Butterflies Will Burn weaves together criminal, inquisitional, and literary sources to show that attitudes toward so-called sodomites grew as much out of the needs of a burgeoning Spanish Empire as they did out of the religious conviction that male same-sex desire was immoral. Garza Carvajal argues that male homosexuality in the transatlantic Iberian world has been poorly understood within early modern European historiography. He posits that definitions of manliness, at least the manner in which they came to define acceptable male sexuality, resulted from an uneven discourse between the secular and ecclesiastical repressive apparatuses and the “unmanly” homosexuals they repressed. Donna Guy and Eileen Suárez Findlay have fruitfully applied similar methods in under-standing the construction of norms of acceptability in Argentina and Puerto Rico, but Garza Carvajal’s application to the study of male homosexuality in Spain and early Mexico is novel.
Garza Carvajal musters a formidable knowledge of Golden Age...
