Long Before Stonewall

Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America

Thomas A. Foster, Thomas A. Foster

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9780814727508
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814728673
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Although the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City symbolically mark the start of the gay rights movement, individuals came together long before the modern era to express their same-sex romantic and sexual attraction toward one another, and in a myriad of ways. Some reflected on their desires in quiet solitude, while others endured verbal, physical, and legal harassment for publicly expressing homosexual interest through words or actions.
Long Before Stonewall seeks to uncover the many iterations of same-sex desire in colonial America and the early Republic, as well as to expand the scope of how we define and recognize homosocial behavior. Thomas A. Foster has assembled a pathbreaking, interdisciplinary collection of original and classic essays that explore topics ranging from homoerotic imagery of black men to prison reform to the development of sexual orientations. This collection spans a regional and temporal breadth that stretches from the colonial Southwest to Quaker communities in New England. It also includes a challenge to commonly accepted understandings of the Native American berdache. Throughout, connections of race, class, status, and gender are emphasized, exposing the deep foundations on which modern sexual political movements and identities are built.

Part I

Colonial Native Americas

Chapter 1

Warfare, Homosexuality, and Gender Status Among American Indian Men in the Southwest

Ramón A. Gutiérrez

For the last forty years, and particularly since the height of the gay liberation movement, there has been a rather prolific scholarly project committed to a quest for the historical roots of contemporary homosexuality. In this search for older forms, alternative patterns, and cultural variants of signification of sexual behavior between and among men, one can point to the absolutely catalytic documentary history that Jonathan Katz edited. In his massive and foundational Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (1976), Katz chronicled patterns of homosexuality in what is now the United States from pre-Columbian times to the present. Among the many things that he uncovered were the shards of a Native American tradition that was known only to a few anthropologists, and before that, to a number of early sixteenth-century European explorers and missionaries.¹ Called berdache by Europeans and by a more complex set of indigenous terms in the Americas, these men who had sex with other men were particularly fascinating. Not only did they offer exclusive sexual service to members of their own sex, but they also were transvested as women and performed women’s work.

A number of historians and anthropologists were fascinated by this discovery and set out to chronicle the berdache tradition. They saw in it a potential model for childhood socialization that might ultimately lead to gay liberation, and if not that, at least a path toward a more gender tolerant society for tomboys and sissies to develop into lesbians and gays. While American scholars have called the berdache a “third sex,” a “fourth sex,” “two-spirited persons,” and “man/woman,” to the Zuñi Indians they were la’mana, to the Tewa they were quetho, and to the Navajo they were nadle.² The berdache putatively embodied both the masculine and the feminine, moved easily between the segregated worlds of indigenous men and women, and offered moderns an alternative, more natural and less constrained way to live and love. Anthropologists like Will Roscoe and Walter L. Williams celebrated the berdache, situating them in mystical New Age worlds, heralding their primitive premodern ways, unfettered by homophobic cultures, and free of rigid masculine and feminine gender roles.³ Many of these unwitting projections backward of the then contemporary gay liberation moment’s politics of yearning profoundly distorted the history of the berdache. As will be argued below, what we mainly know about the history of the berdache has them located in warps of masculine power, in warfare, slavery and exploitation, not in worlds of egalitarian possibilities and of gender harmony and accord. The lives of the berdache were lives of humiliation and endless work, not of celebration and veneration.

Here we will study historically how the berdache were first described by European colonial soldiers and priests in the 1500s, where they were located socially in the gender division of labor; and whom and how they served. Clearly these European observers came with a set of biases that were hard for them to overcome, but they nevertheless were intent on trying to understand indigenous social organization in order to conquer and eventually exploit the natives, or in the case of the missionaries, to Christianize.

While this historical excursion will be limited primarily to those areas previously under Spanish control that ultimately became part of what is today the American Southwest, larger hemispheric patterns and longer historical trends will also be noted. Native American berdache still exist among many tribal groups in North and South America. Here we reference their experiences particularly as they illuminate larger historical patterns and permutations of longer institutional histories.

