The Routledge History of Queer America

Don Romesburg, Don Romesburg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317601029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge History of Queer America presents the first comprehensive synthesis of the rapidly developing field of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer US history. Featuring nearly thirty chapters on essential subjects and themes from colonial times through the present, this collection covers topics including:

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• Rural vs. urban queer histories

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• Gender and sexual diversity in early American history

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• Intersectionality, exploring queerness in association with issues of race and class

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• Queerness and American capitalism

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• The rise of queer histories, archives, and collective memory

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• Transnationalism and queer history

Gathering authorities in the field to define the ways in which sexual and gender diversity have contributed to the dynamics of American society, culture and nation, The Routledge History of Queer America is the finest available overview of the rich history of queer experience in US history.

PART ONE

Times

1
COLONIAL NORTH AMERICA (1600s–1700s)

Richard Godbeer

How do we write about what today is called lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history when dealing with periods before the fundamental categories of sexual identity that modern westerners now take for granted (such as ‘gay,’ lesbian,’ and ‘homosexual’) came into existence? Some scholars, such as Rictor Norton, argue that men attracted to men and women attracted to women in whatever period can legitimately be described as gay and lesbian because their desires, however labeled at the time, were similar if not identical to those experienced and expressed by people today. Others, most notably David Halperin, have countered that these modern and western categories are freighted with assumptions that simply do not apply in other historical and cultural contexts. Indeed, some have suggested that the actual experience of desire might be shaped at least in part by the categories available to us, so that subjectivity is to some degree contingent upon discourse. This chapter’s approach is closer to the latter position: men and women in the North American colonies who desired intimacy with members of the same sex experienced and expressed those desires in ways that were shaped by the cultural vocabulary available to them. We cannot possibly understand their feelings and experiences without taking seriously the discursive environment in which they moved. That is not to suggest that colonial Americans were entirely passive prisoners of a larger cultural discourse. Even though we are all handed a cultural script with which to articulate our desires, we each pick and choose which parts of the script to adopt and sometimes add our own lines. Early Americans sometimes tried to find words that would describe feelings and behavior that official language failed to encapsulate. But until very recently men-loving men and women-loving women did not think in terms of sexual orientation or identity; to impose subjectivities such as these onto their lives is simply to re-invent them as a mirror of ourselves instead of trying to understand them on their own terms.¹

Historians investigating same-sex desire and gender diversity in the colonial period face a number of obstacles. Individuals were understandably reluctant to admit sexual behavior that carried the death penalty, while their neighbors were often eager to avoid acknowledging the occurrence of same-sex intimacy in their communities. The vocabulary that colonial Americans used to describe sexual attraction or activity was sometimes ambiguous; a reference to “unclean” behavior, for example, might indicate something sexual, but quite possibly not, given the Christian position that any sinful action polluted the body and soul of the persons involved. Archivists and historians have, furthermore, sometimes ignored, suppressed, or even destroyed evidence of sexual and gender nonconformity that they found perplexing or distasteful.

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Willful silence and suppression played a significant role in the manufacturing of Virginia’s early history. Jamestown was initially an all-male colony; though women did migrate to the Chesapeake in subsequent years, they remained relatively few in number for several decades. The Chesapeake’s skewed sex ratio made it extremely difficult for men to establish conventional family households or to find female sexual partners; there seems, furthermore, to have been little sexual contact with Indians during those years. Early settlers often paired off to form all-male households, living and working together. As historian Mary Beth Norton has remarked, “it would be truly remarkable if all the male-only partnerships lacked a sexual ingredient.”² Some men may have engaged in sexual relations with each other out of desperation; others may have taken advantage of an unusual situation to form relationships that would have been stigmatized under normal circumstances.

Just as householders elsewhere on both sides of the Atlantic sometimes assumed that they had a right to the bodies as well as labor of their servants, so early seventeenth-century Virginians who had male indentured servants working for them may well have pressured or forced their dependants into having sex with them. One male servant was found dead with his thighs badly bruised; another who had been working for an all-male household hanged himself for no apparent reason. We can only wonder if these deaths were prompted, at least in part, by sexual coercion. One servant did formally accuse his master of raping him. As a result of that servant’s testimony, Captain Richard Cornish was convicted of sodomy and hanged in 1625. In this case, the only trial for sodomy known to have taken place in the early Chesapeake, Cornish’s execution aroused heated controversy. The death sentence was certainly open to question, given the lack of corroborative testimony: no one had witnessed the captain’s alleged assault of his servant. Edward Nevell, for example, declared that the captain had been hanged “for a rascally boy wrongfully.” The government was clearly determined to silence those who criticized its handling of the case. Nevell was arrested for his criticism of the court and sentenced “to stand on the pillory with a paper on his head showing the cause of his offense in the market place, and to lose both his ears, and to serve the colony for a year.”³ As women were now arriving in greater numbers, enabling the formation of more conventional households and marriages, the authorities may have wanted to make an example of Cornish. Critics of the court may have been anxious about the vulnerability of other men, perhaps including themselves, especially if they were to be convicted as a result of uncorroborated accusations. It is striking that none of the reported conversations about this case suggested any revulsion toward sodomy itself. Some Virginians may have feared that a veil of silence regarding sexual activity between men in the colony was being ripped away. That veil of silence was soon back in place and would remain there, lifted only recently by a few scholars who have begun to ask questions about fragmentary evidence that survives about male liaisons in the early Chesapeake.

