The Myth of the Queer Criminal

Jeffery P Dennis, Jeffery Dennis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367370855
• eBook ISBN: 9781351684347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Myth of the Queer Criminal documents over a century of writings by sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, and forensic scientists, in Europe and the United States, who asserted that LGBT persons were innately and uniquely criminal.

Applying the tools of narratology and queer theory, Jeffery P. Dennis examines the ten types of queer criminal that have appeared in seminal texts, both literary and scientific, over the past 140 years - beginning with Lombroso's Criminal Man (1876) and extending to postmodern criminologists and contemporary textbooks. Each type is named after its defining characteristic. The pederast, for example, was believed to be a master-criminal, leading vast criminal empires. The degenerate, intellectually and morally corrupted, was perceived as a symptom or cause of societal decay. The silly, lisping pansy was a figure of ridicule, rather than of dread. The traitor was murderous and depraved, prepared to destroy democratic institutions worldwide. The book aims to contextualize this mythology, revealing the motivations of the agents behind it, the influence of broader preoccupations and anxieties of the age, and its societal, political and cultural impact.

This carefully researched, meticulously written history of the queer criminal will be of interest to students and researchers in criminology, gender studies, queer studies, and the history of sexuality.

1
Pederasts

The first queer criminal was born on a hot day in 1863, when an army doctor asked a soldier to take off his clothes.

The doctor was 28-year-old Ezechia Marco Lombroso, renamed Cesare Lombroso to downplay his Jewish heritage. Born in Verona in the Kingdom of Lombardy, a demesne of the creaking, doddering Austrian Empire, he originally planned to become a writer or a linguist, and set himself to the study of such exotic languages as Sanskrit and Chinese. But at university he changed his mind, taking degrees in medicine in 1858 and surgery in 1859. After graduation, he joined the Piedmontese Army to fight for the cause of Italian Unification, and found himself stationed at a military prison in Calabria in the deep south.

Calabria was closer to Greece than Naples, closer to Africa than Rome, unimaginably far from sedate Paris and Vienna where Lombroso studied, on the wrong side of the great divide that European artists, writers, and scientists of the era posited between north and south, logical and passionate, forward-thinking and barbaric (Gibson 1998; Placanica 1999; Libandi 2011). Natives still worshipped the dryads of the trees, and warned travelers of “forest boys, clad in leather, with wild eyes and matted locks, that take an elvish delight in misdirecting you” (Douglas 1915: 222). The men were savages, sometimes good and ingenious, but more often irrational and crude (Moe 2002: 57). Giovanni Verga (1840–1922), who grew up in nearby Sicily, made a career of documenting the violence and lusts of the South, such as the oddly masculine ravaging wolf called La Lupa:

The women made the sign of the cross when they saw her pass, alone as a wild bitch, prowling about suspiciously like a famished wolf; with her red lips she sucked the blood of their sons and husbands in a flash, and pulled them behind her skirt with a single glance of those devilish eyes

(Verga 1880: 3)

If the women were oddly masculine, the men were oddly feminine. In Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945), Carlo Levi describes his exile to the remote south of Italy, too far away for Christ to visit (He got no farther than Eboli, near Naples). The mayor of Gagliano, the village of the damned, was “an overgrown, corpulent young man with a lock of oily black hair tumbling over his forehead, a yellowish, beardless face, and darting black eyes.” He spoke in an “emasculated falsetto voice that issued in a complacent squeak from his immense body” (1945: 11). In Italian folklore, as Lombroso knew, “a scanty beard,” “a colorless face,” and “darting eyes” are traits of both the eunuch and the scoundrel (Wolfgang 1961: 378).

Lombroso came to Calabria with trepidation, but also with curiosity (Lombroso 1902: 47). What did beardless, barbaric primitives look like? How did they behave?

Since the war had ended in the South, his duties were few, and Lombroso passed the time honing his taxonomic skills by classifying and analyzing the soldiers. There were two main types. Soldiers from the primitive South were surly, fractious, lazy, disobedient, fond of crimes such as gambling, theft, prostitution, and especially “unnatural” sexual acts with other men. Even the new Italian criminal code made an exception in its sodomy law for the Calabrians and Sicilians, owing to the “particular disposition of those who live in the South” (Aldrich 2010: 118).

