Guest Blogger: Mairead Hynes

So you have to feel kinda bad for Renaissance theologians.  They really, really wanted to tell people that they shouldn’t have gay sex– but they really, really wanted to do it without actually saying “don’t have gay sex.”  So they twisted themselves into all kinds of funky rhetorical shapes– they told people to avoid “unnatural vice,” or “you know, the thing that guy did in that bible verse– you know,” and just assumed that their readers would know what they meant (they probably did).  This has created all kinds of problems for the historians who have to interpret these documents five hundred years later, having to guess at which euphemisms mean gay sex and which ones mean bestiality or something.  But for SOME of us, the most important effect of their reticence is that we’re imagining a whole bunch of 16th century protestant polemicists in wizards’ robes, hissing “NO!  DON’T SAY THE NAME!”