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August 2 - December 30, 2019
“add one woman and stir.”
Jonathan Ned Katz, Lillian Faderman, Allan Bérubé, George Chauncey, and Esther Newton,
Their works sought to make a case for both the naturalness of same-sex desire and the reformation of laws that criminalized homosexual behavior.
Kertbeny, Ulrichs, and Symonds were making a clear, unequivocal case for the cultural and legal acceptance of same-sex desire and activity.
Kertbeny invented the word “homosexual” in 1869 to help him construct a narrative around a person defined by his or her same-sex sexual desires and actions.
The word “lesbian,” referring to the Isle of Lesbos, the home of Sappho, was first used by sexologist Havelock Ellis in 1897.
While language informs identity, the elaborate emotional, psychological, and political intricacies of lives exceed identity, and even language itself.
Perhaps the most startling revelation, which did not occur to me until I had finished writing, was that many of the most important changes for LGBT people in the past five hundred years have been a result of war. From the American Revolution to the war in Vietnam, wars have radically affected LGBT people and lives. These wars have had an enormous impact on all Americans, but their effects on LGBT people have been particularly pronounced, in part because the social violence of war affects sexuality and gender.
Impact of war.
The second realization was that entertainment in its broadest sense—popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels—has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironically, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them.
the battle between the social purity movements (which began in the nineteenth century and have numerous descendants) and the right of LGBT people, and all Americans, to decide how to use their imaginations and bodies.
Gertrude Stein, the mother of all queer wit, begins her novel The Making of Americans
History teaches something new every time it is rewritten or interpreted. Pedagogy, like history, will never be able to contain all of America—a great country, an evil country, a place of tremendous generosity and welcome as well as pronounced disdain for foreigners and outsiders. America is not one thing or another. America is queer. A Queer History of the United States is one explanation of how it got that way. To become American, to benefit from the contributions of LGBT people to this fabulous, horrible, scary, and wonderful country we call America, is to be a little queer. As history
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Omg lol
Europeans came to the Americas with an extraordinarily rigorous sense of how gender and sexuality should be organized. These strict ideas were bulwarked by rigid civil and religious statutes. The Europeans attempted to eradicate many non-European gender-normative customs, traditions, and behaviors. They often did this through accepted practices of violence, such as capturing and enslaving non-Christians and forced conversion. This legal and religious repression and violence provided a template for how mainstream European culture would treat LGBT people throughout much of U.S. history.
woman who led men into battle and had four wives was a respected chief.”
Poly
European religious and social thought held that people who did not adhere to Christian concepts of sexual behavior, gender affect, or modesty were less than human; they were like animals. This qualified them to be deprived of individuality, liberty, and life itself.
When the Puritans established a religious society in the colonies, they were determined to ensure that its members did not fall prey to the temptations and errors they had left behind in England. Therefore they enacted strict legal sanctions against deviance from sexual and gender norms.
The Problems of Aristotle, a late seventeenth-century sex manual read in the colonies,
Because most sexual behavior is private, much of the information we have about same-sex activity is from court cases or other public records, which provide a vivid but incomplete sense of the time.
We can assume that there was public concern about sex between women, or that it was occurring, since Rhode Island’s 1647 law and New Haven’s 1655 law both explicitly prohibit sexual activity between women.
Over the decades, Providence Plantations became, for its time, a progressive colony. Capital punishment was rare, and debtors’ prisons and trials for witchcraft were abolished. In 1652 it was the first colony to ban all slavery, regardless of color.
Merrymount,
We see throughout American history that restrictions against LGBT people are enforced “as needed” to maintain the contemporary status quo—a
It was Morton’s social egalitarianism, his openness to treating the Algonquians as relative equals, and his theological liberality that set him decisively apart from the Puritans.
“persecuting society.”
This fear of pollution was less about sex or death than about power and social standing. As Moore notes, “Pollution fear . . . is the fear that the privileged feel of those at whose expense their privilege is enjoyed.”
