Eighteenth century British “libertine,” Lord Byron was one example of the eighteenth century “libertine”, leading to an historical question.  Did such ’libertines’ consider themselves gay or bisexual, or a precursor to the above.

 Insofar as social identities and networks based on sexuality are concerned, no. Lesbian and gay ancestors are more likely to have been the eighteenth century “mollies” and “tommies” in Britain or their European equivalents.

It’s a truism of LGBT history that one should not ‘colonise the past.’ There’s a scholarly consensus that current pakeha LG social identities and communities emerged in Europe during the seventeenth centuries. Takatapui, fa’afafine and whakawahine-centred histories need to be investigated to learn their origins and traditions. One hopes that this will happen soon. Bisexuals emerged during the nineteenth century, while transgender communities arose in earnest after reassignment surgery developed in the 1950s.

Who were ‘libertines?’ They tended to be British or French aristocrats who took advantage of their status as nobility to shag anything that moved. They tended to be mostly male, although Catherine the Great and Queen Christina of Sweden had their own reputations for ‘heterosexual’ and ‘lesbian’ female libertinism during this period. Lord Byron had a succession of male and female lovers, and there have been other analyses of the historical period in question.

What about these lovers, though? In sharp contrast to today’s centre-left aligned LGBT political and social movements and communities, libertinage was based on social inequality. It was precisely because Byron and de Sade were products of British and French nobility that they could avoid criminal prosecution, as ’sodomy’ was punishable through death until Britain mitigated penalties to long-term imprisonment in 1810. They did not consider middle-class and servant lovers as their social equals, and could and did dismiss them if they tired of sex. That said, the Marquis de Sade could and did suffer imprisonment when he tried to invoke his alleged ‘aristocratic privileges’ with younger lower-class women, given the emergence of qualified democratic society during and after the French Revolution of the 1790s.

Are these our ancestors? As with Alexander the Great’s kinaidi, probably not. Although there was a literary tradition of libertinage, there was no organised ‘libertine community’ and libertine sex could be aligned with defence of absolute monarchy and the absence of democratic political institutions and civil liberties. As a gay man of working-class origin, I find it difficult to identify with these people.

And what about libertinage today? The Christian Right may have absorbed the concept of libertinage into the pulsating uneven amorphous mass known as ’sodomy’ discourse, as it reinforces their own subjective prejudices and junk science ‘analyses.’  Our own current LGBT identities are based on participation within democratic social and political institutions and we try to be a multicultural, antisexist and politically pluralist community at that. While HIV/AIDS politics tries to reach out to working class men who have sex with men who aren’t gay-or-bisexual identified, this isn’t true for all working-class MSMs. Some of them do identify as gay or bisexual.

The ethos of libertinage was the product of a world we left behind in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was a world well lost.

Recommended Reading:

Benita Eisler: Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame: Vintage Press: New York: 2003.

Mike Feher (ed) The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century: Cambridge, Massachuesetts: MIT Press: 1997.