Soldiers from the modern, civilized North, however, were cheerful, industrious, and obedient, and spent their free time in wholesome pursuits. They never gambled, stole, or frequented brothels. They shunned “unnatural acts.” In fact, they slept in their underclothes, lest they tempt their southern bunk-mates (Aldrich 1993: 163).

One day, while watching the soldiers as they exercised and played sports, their semi-nude bodies gleaming in the sun, Lombroso noticed that the southern soldiers usually bore tattoos, obscene pictures and slogans on their chests, arms, and stomachs. He asked one of the soldiers to disrobe to be examined more closely. He even had a tattoo on his penis! But it wasn’t just the tattoos. Southern and northern soldiers differed in the size of their skulls, the shape of their faces, the depth of their chests, the muscles in their arms and legs. Could it be that good and evil were inscribed onto the body, that each had a distinctive face and physique, a distinctive family heritage (Wolfgang 1961; Caplan 2009: 38–39)?

During the next three years, Lombroso and his assistants measured the nude bodies of over a thousand soldiers. When his military service ended, he became a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pavia, and then head of the insane asylum at Pesaro, where he could examine many more nude bodies, contrasting normal men with delinquenti (criminals), pazzi (the insane), epileptics, hysterics, and victims of pellagra (Villa 2014). In addition to physical examinations, Lombroso interviewed the men, gathering data on their dialects, family histories, leisure pursuits, folk beliefs, and sexual practices. When they died, he performed autopsies, weighing their brains, measuring their chest cavities, accumulating a museum full of anatomical parts that are still on display in Turin.¹

Criminal Man

Thousands of hours of examination of the bodies and souls of criminals resulted in L’uomo delinquente: Studiato in rapporto alla anthropologia, alla medicina legale, e alla discipline carcerarie,² published by the scientific technical publishing company Ulrico Hoepli in 1876. It was a small volume of 252 pages, twelve terse chapters aimed at physicians and forensic professionals. Two years later, Lombroso published a longer second edition, aimed at a general audience. Further editions appeared in 1884, 1889, and 1896. Lombroso revised very little, but added many new chapters on such diverse topics as suicides, political radicals, epilepsy, insanity, and the social, cultural, and geographical antecedents of crime. The last edition, in 1896, filled over 1,500 pages in five volumes.³

There are many charts, tables, and diagrams in L’uomo delinquente, detailing precisely how, in Lombroso’s estimation, Criminal Man is a separate breed, if not a separate species, noticeably distinct from Normal Man in the shape of his forehead, ears, and nose, in the width of his chest cavity, in the length of his limbs, in his skin and hair, and in the size of his penis. He conflates the bestial ugliness of the Golem of Prague that Lombroso knew from childhood tales – sloping forehead, jutting jaw, sharp fanglike teeth – with a disquieting femininity, a monstrous failure of masculine performance, like that of the 19th-century stage hermaphrodite (Magnanini 2001: 208). Rapists have sparkling eyes and delicate features. Arsonists have soft skin. Murderers have scanty beards and abundant hair.

Pederasts (pederasti) are the most feminine of all, often indistinguishable from women: they wear women’s clothing, soak themselves in perfume, and “walk around acting like jewels (giojelli)” (Lombroso 1876: 92). Furthermore, although most criminal types have exceptionally large penises, pederasts tend to be small-sized, and suffer from hyperspadias, “crooked” members, and undescended or missing testicles. Lombroso suggests that arrested genital development and arrested moral development go hand in hand, which explains why pederasts are so common in prison.

Lombroso draws most of his description of the pederast’s physical traits from folklore and popular novels, but he also draws on the medical literature, such as alienist Hubert Lauvergne’s description of a person of “sexe mystérieuse et voilée” (mysterious and veiled sex) found among the criminal inmates of the Bagne of Toulon, with male genitals but a wispy beard, moist eyes, and a feminine gait (1841: 66); or Ambroise Tardieu’s detailed description in Etude médicolégale sur les attendants aux mœrs (1859: 216) of a man with curly hair, a small waist, “peculiarities of the penis and anus,” and a preference for make-up, perfume, handkerchiefs, and flowers. But what crime does Lombroso expect us to envision from such a creature?

