tough-mindedness, he draws significance out of what is, and what is not, available in the archive. In so doing, the archive is reconfigured: it is not a storehouse or treasure chest waiting to be opened but a palimpsest of fragments, on the ragged edges of which hang unexpected meanings. Bray’s articulation of the difference between Elizabethan and later discourses of male intimacy, for instance, hinges on “what is left out” in idealized expressions of friendship: the “tactful omission of those bonds of mutual interest of which the everyday signs were such conventions.”26 When suspicion is generated by accounts of friendship, as it increasingly was, it is because “some of the conventions of friendship are missing … and the missing ones are precisely those that ensured that the intimacy of these conventions was read in an acceptable frame of reference.”27 What could convert signs of male friendship into signs of sodomy, it turns out, was partly the mixing of status or degree—and it was only by looking for “the silence between the lines” that Bray hit upon the significance of social inequality to the sodomy-friendship interrelation.28 For a social historian generally committed to traditional protocols of evidence, this emphasis on silence and insignificance, on traces and fragments and the difficulties of intelligibility they pose, was, especially at the time, a strikingly unconventional move.29
That erotic behavior might not signify in or by itself implicitly links the problem of representation to the issue of social embeddedness. The combined effect of this connection is to emphasize the uncertainty of sexuality’s power of signification. As I noted in Chapter 1, Laurie Shannon has cogently rearticulated and extended Bray’s argument, maintaining that there is nothing fully dispositive about eroticism to convey particular meanings; erotic acts operate only unreliably as a trigger for articulation.30 Correlating the gift of the friend’s body to the changing fate of homosexuality, for instance, Bray argues that the proximity of exalted and excoriated male bonds means that erotic affects and acts could be an element of both—it depends on how you look at it. How you look at it is itself influenced by historical factors, including what counts as sex in a given culture. What counts, of course, can be highly contingent, variable, and incoherent, even within a single culture and historical moment—as was brought home to everyone in the United States when President Bill Clinton avowed that whatever he did with Monica Lewinsky, it was not sex.31
One effect of showing that sodomy and friendship could be recognized at one moment as utterly distinct and at another moment as close to the same thing was to deconstruct, from a historically specific angle, the boundary between them. The complex elaboration of male intimacy throughout early modern society, coupled with the potential for erotic acts not to signify, creates the interpretative field into which all erotic behaviors fall: “Mediated as homosexuality then was by social relationships that did not take their form from homosexuality and were not exclusive to it, the barrier between heterosexual and homosexual behaviour … was in practice vague and imprecise.”32 One might expect, then, that changes in the social articulation of male bonds might affect the meanings of male intimacy with women—and indeed they did. Just as the sodomite became identifiable as a perversion of normative cross-sex alliance, so these alliances increasingly relied on the sodomite to secure their own status as natural and inevitable. Arguing that the transformation in male intimacy “placed a burden of social meaning on the heterosexual bond between husband and wife that before it had not been required to carry alone,” and that, with the ascendance of civil society, the gift of the body came to be acknowledged “only as a sexual gift between men and women,”33 Bray brings to the theoretical dictum of the dependence of the hetero on the homo a historical specificity it otherwise often lacks.34
Yet, it is important to acknowledge that, despite this deconstructive impulse, Bray never adopted the inversive desideratum of queer theory: that the burden of proof belongs to those who assume the presence of heterosexuality. Committed as he was to the historian’s protocols of evidence, and taking seriously sexuality’s lack of dispositive power, he was cautious about assigning erotic signification to particular gestures, behaviors, texts, people. He especially discounted the truth value of Renaissance accusations of sodomy, whose evidentiary basis he rightly judged to be unreliable:
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
