Bugger
From Homolexis Glossary
Bugger and faggot are the two most affect-laden terms in the English vocabulary of homosexuality. Bugger is the characteristically British form of abuse, faggot the American. The former word ultimately derives from Old Bulgarian bularinŭ, the ethnic name of the Slavic people inhabiting the Southeastern part of the Balkan peninsula (as shown by the work of Borislav Primov and Ivan Petkanov). Although the Bogumil and Paulician (dualist) heresies emerged in Bulgaria, on the periphery of the Byzantine Empire, as early as the tenth century, it was only in the wake of the Fourth Crusade (1204) that Medieval Latin bulgarus (with vernacular offshoots) came to be associated with these heresies. In the West the principal reflex of this dualistic system was the Cathar or Albigensian heresy in the south of France.
And so in the thirteenth century bougre appeared in Old French with two meanings: 1) Albigensian heretic; 2) sodomite. Sexual depravity had, in fact, been charged with certain Gnostic sects as early as Irenaeus of Lyon (late second century). During the Middle Ages heresy and “unnatural” sexual activity were both attributed to the instigation of the devil, since neither could presumably have occurred to anyone spontaneously. At all events the ascription of homosexuality to the Albigensians seems wholly unfounded, albeit the higher orders of the perfecti did abstain from heterosexual—and any other—intercourse.
An additional factor is the Old French use of bougre to mean “userer.” This association (heretic = sodomite = usurer) derives from the ancient notion that interest in “unnatural” because money, unlike land, is intrinsically sterile, just as homosexual activity is doomed to sterility. There may be some echo of the accusation advanced by Philo of Alexandria that the pederast “debases the coin of nature.” In eighteenth-century England “queer money” was counterfeit.
The English derivative of bougre is bugger, which in the medieval texts has the sole meaning of “heretic.” The first instance of the word buggery in the legal sense of sodomy is Henry VIII’s Act 1533 (25 Hen. VIII c. 6). This law ranks as the first civil legislation applicable against male homosexuals in the country, such offences having previously been dealt with by ecclesiastical courts, The law defined buggery as an unnatural sexual act against the will of God and man. In practice, this provision has almost always been applied to anal sex between men, or its attempt. Unlike Continental jurisdictions and that of Scotland (in both of which burning was stipulated), the Act made buggery (with man or beast) punishable by hanging, a capital penalty not finally lifted until 1861. Although it has sometimes been suggested that the Act was introduced as a measure against the clergy during the separation of the Church of England from Rome, there is no firm evidence for this claim, and indeed the Act preceded the separation.
In his commentaries on the law of England, Sir Edward Coke (1552-1635) defined buggery as “a detestable and abominable sin amongst Christians not to be named, committed by carnal knowledge against the ordinance of the Creator and order of nature by mankind with mankind or with brute beast, or by womankind with brute beast.” (Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, pp. 58-59). (A seventeenth-century text mentions buggerone italicus, thus imputing the vice to Italy and revealing that by this time all memory of the putative Bulgarian origin had been lost.)
Following the final confirmation of the Act by Queen Elizabeth I, it was firmly ensconced as the charter for all subsequent criminalization of homosexual behavior in England. Nonetheless, only a few executions are known during the two centuries that followed.
The Act itself was supplanted by the 1828 Offenses Against the Person (England) Act and the Criminal Law (India) Act of the same year, though the crime persisted on the statute books under other rubrics. Buggery remained a capital offence in England until 1861; and the last execution for the crime took place in 1836. England and Wales repealed the buggery laws in 1967, a step subsequently extended to other parts of the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, legal statutes in many former colonies, such as those in the Anglophone Caribbean, have retained the crime. These laws are among the lingering banes afflicted by colonialism.
Why American jurisdictions substituted the European expression sodomy as a legal term has not been clarified.
That the term has lost much of its sting in some English countries is shown by the humorous Australian television show Club Buggery.
