A-Z of Sexual History: U - Ufficiali di Notte – the Anal Police

Anal sex does not lead to the apocalypse. It’s just your bum hole, not the doomsday trigger. Unfortunately, it took humanity a long time to figure this out. In Renaissance Florence, they became so panicked that sodomy was going to cause the end of civilization and bring plagues and misery in great diarrhetic spurts, that they set up an entire police squad whose sole purpose was to catch people enjoying their arse. Gli Ufficiali di Notte, the Office of the Night, was the buggery brigade.

Renaissance Italy was dubbed "the motherland of sodomy" by preacher Bernardino of Siena and most infamous of all were the Florentines, so much so that in Germany “to sodomize” was popularly dubbed florenzen and a sodomite was ein Florenzer. For the Catholic Church, "sodomy" was defined as any act deemed contrary to nature - so pretty much all the fun stuff like oral sex and masturbation, and some less fun stuff like bestiality and necrophilia were included. However, it most often referred to anal sex between men, (though even doing it with your wife was forbidden).

This sexual hit squad was made up of about nine elected members of the most upright social standing. Married men over 45 who were trusted not to be lured into sexual debauch. They functioned on a tip-off system with boxes affixed to the outside of every church for people to leave anonymous accusations. While many were false, others were wives angry with their husband keeping a harem of boys for sexual favours; mothers distraught about their son selling himself to older men; or jilted lovers taking revenge. If you confessed to committing sodomy and divulged all the names of your partners, you were granted immunity. In this way, the Office of the Night collected an army of spies and kept meticulous records of every investigation, creating one of the fullest existing records of homosexual culture in the 15th Century.

In their 70-year tenure, 17,000 of the 40,000 population of Florence were incriminated. Seeing as most women were let off, that means the majority of adult males were apprehended at some point in their lives. Taking a boy lover was common amongst men and sexual identity wasn’t polarized into hetero and homosexual. Sodomy was part of the drinking, gambling, and open sexuality of male culture of the 15th century.

Prior to 1432 it was punishable by exile, castration or death by burning, as well as “optional” public humiliation. One woman was beheaded for letting men sodomise her daughters. But generally, women or boys under 14 would just be fined and flogged nude through the streets of the city. To stop it happening behind closed doors, they decreed that any homeowner allowing it to go on under their roof would have their house burned down. Restaurants were even forbidden from having a menu of too many rich foods, because these were thought to lead men to “perpetuate wicked sins”.

The Night Officers decided leniency would lead to more arrests. You only faced being burned at the stake the fifth time you were caught. Until then you paid an ever increasing fine, which was put back into developing schools, hospitals and helping orphans. So basically, anal sex just carried a heavy tax. The Night Officers’ other duty was to police the convents – we learnt previously about horny nuns – to stop the sisters prostituting themselves.

Unsurprisingly the church has always been at it. Libertine priest Antonio Rocco advocated giving pleasure to the boys they sodomised, saying it was a conscientious lover's duty to foster the child's erotic pleasure in anal coitus. In his apology for pederasty, the protagonist of his book, schoolteacher Filotimo, insists youths are “avid and eager” for the “administration of the cock”, but their enjoyment depends on the skill of the agent and he condemns those who, “like butchers” sodomise boys causing pain. “These are not lovers, but wolves; not partakers of the most exalted delights, but deadly enemies of the natural and the world.”

The Office of the Night was disbanded in 1502, after which was arguably the first gay rights demonstration in 1512, when a group of young aristocrats stormed the palace demanding that all those who had been exiled should be allowed to return. Their demands were met, but sodomy remained illegal in Italy until the 1800s.