Sodomy is a medieval artifact. I have found no trace of the term before the eleventh century. It is also a medieval artifact as a category for classifying - for uniting and explaining - desires, dispositions, and acts that had earlier been classified differently and separately. But “Sodomy” is also a judgment. The judgment made in “Sodomy” has been as durable as any medieval artifact…The fearful abstraction in our use of the term is medieval, as is our prurient confusion over what the word really means…The credit - or rather the blame - for inventing the word sodomia , “Sodomy,” must go, I think, to the eleventh century theologian Peter Damian. He coined it quite deliberately on analogy to blasphemia, “blasphemy,” which is to say, on analogy to the most explicit sin of denying God. Indeed, from its origin, Sodomy is as much a theological category as trinity, incarnation, sacrament, or papal infallibility. As a category, it is richly invested with specific notions of sin and retribution, responsibility and guilt. The category was never meant to be neutrally descriptive, and it is doubtful whether any operation can purify it of its theological origins. There is no way to make “Sodomy” objective.
