from The Plaint of Nature

ALAIN DE LILLE

There is, sadly, no lack of gay bashing in the history of literature. But the fact that authors have felt the need to attack homosexuality signals that it has always had a certain presence and impact in their cultures. The Pearl poet’s fourteenth-century condemnation of same-sex practices (see page 147) is a testament to their prevalence in late medieval England; Alain de Lille’s The Plaint of Nature, written two centuries before, demonstrates that there was no lack of same-sex sex taking place in twelfth-century France either.

I’m less interested, however, in the fact that Alain’s text is conspicuously homophobic and more interested in the manner in which his homophobia is expressed. The Plaint of Nature is, to my knowledge, unique among literary texts in being a condemnation of homosexuality as an error of grammar. In Alain’s scheme, sex and Latin are made to be analogous, so the sexual practices that Alain doesn’t approve of correspond to grammatical errors and irregular Latin forms: male-to-male sex is a confusion of subject for object, masturbation is a reflexive verb that should be transitive, women on top are deponent verbs (passive forms that take active meanings), and gay men are the opposite. So, although the excerpt below isn’t sexy per se, it is certainly one of the oddest writings about sex I have ever read, and instructive of the lengths to which authors will go to attempt to denaturalize homosexuality.

By adopting a highly irregular grammar, the human race has fallen from its high estate and inverted the rules of Venus . . .

The plan of Nature gave special attention, as the evidence of the rules of grammar confirms, to two genders, namely, the masculine and feminine (although some men, deprived of the outward sign of sex, could, in my opinion, be classified as of neuter gender) . . . Reproduction demands that the masculine joins the feminine to itself. If irregular combinations among members of the same sex should come into common practice, so that members of the same sex should be mutually connected, those combinations would never be able to gain acceptance . . . For if the masculine gender, by a certain violence of unreasonable logic, should seek one of a gender entirely similar to itself, this bond and union cannot be called a graceful trope or figure of speech but will bear the stain of an outlandish and unpardonable linguistic error.

The regular procedure . . . should assign the role of subadjacent [bottom] to the part characteristic of the female sex and should place that part that is specific to the male sex in the prestigious position of superjacent [top] . . .

In addition to this . . . the conjugations should restrict themselves entirely to . . . the transitive and should not admit intransitive, reflexive or passive forms . . . Furthermore, the active type should not go over to the passive nor should the passive, laying aside its proper character, return to the active or adopt the rule of deponents . . .

With the signs of the discipline of grammar . . . my speech has now inscribed on the tablet of your mind an account of the ruination of Venus . . . In wretchedness and lamentation, I have sung my song of complaint.

—translated by James J. Sheridan,
modified by Jack Murnighan