Living Out Loud

An Introduction to LGBTQ History, Society, and Culture

Michael Murphy, Brytton Bjorngaard, Michael J. Murphy, Brytton Bjorngaard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317276364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Living Out Loud: An Introduction to LGBTQ History, Society, and Culture offers students an evidence-based foundation in the interdisciplinary field of LGBTQ Studies. Chapters on history, diversity, dating/relationships, education, sexual health, and globalization reflect current research and thinking in the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. Coverage of current events and recommendations for additional readings, videos, and web resources help students apply the contents in their lives, making Living Out Loud the perfect core text for LGBTQ+ Studies (and similar) courses.

CHAPTER 1

Out of the Past

Histories

Christianne Anastasia Gadd

Laurie Casagrande, National Coming Out Day Poster, “Unfortunately, History Has Set the Record a Little Too Straight,” 1988. Source: Laurie Casagrande. Image courtesy of Syracuse Cultural Workers.

October 11, 1988, marked the first observance of National Coming Out Day in the United States. Jean O’Leary and Robert Eichberg, two activists for lesbian and gay rights, hoped this occasion would increase awareness of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in their lives and communities. To promote National Coming Out Day, Minnesota’s Gay and Lesbian Community Action Council published a poster that read “Unfortunately, History Has Set the Record a Little Too Straight.” Below the title were ten photos of well-known public figures of the past—including the Renaissance artist Michelangelo, writers Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, and Willa Cather, and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—who had been involved in same-sex romantic or sexual relationships at some point in their lives. Though the admirable goal of the poster was to challenge the assumption that only heterosexual people had made important contributions to society, for viewers aware that the concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were relatively modern inventions, it also raised some questions about the artist’s effort to reclaim LGBT history. Was it accurate, let alone desirable, to describe historic figures, or anyone in the past, using present-day terminology and understandings of sexual identity that these individuals themselves might have found foreign, or that they might have rejected?

This example illustrates one of the primary challenges facing historians of sexuality. How do we understand manifestations of same-sex love and sexuality in different cultures and across different eras? Some historians argue that same-sex desire has existed throughout history and in a number of cultures; in other words, that there have always been individuals whose primary romantic attachments and sexual attractions have been with others of the same sex. Historians who take this approach, called essentialism, tend to emphasize the similarities between past and present manifestations of same-sex love and sexuality. From the essentialist perspective, the homosexual is a distinctive type of person whose history can be traced back to the earliest civilizations.

Other historians, using an approach called social construction, argue that the meanings of same-sex romantic and sexual relationships are determined by the unique time and place in which they occur, as well as by the social status (determined, in part, by a person’s race, age, gender, and class) of those who engage in them. From this perspective, a sexual act between an older, wealthy, married, male “citizen” and a young, unmarried, male slave in ancient Greece would have a significantly different social meaning than the same sexual act between two wealthy adult “citizens.” Similarly, a romantic relationship between two middle-class, unmarried, African-American women in the nineteenth century United States would have had a different social meaning than a romance between two working-class, married, white women in Ireland in the same time period. Social constructionists argue that modern-day concepts and terminology of sexuality cannot be used to “accurately position people who lived in different circumstances” and that the term “homosexual” is particularly problematic when applied to individuals who lived in non-Western, pre-twentieth century societies (Eaklor, 2008, 8). While both perspectives have their merits and flaws, a social constructionist approach allows historians to explore how understandings of same-sex romance and sexuality have changed over time, and to investigate what these changes tell us about the ways in which different societies have viewed sexuality.

Since the 1970s historians and other scholars have amassed a mountain of evidence demonstrating that same-sex attraction and sexual behaviors, and a wide variety of gender expressions and identities, have been practiced throughout time and across cultures. However, in the interests of space, this chapter provides a general overview of these practices in what is today the United States, noting both the similarities and differences between their manifestations and the ways in which they were understood.

