I struggled with Michael Warner’s “New English Sodom.” It was an interesting read, but it was hard to follow at several point, but the big takeaway that I got from it, is that, Sodom had not always had the sexual connotations that it has today, but rather that it was often employed in the rhetoric of collective judgement or punishment. England was compared to Sodom by Puritans who later moved to the United States, because they were both seen as degenerate and in need of condemnation and punishment. I found this incredibly interesting because Sodom is not alluded to for these purposes today, at least in my experience. Sodom and sodomy, tend to have legal air to them (as well as religious, of course), because of anti-sodomy laws. This is particularly
