La problematización de los “estados frágiles”

After the second trial, Juhani was sentenced to one years’ imprisonment. Juhani appealed this sentence to the Vyborg Court of Appeal. Some new documents were produced in that process that revealed a third kind of relation between Juhani and local men. The documents were the letters written by the local people who wished to support Juhani. The letters are interesting, because, first we will see who Juhani’s friends were and, secondly, we will read their side of the story. The third interesting issue in this regard concerns the signatures on the letters. From these signatures we will note a particular person, a carpenter named Juho. His signature was on three of the letters, which makes me think that he was the person who helped the teacher to collect the material for the Court of Appeal. Juho’s name was also mentioned in many connections during the two trials. Next, I will concentrate on what emerges in Juhani’s case: the concept of male bonding.

Juho’s name had already been mentioned in the first trial by a local seamstress. The seamstress recounted how, about three years earlier, she had helped the teacher’s wife to write a letter to the Kajaani teacher training institute.²¹⁸ She went on to say that Juhani’s wife had known about her husband’s fornicating with other men, especially with Juho, who had at the time applied to the Kajaani Institute. The wife, according to the seamstress, wanted to let the Institute know what kind of a person Juho was. In addition, the seamstress claimed that the wife did not allow Juho to sleep at their house, because of the sexual relationship between Juhani and Juho. Also the local tailor told the court about the relationship between Juho and the teacher. The tailor recounted how after he had had sex with Juhani, he had asked Juho about it: The tailor claimed that Juho had told him about having been frequently in the same situation with the teacher as well.

Juhani had apparently supported Juho’s application for the Kajaani teacher training institute, which was his own former school. Why would he have suggested this school to his lover? Juhani studied there from 1902 to 1906. The institute was founded especially for peasant men from the peripheral parts of Eastern and Northern Finland even though, while situated in the isolated city of Kajaani, the school took its models from the Enlightenment and national Romanticism. The school offered an easy and fast way to climb up the social ladder. ²¹⁹ According to the tailor, the teacher had told him after they had had sex that “sophisticated people no longer use women to satisfy their sexual needs”.²²⁰

218 The Kajaani training institution was one of the eight institutions where teachers were given their education in Finland. It was founded as the last seminar in 1900.

219 KÄÄRIÄINEN 1950: 27-29.

220 In Finnish: “sivistyneiden ihmisten ei enää käyttävän naishenkilöitä himojensa tyydyttämiseen”. The witness no. 19.

According to the testimonies, Juhani had had same-sex sexual relations before going to the Kajaani Institute. However, it was probably the place from where he had learned that these relations were sophisticated. The seminar was in its early years open only to men, and there were therefore many possibilities for male bonding. It is interesting to note that the other folk-school teacher, who was convicted in 1921 of same-sex sexual relations in West Finland, had also graduated from the Kajaani Institute. This would explain why Juhani suggested the same school to Juho. Apparently, however, and perhaps because of the letter that Juhani’s wife had written, Juho was not accepted to the Institute. He started a career as a carpenter instead, and later moved to Kuopio.

Juhani’s wife remained at her husband’s throughout the trial. She denied all the accusations against her husband. This loyalty may be attributed to the gender structure of the Finnish agrarian society.

The basis of the marriage was not romantic love, but work. She formed a unit with her husband and that unit was more important than Juhani’s homosexual adventures.²²¹

Two men testified in Juhani’s defence. They were two sons of a landowner, and so belonged to the same social strata as Juhani. They had testified in the first trial, where they had wanted to speak in Juhani’s favor, but they were not allowed to speak because they did not have anything to add to the

221 RANTALAIHO 1994:18.

crime. In their letters to the Court of Appeal, the brothers explained that the judge had not let them speak, as they did not have anything to say against the teacher. The judge, Axel Argillander, was described as an angry and loud man. He was born in 1855 to an educated family; his father had been the director of the Kuopio lyceum. Argillander studied in Vyborg. He had worked as a military judge but turned back to Kuopio in 1906. Juhani said later that the judge had been biased in the trial because Juhani did not belong to a political organization as the others did. This political organization was Kagals (Kagaalit),²²² whose goal was Finnish independence.

These landowner brothers were said to have had sexual relations with Juhani. The local poor had on different occasions found Juhani having sex with them in saunas or when sharing a same room for sleeping. These mutually desired sexual relationships were not recorded in the legal sources of the early decades of the twentieth century, and they did not gain much attention in Juhani’s trial either.

There is one simple reason for this: same-sex relations - if mutually agreed upon - were not considered as being socially problematic in the rural sphere. Only five same-sex fornication cases were tried in the Finnish rural courts during the period between1894-1924, and in none of them did the relationship reflect that kind of mutual and equal relation. As in Juhani’s case, the equal relationships that he had with landowners were not under consideration in the case. Only in later decades, when neighbors and other members of the community started to think that they had a right to inform on the private sexual relations of others, were some mutually agreed upon relations also discussed in the court. However, at the beginning of the century, these kind of same-sex relations were by and large tolerated.

Perhaps this attitude of acceptance is related to the fact that voluntary male sexual relations did not create any unwanted social consequences, such as children born out of wedlock. Women were viewed and portrayed as moral guardians, which also implied that men as a group were sexual and sense-driven. Thus, the control of morality was mostly appointed to women. Women’s purity is also evident in the penal code of the time, as it protected sexual abuse of girls and women, but not that of men and boys. Rydström’s findings from Sweden indicate the same. Almost all the same-sex fornication cases tried before 1920s were related to child abuse or other kind of violence and hardly ever to adult homosexuality.²²³

222 Kagals was a secret society founded in the period of Russian oppression.

223 RYDSTRÖM 2003.