic tradition; he also innovated the tradition. His books were foundational for a new twentieth-century pederastic subculture that thrived until the sea change of the 1960s.” Here I want to take the opportunity to draw out some of the implications of this aspect of Cleves’s argument, emphasizing the ways in which her account of Douglas’s sexual practices and persona reveal a new dimension of this particular moment in the history of sexuality, in which a particular kind of sexual self became imaginable. That sexual self was formed in complex dialogue with the changing …