In this view, the founding of modern society was predicated on the creation of minority groups whose only purpose was to be vilified as unclean and persecuted for the illusion of a comprehensive sense of societal safety.
Throughout American history there is a pattern of persecuted groups, like the Puritans, treating other outsider groups in a similar manner.
Fundamental to this new nation was the reshaping of ideas about gender and sexual behavior as they related to the political concept of the citizen.
In 1760, colonists numbered 1.5 million—six times the population at the turn of the century.
Penn designed Philadelphia—the city of brotherly love, denoting many faiths—between 1682 and 1684. Within fifty years it was the second largest urban area in the colonies. Progressive Quaker views on religious freedom and abolition—and later, sexual freedom—would be a strong influence on American political thought.
The 1682 Pennsylvania sodomy law did away with the death penalty for sodomy and replaced it with a whipping, six months of hard labor, and the forfeiture of a third of the accused’s estate. (Thirty-two years later Pennsylvania made sodomy a capital crime again, reflecting changing demographics and belief systems.)
Colonists continued their sexualized treatment of native people, sodomy laws proliferated, and the legal, economic, and cultural institution of slavery was introduced into the colonies.
It is impossible to understand American history—including the position of LGBT people—without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country.
not unlike the biblical justifications for the condemnation of same-sex sexual activity, were used to both enforce draconian laws and justify extraordinarily harsh punishments.
It would be inaccurate and unwise to make strict parallel claims for the oppression of slaves and gay people. But the extensive legal and social effects of slavery have shaped the social and political context of America today. The acceptance of slavery as a philosophical concept and political reality laid the groundwork for the justification of “othering”—designating a group of people as “different,” placing them outside of the legal, social, and moral framework granting full citizenship. As was the case for both native people and religious dissenters, othering is the enactment of Moore’s
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the widespread acceptance of legalized slavery reinforced and normalized mainstream society’s ideas about moral and sexual inferiority.
Nevertheless, by the mid-nineteenth century it had evolved to become foundational to how America culture was to conceptualize male-male relationships.
In this way, the “unnatural” became “natural” only when enacted by an already “civilized” white person.
the Enlightenment drastically transformed intellectual life, majority consciousness, and social structures.
claims of the Enlightenment was the insistence that every human being had equal worth, dignity, and personal integrity. However, many of the Enlightenment thinkers who formulated these radical ideas did not apply them to everyone, harboring prejudice against nonwhites, Jews, and women even as they argued for equality. Some even constructed “scientific” evidence to rationally prove a biological inequality.
But despite a clearly articulated separation of church and state, the colonies never abolished their sodomy laws.
France, which abolished its sodomy law using Enlightenment precepts. In 1789—more
implemented in all French colonies and wherever Napoleon established governments in Europe and the Americas.
The notion of sexual autonomy even rearticulated, for Enlightenment thinkers, the Puritan concept of individuality and care of the self and body. Yet not only did the thirteen original colonies keep their sodomy laws, they maintained, elaborated on, and enforced them for the next 212 years.
This new American man was bold, rugged, aggressive, unafraid of fighting, and comfortable asserting himself. This model was in complete contrast to the Englishman, who was stereotyped as refined, overly polite, ineffectual, and often effeminate.
Highly gendered societies reinforce traditional ideas about gender through regulating sexual behavior.
In 1787 a constitutional convention allowed the states to decide on suffrage; all states but New Jersey denied women the right to vote. New Jersey revoked female suffrage in 1807. In 1867 the Fourteenth Amendment stipulated specifically that suffrage is the right of male citizens alone.
Homosocial space at this time gave birth to distinct same-sex relationships that were referred to in popular and literary culture as romantic or intimate friendships.
The public interest in the topic of female transvestism was not isolated to stories about these three strikingly different women. Late eighteenth-century American literary and popular culture was obsessed with this new notion of the cross-dressed female warrior.
Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping unacceptable behavior private.
