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 of contemporary identification with a homoerotic past may have given him pause.56
It is not just that leveling a charge of projection in this way is inaccurate and offensive; more important, it circumvents, and thereby obscures, questions tacitly raised by Bray’s scholarship but not resolved in it: namely, the relations between emotional and bodily intimacy, and what we make of them. Indeed, it is one of the legacies of his work that, although the tension between friendship and eroticism informs it at almost every turn, nowhere is the unstable line separating these forms of intimacy brought into direct focus and treated as an object of analysis. Bray casts his eye first on the conventions of friendship and then on those of sodomy, but in analyzing their connection, he seems to take his cue from early moderns themselves, who were unwilling “to take seriously the ambiguous borderland between the ‘sodomite’ and the shared beds and bonding of its male companionship.”57 For a historian to “take seriously” this “ambiguous borderland” would mean to submit to analytic scrutiny the movement across borders, the places where and the moments when (and not simply the processes by which) one thing becomes another. Bray’s apparent preference was much like that of the early modern society he describes, which “knew that the gaps—and the overlaps—between one thing and its other had their utility.”58 Rather in the manner of the “accommodating ambiguity” he identifies elsewhere,59 Bray does not parse his terms too precisely, as evinced by the sleight of hand in his remark that “the word ‘love’ in this society could comprehend as easily the public relation of friends as the more private meaning we give the word today, but wherever on that wide spectrum the gift of a friend’s body might lie, it gestured toward a place of comforting safety in an insecure world.”60 Indeed, if one substitutes the term “eroticism” for “friendship” in Bray’s statement that “the indirection of the language of friendship provided a circumspect path around it,”61 one comes close to describing the rhetorical strategy he deployed in regard to the confused relations among the sexual, the physical, the subjective, and the affective.
Examining the ambiguous borderland, the overlap, between one thing and another might particularly have paid off in relation to one of Bray’s key terms: voluntary kinship. It is striking that Bray ignores the applicability of voluntary kinship to the social structure of the molly house. Because of the tight link between sodomy and social disorder—a link that for Bray goes to the heart of what sodomy is—he fails to consider whether the vows of mollies, some of which follow the traditional script of marriage, might not also operate as an alternative form of kinship. The analytic division between friendship and sodomy, social disorder and social cohesion, enables him to recognize bonds of kinship only within the received structure of traditional society: in the form of male couples whose formal vows are backed by Christian ritual.
It may well be wrong to characterize Bray’s circumspection in this regard as reticence or reluctance to confront the radical implications of his own work. As a historian, he appears to have approached the relation between friendship and eroticism primarily from the standpoint of evidence. In his final chapter, for instance, he asks of the body of the friend:
But did it not also have the body’s genitals? Did its symbolic significance stop short there? The laughter that closed an earlier chapter suggested that it did not. Yet the sexual potential in these gestures has repeatedly come into view only to slip away again…. This is not, of course, to say that the erotic has not been part of this history. But sexuality in a more narrow sense has eluded it whenever it has come into view. With the diary of Anne Lister that problem falls away.62
Yet even as the evaluation of evidence must persist as a preoccupation of historians, important questions of method and theory remain untouched by it. Whether Bray’s disinclination to probe, rather than work adroitly around, the precise means of the overlap of friendship and eroticism as a theoretical problem indicates the historian’s discomfort with the deconstructive ramifications of his own radical history or whether, conversely and paradoxically, it is a further measure of his own deconstructive commitments is a question about which I remain unsure. Bray delights, for instance, in the enigma of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, which he calls a “dazzling tour de force” that “can be read both as asserting the chastity of friendship in the most transcendent of terms and as rejecting it in the most bawdy