The terminology of sexual identity is also a point of contention among scholars of the past. As the example at the beginning of this chapter illustrates, historians have struggled with the impulse to use words like gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender to describe individuals who might not have known, understood, or embraced these words or concepts. While some argue that such terminology is useful to construct a linear history of LGBT people’s existence throughout human history, others believe that use of these words glosses over the historically and culturally specific meanings of same-sex sexual behavior and sexual and gender identities. To address this issue, this chapter endeavors to describe same-sex sexual behavior and same-sex romantic or affectionate relationships using the terminology appropriate to each culture or era discussed. The terms gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender are largely reserved for descriptions of post-nineteenth century individuals and/or societies shown by the historical record to have understood and used these terms themselves.

EARLY AMERICA

Gender and Sexuality among Native Americans

Though the cultures which flourished in North America prior to the arrival of European explorers and settlers varied considerably, same-sex sexual acts took place in many of them, carrying with them different social meanings. Heterosexual marriage—monogamous or polygamous—was usually part of Native American tribal norms, and an individual’s gender dictated their roles within the tribe. While their roles were in some ways complementary, men and women had often very separate lives, with clearly defined responsibilities falling to each group.

One of the challenges facing historians who study sexual practices among the indigenous people of the Americas, and in particular Native Americans, is that much of the documentation that exists was created by European—and later American—explorers and colonizers. These outsiders interpreted what they observed through their own particular set of beliefs and social values, which doubtless influenced the accounts they produced.

To European colonizers, the most noteworthy thing about Native American gender expression and/or sexual practice was the presence of what has often been called persons of a “third” gender. Spanish and French explorers who encountered Native American societies regularly noted the appearance of individuals who did not appear to be conventionally male nor female. A sixteenth-century visitor to California wrote of seeing several Native American men in “women’s apparel,” and a Spanish explorer, who lived in captivity among a tribe of Native Americans in Florida, claimed to have seen two men married to each other; that he described one of these men as wearing women’s apparel and performing the tasks typically associated with women suggests that what he observed was not the marriage of two men, but the marriage of a man to an individual whose gender was neither male nor female (Gutiérrez, 2010, 21). Similar observations appear in other Europeans’ travelogues. One French missionary struggled to reconcile his observations of the Illinois tribe with his binary understanding of gender, writing that some of the tribe’s men, “while still young, assume the garb of women, and retain it throughout their lives . . . they never marry and glory in demeaning themselves to do everything that the women do” (Miller, 1995, 29). But, he noted, these individuals also played other social roles not typically associated with their tribe’s women. The missionary’s understanding of gender prevented him from considering the possibility of these individuals occupying another gender role altogether.

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity throughout History. Source: UN OHCHR and UN Free & Equal campaign.

The term early eighteenth-century explorers’ accounts commonly used for such individuals was berdache, which came from the Arabic and Persian terms for a younger male partner in a same-sex sexual act. In addition to wrongly associating homosexuality with gender identity, this term incorrectly implied that the individual thus described did not conform to gender norms, which was not the case. European observers simply did not comprehend that these individuals occupied an acknowledged gender category within the context of their tribes. Native Americans would not have used the word berdache to describe themselves. There were a few different terms used by Native American tribes to describe those individuals whose gender was something other than fully man or woman, including the Navajo nadle, the Arapaho haxu’xan, and the Lakota winkte. Over 150 tribes have been documented to have roles like these, and, in recent years, Native Americans have advocated for the use of the term “two-spirit,” instead of berdache, in anthropological and historical surveys of Native American cultures (Fur, 2007).

John K. Hillers (American, 1843–1925), We’wha, a Zuni lhamana (two-spirit person) weaving (ca. 1871–1907). Source: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Wash., D.C. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As with gender, Europeans’ attitudes toward, and definitions of, same-sex sexual activity were also often at odds with those of Native American societies. Colonizers attempted to enforce their own visions of morality on Native Americans in a variety of ways, including through the policing of their sexual practices. For example, a 1731 case in New Mexico involved a Spanish landowner who claimed to have caught two men from the Pueblo tribe in a sexual act on his land. He reported the men to local Spanish authorities and they were put on trial. While eventually convicted and sentenced to whipping and temporary banishment, they only avoided capital punishment due to their legal defender’s claim that the landowner had misinterpreted the situation he encountered. (He asserted that the Pueblo men had been attired in skimpy, though culturally and seasonally appropriate, attire, but the landowner’s lack of familiarity with Pueblo clothing conventions led him to believe he had discovered the men in a state of undress). Colonizers’ attempts to curtail both Native American same-sex sexual practices and two-spirit gender presentation continued through the eighteenth century and were subsequently taken up and continued by the U.S. government—under the guise of Native American “assimilation” efforts—into the twentieth century (Miller, 1995).

