Reading "Same-Sex Unions" in a Post-Obergefell Age

Like Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, I read this book back when it first came out and had not yet generated the intense discussion that marked its reception. (In fact, on checking the publication information, I appear to have picked up a first edition of the original hardcover.) Looking back in the context of this re-read, two things come back to me that still hold.

Firstly, although Boswell’s clear intent was to provide data for, and stimulate discussion of, the topic of same-sex marriage in modern American society, he really did frame his material very carefully and precisely. He doesn’t claim that the “same-sex union” ceremonies and customs in his research were considered marriage, or were a type of marriage. He does provide evidence that people at the time regularly compared them to marriage, as well as pointing out in great detail that many types of formal heterosexual unions, and many details of heterosexual marriage at that time, bear no relationship to our modern concept. And yet, when it first came out, so much of the negative reception of this book (not only from homophobes, but from critical historians) appeared to reacting as if it had claimed "adelphopoiesis is medieval gay marriage." Which, in fact, was what many enthusiastic non-historians took away from the book. Whether that mistaken reaction was within Boswell's intent or not is open to question and I suspect he may have provided the answer at some point.

The second thing that comes back to me--and which still holds--is the depth of my anger over Boswell’s blythe assertion that his overwhelmingly male-focused data can--of course!--be extrapolated to women’s lives. The wrong-headedness of this position should be blindingly obvious, and yet time and again we find male scholars of the history of homosexuality taking the position that male experiences are universal and that women’s experiences are, at most, a minor variant thereof. If they address the topic at all.

There is even less woman-focused material in this book than in CST&H. And, as noted by several authors in the collection The Lesbian Pre-Modern, there has been an unfortunate tendency in the rise of Queer Studies for this centering of male narratives to continue, even as the use of the term “queer” stakes a moral claim to universal coverage. Marginalized groups are never de-marginalized by dominant groups deigning to include them. Indeed, works like this that focus on the male experience with the excuse that “the data is overwhelmingly male” will never be capable of redressing that imbalance because they have no incentive to dig beyond a few familiar examples, but then turn around and imply that those examples are all that exist.

Just as a random example, becasue Boswell is focusing on "sworn partner" relationships that follow the adelphopoiesis model, it's outside the scope of his study to consider historic traditions like "female husbands" or Boston marriages--phenomena that did not have a corresponding male version, and that therefore are invisible under his search for “female correlates of male-recorded and male-centered phenomena.”

Anyway. This is a useful and valuable book, but it can make no genuine claim to being about “same-sex unions”. It is about male-male unions, focusing on the types of social arrangements made between people with social, political, and economic power, who have the ability (and sometimes the inclination) to exclude the concerns of women from the central focus of their lives. Take it for that and look elsewhere for historic data about the arrangements that women made among themselves.