When Spanish soldiers and missionaries first saw Native American men pressed into impersonating females, forced to perform women’s work, dressing as women, and offering receptive sexual service only to men, they asserted that these individuals were living in bradaje. Bradaje as a word was derived from the Arabic bradaj, which means male prostitute; hence the English word berdache. Bradaje was something Europeans were quite familiar with in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, having inherited it themselves from East Asia and Islamic Africa where it was extensive. When they found men so employed in Florida and New Mexico, in central Mexico and in the highlands of Peru, they were not particularly surprised and described in a rather matter of fact fashion what they saw. Missionary moralists on campaigns to propagate Christian marriage quite naturally expressed great revulsion over what appeared to be “marriages” between men. In the ecclesiastical lexicon of the day, what was being practiced was clearly the sin against nature, or sodomy, which inhibited marriage and the propagation of children, which after all was the only real purpose of human sexuality.

One of the earliest descriptions of bradaje is found in the narrative of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, published in 1542, recounting events from 1528 to 1536. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was second in command of the 1528 expedition of Pánfilo de Narvaez, which had sailed from Hispaniola to conquer Florida. The conquering party failed miserably, stranding Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his compatriots in Florida. Fashioning makeshift rafts to return to Cuba, they were instead swept by Caribbean currents to the shore of Louisiana. From there they walked in a westward direction across what is now Texas, New Mexico, and southern Arizona for some five years, before turning south into northwestern Mexico. There, in 1536, near Culiacán, Sinaloa, Spanish slave-raiders encountered Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and three lone survivors of the expedition. Recalling what he had seen on the northeastern coast of Texas, Núñez wrote: “I saw a wicked behavior (diablura), and it is that I saw one man married (casado) to another, and these are effeminate, impotent men (unos hombres amarionados impotents). And they go about covered like women, and they perform the tasks of women, and they do not use a bow, and they carry very great loads. And among these we saw many of them, thus unmanly as I say, and they are more muscular than other men and taller; they suffer very large loads.”⁴ When Núñez Cabeza de Vaca noted the berdache dressed as women, he himself stood completely naked among indigenous male warriors, who were themselves naked.

Commenting further on marriage and the division of labor among the Yguaces, a neighboring indigenous group, Núñez stated, “when these Indians are to marry, they buy women from their enemies, and the price that each one pays for his is a bow, the best that can be found, with two arrows, and if by chance he has no bow, then a net. . . . Among these people, the men do not burden themselves nor carry anything of weight, rather, the women and the old people, who are the ones they value the least, carry it. . . . The women are very hardworking and endure a great deal, because of the twenty-four hours there are between day and night, they have only six of rest, and the rest of the night they spend in firing their ovens in order to dry those roots they eat. And from daybreak, they begin to dig and bring firewood and water to their homes, and put in order the other thing of which they have need. . . . There are some among them who practice sodomy (pecado contra natura).⁵ From these descriptions womanhood was associated with a virtual state of slavery. Women were purchased cheaply and made to work cooking and hauling loads endlessly, activities that warriors in their prime refused to do.

Ten years after the Núñez account of his travels in Texas and New Mexico was published in Spain, it became one of the main sources Francisco López de Gómera relied on for his own widely read and cited Historia de las Indias (1552). López de Gómera concluded two things about the trans-vested men who married other men. First, they were “impotent or castrated” (impotents o capados). Second, they were denied access to the instruments of war, “for they could neither carry nor shoot arrows,” though clearly marched into battle with warriors, hauling their load and servicing their needs.⁶ Fixating on the fact that the berdache were “more muscular than other men and taller,” López de Gómera concluded that what Núñez had described were eunuchs. For when men were castrated in youth, it was not uncommon for them to grow taller and more muscular.⁷ When a century later the Jesuit priest Andrés Pérez de Ribas described some transvestites he had observed in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, their basic social location and role in the division of labor remained unchanged. Pérez de Ribas affirmed that the berdache “do not use the bow and arrow; rather, some of them dress like women.”⁸