Pederasta is Lombroso’s preferred term for this criminal type, appearing more than thirty times in the fifth edition. By contrast, sodomite (sodomita) appears fewer than ten times, usually in a historical context or in a discussion of barbarians:⁴ In Mexico, male prostitutes dress as women to trick men into committing sodomy; in Medieval France, the Abbot of Clairvaux complained that the Normans spread sodomy wherever they go. He rarely uses inverts (inverti) and homosexuals (omosessuali), even in later editions when these terms had become common in scholarship. And he never uses cinaedi, the term preferred by his daughter Gina in her English-language summary, referring to a Roman dandy who unmanned himself through taking the passive role in a same-sex encounter.⁵

For Lombroso, sodomy alone cannot differentiate the pederast: “unnatural acts” characterize all Criminal Men. All criminals work in groups, with bonds of loyalty so strong and passionate that their platonic loves often turn into “unnatural passions.” One interview respondent tells Lombroso that in order to be admitted into a criminal society, one must be “a trickster, a thief, and a sodomite” (1876: 134). Criminal Man rejects not only mainstream political and economic activity, but heterosexual marriage and reproduction to embrace, as Dobelbower states, “an alternate form of solidarity organized around same-sex companionship” (2012: 132).

Although the term pederast derives from the Greek paiderastia, “love of boys,” when it entered European languages during the Renaissance (Italian pederastia, French pédérastie, English paederastie, German Päderastie), by the 19th century it no longer referred specifically to man-boy erotic contact. It referred to someone who is devoted to “deviant” sexual acts, sometimes same-sex contact (Tardieu 1859: 121–126, 216), or to any nonprocreative sexual activity (Casper refers to pédérastie masturbartoire, 1856: II, 148), or to any gender-transgression, to men who adopt the appearance and social traits expected of women (Cardon 2008: 312). All criminals are gender-transgressive to an extent, according to Lombroso, but the pederast’s crime seems to be gender-transgression itself. His same-sex activity, though of course criminal, is only part of a far-ranging, nearly universal violation of the boundary between male and female. His long hair and beardless chin, his feminine name, his strutting about like a jewel are as important as his passive role in sexual acts, all working together to do violence to the fragile and contested definition of manhood in the newly unified Kingdom of Italy.⁶

In addition to his extreme gender-transgression, Lombroso’s pederast can be distinguished by the profligacy of his criminal acts. He does not confine himself to robbery, theft, or political radicalism alone: he loves every sort of violent and property crime, “daring thefts,” “atrocious assassinations,” assaults, and murders. He is, therefore, the most violent, vicious, cunning, and dangerous of criminals, a master criminal, often the leader of a criminal band that ravages the countryside like modern-day pirates (1876: 72).

The stories of the Criminal Man

Even more interesting than discussions of genital hypertrophy in L’uomo delinquente are the stories, brief racconti that serve as a counterpoint to the statistical analyses. There are dozens, drawn from Lombroso’s interviews as well as forensic manuals, police dossiers, newspaper articles, novels, folklore, and even the “chain rattler” tales of Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe, written with the zest, attention to detail, macabre humor, and studied amazement of the true-crime pamphlets that flooded the train station magazine racks (Flanders 2013).

The purpose of the racconti was more profound than to make the dry data accessible to non-scientific readers. They emphasize that the Criminal Man in general, and the pederast in particular, is a different sort of being from the rest of us, with not only a distinctive body, but a distinctive soul. Not an enlightened, logical criminal such as Beccaria describes in Dei delitti e delle pene (Of Crimes and Punishments, 1768), he has motives, desires, and practices descended from barbarism, incomprehensible to modern, civilized beings. For this reason, the criminals in Lombroso’s stories are never mere pickpockets or purse-snatchers. They are never thieves, unless they are a gang of thieves led by a colorful masked scoundrel. They are often murderers, but only the grotesque murderers who might provide sensationalistic headlines: boys who kill and eat their parents, women who poison their lovers and bury them piece by piece in the garden.

Lombroso prefers racconti where the Criminal M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Pederasts
• 2 Inverts
• 3 Degenerates
• 4 Psychopaths
• 5 Pansies
• 6 Traitors
• 7 Delinquents
• 8 Deviants
• 9 Militants
• 10 Derelicts
• Index