American Colonies

Even though the word Puritan is often used as shorthand for sexually repressed, the Europeans (some of whom were indeed Puritans) who settled the land they called New England thought often and deeply about sexual activity. The fragile new society’s existence relied on reproduction, so men and women were encouraged to marry early and to bear as many children as possible, and people were discouraged from living alone (D’Emilio and Freedman, 1997). Puritans, accordingly, saw non-procreative sexual behavior as a significant threat to their way of life.

Legal and religious authorities in colonial New England saw themselves as responsible for maintaining the unity and well-being of their communities, and sought to minimize dissent and disruption. There were strict codes of punishment for all types of transgressions that threatened community stability, including offenses of a sexual nature. Sexual sins were classified as either natural or unnatural, with the former category covering masturbation, incest, and heterosexual fornication or adultery. Unnatural sins contravened the “natural order,” defined by Scripture, and were broadly characterized by the “going after [of] strange flesh,” as in bestiality and same-sex sexual activity (Godbeer, 2007, 95).

Punishments for sexual conduct outside the bounds of heterosexual marriage included fines or whipping. Those who publicly confessed and accepted their punishment usually were fully accepted back into the community, though harsher punishments—such as permanent banishment or death—could be levied against individuals who persistently engaged in non-heterosexual sexual practices without expressing remorse or compensating those they had wronged. Laws regarding sodomy (an act of non-procreative penetration by a man) often prescribed the death penalty as punishment; for example, the 1647 charter of Rhode Island mandated “death without remedy” as the punishment for sodomy, defined by the document as “a vile affection, whereby men . . . leave the natural use of woman and burn in their lusts toward one another” (Crompton, 1976, 281). However, this most extreme penalty was only rarely applied. Same-sex sexual practices between women are mentioned far less frequently in legal records than those between men, but evidence suggests that they were punished largely by whipping (D’Emilio and Freedman, 1997).

Colonial authorities’ responses to sexual sins were predicated on a religious belief that all humans were innately flawed and prone to sin, and thus punishments were based on people’s acts rather than their identities. Sometimes the penalties meted out to those convicted of same-sex sexual transgressions differed considerably from those prescribed in the law. For example, in 1677 Nicholas Sension appeared before a Connecticut court to answer to a charge of “sodomy,” a crime whose definitions varied in some respects but which was commonly construed by colonial authorities as involving two individuals of the same sex (usually men; the historical record contains only two instances where women were punished for sexual acts with each other) (Godbeer, 2007). Sension had been confronted, 30 years earlier, by colonial authorities after several men had complained about his unwanted sexual advances, but had not been charged with a crime. At this trial, more than a dozen of Sension’s male neighbors testified that they had either experienced or had heard about his sexual advances toward other men, including the initial complainant—Sension’s indentured servant, Nathaniel Pond—and another man who said he had witnessed Sension and Pond having sex. Despite this testimony Sension received a sentence far lighter than the capital punishment mandated for sodomy. His entire estate was placed in bond to ensure his future good behavior and, if he refrained from additional offenses, would revert to his family upon his death (D’Emilio and Freedman, 1997). The court’s leniency may have been because the prosecution lacked insufficient proof of sodomy, and Sension could therefore only be charged with “attempted sodomy,” a lesser crime that didn’t warrant capital punishment. It is also likely related to the fact that Sension, an affluent and well-liked member of his community, had primarily attempted or committed same-sex sex acts with younger men of lower social status.

A similar case from the colonial era, involving a Baptist minister whose “inward disposition” to make sexual advances toward younger male community members, likewise resulted in a sentence far less severe than the capital penalty mandated for sodomy. In both cases, the accused men’s behavior contravened sexual norms while still upholding social hierarchies of power. While Governor William Bradford, along with other colonial leaders, firmly believed that “one wicked person [might] infect many,” the authorities’ pragmatic responses to t...