In sharp contrast, sodomy would figure as a regular topic of public discourse further north in seventeenth-century New England, where Puritan leaders were eager to protect their New Israel from pollution, sexual or otherwise, through vehement denunciation of sin in all its manifestations. Though officials there were exceptionally energetic and vigilant in their campaigns against illicit sex, the assumptions that underlay those efforts were not unusual. In common with settlers in other British American colonies, New Englanders made a number of assumptions about what we would call sexuality that differed radically from our own.

Perhaps most fundamentally, Puritans did not think about sexual impulses in terms of a distinct sexuality or sexual orientation that impels men and women toward members of the same or opposite sex. They thought in terms of specific sexual acts that were divided into two fundamental categories: sex between a husband and wife, and all other sex (including premarital sex, casual sex between a man and a woman, masturbation, sex between two men or between two women, and bestiality). They explained all non-marital sex just as they did any other sin, such as drunkenness or falling asleep during a sermon: they were all caused by innate moral corruption which every human being inherited from Adam and Eve. Ministers held that sodomy and bestiality were “unnatural” and so more sinful than illicit sex between a man and a woman. But official teaching did not conceive of sodomy as fundamentally distinct from any other manifestation of human sin. Nor did it see particular men or women as constitutionally inclined or limited to any one form of sexual offense. In other words, the fundamental issue was not sexual orientation, but moral orientation.

Anglo-American laws against sodomy reflected this official preoccupation with particular acts rather than sexual identity or orientation, so that courts were interested primarily in finding out whether a specific act of sexual intercourse had occurred. Neither intent nor an attempt could justify conviction, which carried the death penalty. Because most people committing illicit sexual acts had the common sense not to do so in a public place, conviction rates were remarkably low: it was rare that witnesses came forward with unequivocal statements that they had seen sexual intercourse taking place; and liaisons involving members of the same sex could not be exposed through a resulting pregnancy. This was, of course, good news for individuals who might otherwise have been convicted and hanged.⁴

Not only were executions for sodomy rare, but prosecutions were also remarkably sparse, even in the bracing moral climate of New England. Local communities preferred to handle problematic behavior through informal channels. They resorted to ecclesiastical discipline or the legal system only when private exhortation or informal arbitration failed to resolve the situation. The narrow framing of the laws against sodomy and the rigorous demands of the legal system, which required two independent witnesses for a conviction, may well have deterred some New Englanders from initiating formal action against offenders. Addressing the situation through non-juridical channels was, moreover, less dire than invoking capital law and so would have appealed to those who disapproved of sodomy but did not want the accused to hang. In several cases of sodomy that came before courts or church congregations, it emerged during the proceedings that the accused had long been locally notorious for their sexual interest in men, but that it had taken an extraordinary turn of events to bring about a formal charge. Any number of local incidents and controversies involving sodomy may have escaped record because of this preference for non-institutional forms of social control. When Nicholas Sension, a farmer in Windsor, Connecticut, was brought to trial for his “sodomitical actings” in 1677, it became clear that he had been making sexual advances to local men for over three decades. There had been several informal investigations into his behavior, but his aggressive interest in other men did not become a legal issue until Sension prosecuted one of his own servants for slander. The young man had told neighbors that his employer was making unwanted advances toward him, and when several people came forward to refute Sension’s charge of slander by confirming that he was a serial aggressor, the court initiated a sodomy trial. Had Sension not made this disastrous tactical error, we would most likely know nothing about his reputation or behavior.⁵

The transcripts that survive from that case are rich and revealing in a number of respects. Not least, they show just how restrictive and rigorous the courts were in handling cases such as these. Although many men came forward to testify that Sension had made sexual advances toward them or other male neighbors, only one witness claimed to have seen Sension penetrate a male partner and so Sension could not be hanged. The Sension transcripts also suggest that incidents of sodomy or attempted sodomy sometimes failed to reach the courts because locals were either less outraged by such behavior than clerical tirades and legal prohibitions might lead us to expect, or weighed their disapproval of sodomy with other considerations. Nicholas Sension was in most respects a popular man. One fellow who was summoned to describe an occasion on which Sension had tried to rape him expressed his reluctance to do Sension any harm because the accused had been so kind to him and his wife when they needed help. In determining an individual’s social worth, most colonists appear to have found nonsexual aspects of that person’s behavior more significant even than an allegedly heinous sin and crime such as sodomy. Risking the loss of a good neighbor struck many practical-minded settlers as too high a price to pay for moral cleansing.

Sension was also a prominent landowner and employer in the community where he lived. When in his twenties, he had made advances to men of roughly the same age as himself. But in later years, most of the men whom he approached were teenagers or young adults and at least two of them were his own servants. In other words, Sension appears to have been interested in men whose age and status placed them in a position subordinate to himself. For most sodomy prosecutions in the colonial period there survives only a brief record of the charge and outcome; in some cases, we do not even know the names of those involved, let alone their age or relative status. Contemporaries often referred to servants as “boys” or “girls” regardless of their age, making it difficult to ascertain how old they really were unless other information survives. (William Couse, the servant who accused Richard Cornish of raping him, was twenty-nine years old, but Edward Nevell described him as “a rascally boy.”) Yet at least in Sension’s case, sexual aggression, hierarchy, and power were closely intertwined. That power dynamic might also help to explain why most of Sension’s neighbors took so long to protest his behavior. Scholars have shown that social status was crucial in determining whether individuals would be held accountable for crimes such as rap...