A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 1)

by Michael Bronski

The reality of the persecuting society never completely vanishes from U.S. history. It becomes increasingly refined. In the colonies, social and political persecution of certain groups was relatively indiscriminate, making few distinctions among individuals within a minority group. Gradually, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, we see a growing cultural schism occurring between the private and the public, which was largely the reason people were able to explore nontraditional gender roles.

Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping unacceptable behavior private.

This new spirit is best exemplified in the rise of soldier, and later president, Andrew Jackson in the 1820s. Jacksonian democracy, an early populism, extended the vote to all white men, not just property-owning white men. Jackson’s championing of the common man—a rejection of both the “civilized” behavior of the Englishman and the eastern “city man”—extended and expanded the revolutionary masculinity of the War of Independence.

Because of harsh living conditions, the absence of strict legal policing, and relaxed demands of accepted propriety, gender norms in the West were markedly different from those in the East.

San Francisco’s Jeanne Bonnet was repeatedly arrested for cross-dressing and petty theft; at the end of her short life, she organized prostitutes to leave their work and make a living shoplifting.

This is a central paradox of U.S. masculinity. Masculinity has been increasingly defined by active heterosexual desire and relationships, yet is also defined by participation in an all-male homosocial world that has the potential for sexual interaction.

“The cowboy is queer; he is odd; he doesn’t fit in; he resists community.”2

For public moralists, the problem was not just that theaters bred immorality and crime, but that they let the imagination flourish. The theater was a central form of entertainment in urban areas and provided titillating alternatives to traditional ideas about gender and sexuality. This had been true for decades. In the early 1860s, poet and actor Adah Isaacs Menken, a Jewish convert of African American and Creole parentage who was a close friend of Walt Whitman’s and had both female and male lovers, became internationally infamous when she

took the lead role in Mazeppa. At the show’s climax, Menken, playing a young man, appeared mostly undressed and rode a live horse across the stage. Menken was a prototype of the socially dangerous “unruly woman” who refused to conform to accepted norms of gender and sexuality.