This is an important, but disturbing book. To be sure, it contains a great deal of useful information, distilled from the author's earlier studies. It is safe to say that no other author could do this with such authority and precision.


In his earlier published books Eskridge had seemed to ally himself with the radical gay faction. Now, it seems, he has morphed into something like a social conservative.

Eskridge believes that, even after our remarkable legal progress, gays are being held back by formidable reserves of disgust and fear of social pollution. These stark terms, for which he offers little documentation, seem to me to go too far. Still a mass of reservations, all the more persistent for not being (often) avowed, linger among the general public. As Eskridge puts it, many have not been able to bring themselves to acknowledge that homosexuality is a b e n i g n variation. We can have all the legal advances anyone could possibly require without achieving this.

In a pivotal sentence (p. 382) Eskridge makes the following point. "Lawrence [the 2003 Supreme Court decision] should . . . be understood as a challenge for gay people. Recalling an old-fashioned conception of citizenship as entailing obligations as well as freedoms, Lawrence should stir LGBT people to commit themselves to families, communities, and institutions (including religious ones) from which they have been alienated because of sodomy laws, social stigma, and other disabilities."

I readily confess that I am one of those who has been so alienated. I don't see why I should now have to commit myself to a family or a religious institution in order to secure my full civil rights. Still, I would agree that it would help if substantial numbers of gay and lesbian people did so.

But how much would it help? The disgust that homosexuality evokes is a product of several layers of experience and ideology. Ultimately, it is religiously based, since the Bible presents toleration of homosexual behavior as a danger to the body politic. (Yes, I know that John Boswell and others have sought to erase the sting of these texts. For most religious people, however, the sting persists.) Then a wave of psychotherapy crested fifty years ago. Even though most psychiatrists have changed their tune, the notion persists that same-sex behavior is somehow abnormal. Finally, there was the AIDS crisis. Drugs are helping a great many HIV people to lead productive and rewarding lives. And yet, allowing for some monocausal exaggeration, gay people are centrally implicated in this disease, and they will continue to be so perceived.

In short the likely scenario is that in the long term gay and lesbian people will experience a kind quasipariah status. The laws that have been holding us back will finally be abrogated. Vicious name calling, of the sort that prevailed until recently, will be unfashionable. But still, for the foreseeable future, "virtually normal" will be the best we can claim.

Eskridge Jr, William N. "Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003", Viking, 2008.

The Right to Sex

Amos Lassen

Long overdue on our bookshelves is a look at American sodomy laws and now that William Eskridge's "Dishonorable Passions" is published; we have that information right at our fingertips. Gay rights are the hot issue in our country right now but there is really nothing new about that. During the early periods of America--the colonial period and early statehood--sodomy was prohibited as a "crime against nature". Here was a country built on democratic ideals and it was telling its people what they could do in their private homes and behind closed doors. Even as late as the twentieth century homosexuals were labeled as degenerates and during the McCarthy era, many homosexual lives were splashed on the pages of the press and lives were ruined,
The laws prohibiting sodomy were bases on the English common law which took its impetus from a Christian Biblical interpretation of several small passages from the book of Leviticus. In 2003 the Supreme Court struck down these antiquated laws in the "Lawrence vs. Texas" decision. Finally it was no longer criminal for two consenting adults to practice the sexual relations that they chose.
Eskridge looks at how the laws which regulated sodomy from the decade of the 1930's were used as a legal tool for the denial of public assembly and jobs to homosexuals. But Eskridge does more than just look at the laws; he also includes legal discussions, personal stories and looks at the social history of the times. He brings in the stories of those targeted by the laws such as Margaret Mead and Walt Whitman and of those who were responsible for the targeting (J. Edgar Hoover and Earl Warren). In doing this, we get a look at America's changing view of homosexuals and homosexuality and we see the rise of personal freedom and tolerance in this country.
I do not think that this is a book that will just sit on the shelf of bookstores and libraries but I believe that it will bring about debate among thinking Americans who care about their freedoms and rights. Furthermore the book is not just about the sodomy laws but a history of American sexuality and the way it has been regulated and challenged. The title suggests that this is simply a reference book but it is much more than that. It is an extremely well-written and readable book that deals with a major issue and it seems to me that anyone who values freedom will want to have a look at it.