Among the many things Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca told the viceroy of New Spain in 1536, about his trek across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, was that he had heard that the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona had cities of gold. Determined to conquer them in 1540, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led a grand expedition north into the land of the Pueblo Indians, where he found little except large cities made of mud. Pedro de Castañeda, the official chronicler of the Coronado expedition, presents one of the most extensive descriptions of the geographic distribution of berdache. As the conquering party marched northward up the western coast of Mexico toward the Gulf of California, Castañeda describes finding men transvested as women around Culiacán, Sinaloa, among the Tahus of southern Arizona, among the Pacaxes in the foothills of the Sinaloan Sierras, among the Indians near the mouth of the Colorado River, and in the Suyo Valley on the border of Arizona. All these people were “grand sodomites,” attested Castañeda, with men enjoying sexual service from other men.⁹

Not far from New Mexico Castañeda described a 1540 berdache initiation he had witnessed that began in a male ceremonial chamber, or kiva, by transvesting the male in female garb. Then,

the dignitaries came in to make use of her one at a time, and after them all the others who cared to. From then on she was not to deny herself to any one, and she was paid a certain established amount for the service. And even though she might take a husband later on, she was not thereby free to deny herself to any one who offered her pay.¹⁰

Hernando de Alarcón, also a soldier with the Coronado expedition, further reported that the berdache “could not have carnal relations with women at all, but they themselves could be used by all marriageable youths.” Indeed, it was such sexual service that led the Spaniards to also refer to the berdache as putos or male whores.¹¹

As was just noted, in Pueblo Indian gifting practices, anyone who wanted to have sex with the chief’s berdache was expected to pay. Recounting what he had seen during the conquest of New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá wrote in 1610 that “the natives brought a great number of beautiful many blankets, which they gathered together, hoping to entice with them the Castilian women whom they liked and coveted.” The Indian men desired sexual intercourse not only with the Spanish women that accompanied the soldiers, but also with the young male soldiers. “If a youth in our company had not cried out for help, he would have been attacked,” noted Villagrá, because “these people are addicted to the bestial wicked sin [of sodomy].”¹²

Three hundred years later, in 1852, Dr. William A. Hammond, the United States Surgeon General, traveled through New Mexico and was particularly fascinated by the transvested men he met at the pueblos of Laguna and Acoma. Calling the berdache “amujerado,” literally a person made woman-like, he described them as the persons used “in the saturnalia or orgies, in which these Indians, like the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and other nations, indulge. He is the chief passive agent in the pederastic ceremonies, which form so important a part in the performances. These take place in the Spring of every year.”¹³

Hammond added that when a man was transvested and pressed into a berdache status sexually serving other men: “he is at once relieved of all power and responsibility, and his influence is at an end. If he is married, his wife and children pass from under his control.”¹⁴

That the berdache were consistently described as men abnormally tall and heavy led Fray Juan Agustín de Morfi in the 1770s and Dr. Hammond in the 1850s to wonder if they were eunuchs. Morfi pondered the matter and admitted uncertainty. Hammond, the rational scientist that he was, decided to explore the “facts.” Hammond asked to perform a physical exam on a berdache from Acoma Pueblo. While an Indian male undoubtedly would have protested if a similar request had been made to examine a wife or daughter, in this case the town chief agreed, brought his berdache to Hammond, and remained there throughout the examination. Reporting what he had learned in this and in a similar examination at Laguna Pueblo, to his great amazement, neither was a hermaphrodite. Both had scant pubic hair, small penises (“no larger than a thimble,” “not . . . over an inch in length”), and small testicles (“the size of a small filbert,” “about the size of a kidney bean”). More significant were the comments Hammond elicited from the Acoma berdache: “He informed me with eviden...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Long Before Stonewall
• PART I Colonial Native Americas
• PART II Colonial British America
• PART III Romantic Bonds in the Early Republic
• PART IV Reformers in the New Nation
• Afterword
• About the Contributors
• Index
• About the Editor