“Sodomy—that utterly confused category,” Michel Foucault claims in a characteristically perceptive aside in the History of Sexuality. How can we begin to understand “la sodomie,” Foucault wonders, when we have no authoritative history of sexuality and no anthropology of gender identification, and, others will add, when we have no history of repression or anthropology of desire. That “la sodomie” is still confused today is crucial to my thesis, as is the recognition that the annals of homosexuality represent one of the richest untapped archives in our period.

In my understanding, sodomy—anal penetration of either sexual partner—is merely one of a number of homosexual practices and cults ranging from restrained platonic friendship and ordinary “clubbability” (sometimes called homoerotic or homosocial) to diverse forms of transvestism and anatomical penetration (sodomy or buggery). An intelligent phylogeny could also reverse the classification and create definitions to argue that all homosexual practices are forms of a larger group that ought to be labelled “sodomy.” Given my sole criterion that sodomy necessarily involves anal penetration, the first approach is preferable, for any number of homosocial practices and cults between members of the same sex obviously do not include anal penetration. Indeed, the entire history of same-sex friendships would be altered if the second approach were adopted. Yet no matter how sodomy is defined—whether as Foucault's “la sodomie confusée” or as some other variety—no one ought to diminish its taxonomic riddles or pretend that literary historians can plunge into a discussion of the so-called “facts” and bibliographical treasures without some identification of the phylogenic problem.