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

by Michael Bronski

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.

what continues to influence our culture today is the religious and sexual attitudes of the Europeans. They saw the gender norms and behaviors of indigenous peoples as markedly different from their own,

For the Europeans, the most extreme examples were the women and men who dressed and behaved as, in their eyes, the other sex.1 Often referred to by French explorers as berdache—an incorrect name, implying a catamite or young male sodomite—these women and men took on the dress and the tribal duties of the other sex. Their roles in each culture differed. Sometimes they were placed in socially elevated positions as religious figures, shamans, or artisans. Among the Crows, “men who dressed as women and specialized in women’s work were accepted and sometimes honored; a woman who led men into battle and had four wives was a respected chief.”2 In some cases, these “third sex” figures were integral to traditions of tribal violence and warfare.

In Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expeditions (written between 1804 and 1810), Nicholas Biddle notes that “Among Mamitarees if a boy shows any symptoms of effeminacy or girlish inclinations he is put among the girls, dressed in their way, brought up with them, & sometimes married to men.”

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.

Sodomy laws in Europe and America were not specifically aimed at same-sex activity; they were intended to punish all nonreproductive sexual activity.

Over time, sodomy laws were used more often against same-sex coupling than opposite-sex coupling, and some men, and occasionally women, were punished for their sexual actions.

The Puritans had fled Great Britain to secure religious freedom for themselves, not others; they never intended to found a democracy.

in 1696 Massachusetts passed a law that explicitly forbade cross-dressing. Some historians argue that this law was intended to curb the possibility of same-sex sexual encounters.)

In 1624 Thomas Morton and others, including thirty male indentured servants, founded a decidedly non-Puritan colony in Wollaston, now the township of Quincy outside of Boston. They named the colony Merrymount, punning on Mare-Mount and Mary-Mount, direct references to bestial sodomy and Roman Catholicism. Morton befriended the local Algonquian tribe, whose culture he admired, and urged intermarriage between native women and male colonists. He also released the indentured servants and made them equal “consociates.” In 1627 he erected an eighty-foot-tall maypole with buck’s horns attached to the top (indicative of the sexualized god Pan or, from a Puritan view, Satan) and held, as was customary in medieval England, revels. Morton declared himself a Lord of Misrule. Morton understood the sexual implications of his permissive agenda. In one of his writings about Merrymount, he noted that “there was likewise a merry song made, which [to make their revels more fashionable] was sung with a corus, every man bearing his part; which they performed in a dance, hand in hand about the May-pole, whilst one of the company sung, and filled out the good liquor like Gammedes and Jupiter.”24 His invoking Gammedes (Ganymede) and Jupiter (the Roman name for Zeus) in Elizabethan culture was a clear reference to the archetypical male lovers in Greek mythology.

In 1658 the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill banning all Quakers from the colony under pain of death. Under this law, Mary Dyer and four other Quakers, known as the Boston Martyrs, were hanged on the Boston Common. Unrepentant Quakers were jailed, as were others who contested Puritan doctrine. Ann Glover, for example, was an elderly Irish woman sold into slavery by Oliver Cromwell in 1650. She was a practicing Catholic who also spoke Gaelic. She was accused of being a witch—historically, in Europe, an accusation primarily aimed at women—and hanged on the Boston Common in 1688. Cotton Mather noted that she was “a scandalous old Irishwoman, very poor, a Roman Catholic and obstinate in idolatry.” Within the gendered, parental hierarchy of the family in Puritan society, husbands and fathers were heads of households, and wives and children were beholden to them. This is why Puritans disapproved of Anne Hutchinson’s preaching and were quick to accuse nontraditional women of witchcraft.

Moore argues that a series of fundamental social changes—including the rapid growth of towns and cities, broad changes in agricultural distribution networks, and a radical shift in how hierarchical power was distributed—created this new set of social classifications. Its purpose was to create clear social and cultural boundaries that would stabilize society by safely containing groups designated as dangerous pollutants. 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.”26 The colonists’ seizing of native peoples’ lands was not in self-defense, but for economic gain, resulting in the fairly rapid development of colonial capitalism.

Throughout history, sexual and gender deviance have always been used as reasons for almost all cultures, no matter how progressive, to deny certain people full rights as citizens. 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. This idea, based on anthropologist Mary Douglas’s widely accepted theory of purity and danger, is helpful in explaining broad trends in European and American culture.27 The idea of purifying religious and secular thought and society was at the heart of Puritan identity. These ideas were continuous with the long European tradition of a persecuting society and emerged at a time of grave political and religious disruption that neatly dovetailed with the impulse to stabilize society through persecution. Throughout American history there is a pattern of persecuted groups, like the Puritans, treating other outsider groups in a similar manner.

Early colonial life in the northern continent was a mass of contradictions. It was extraordinarily intolerant, yet often surprisingly lax. The European settlers’ relations to the native peoples ranged from murderous genocide to a complex series of eroticized relationships. While Europeans brought with them a persecuting society, the manifestations of that society took many forms. One of the lasting legacies of colonial social and legal culture was the application of laws prohibiting and punishing sexual activity between people of the same sex. Treating some sexual behaviors differently because potentially they had less impact on the community had a twin effect on future American culture. It gave rise to the social (and eventual legal) concept of “consenting adults” and to a domestic-based idea of privacy that offered protections to some people at certain points in history.

and abolition—and later, sexual freedom—would be a strong influence on American political thought. This rapid growth and diversity meant that the social and religious cohesiveness of the early colonies was lost; the Puritans’ strict social demands on the individual were waning and being questioned.

By othering, European colonists began constructing a new national identity and citizenship premised on a massive displacement of their own sexual and gender anxieties onto marginalized groups.

One of the most important 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. Some colonialists embraced one of the most radical ideals of the Enlightenment: John Locke’s concept of the separation of church and state.

Almost all of the men who wrote the foundational documents of the new American political system were deists—they believed in a supreme being but not necessarily in organized religion, and they rejected the belief that the scriptures were divinely inspired. They envisioned the laws of United States to be, in true Enlightenment tradition, based on reason and equality.

Sodomy laws were in direct conflict with principles of the Enlightenment that called for personal sexual autonomy. But despite a clearly articulated separation of church and state, the colonies never abolished their sodomy laws.

In 1789—more than a decade after the American Declaration of Independence—the French National Assembly produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, boldly stating that true civil liberty included the right “to do anything that does not injure others.”3 By 1791 this progressive thinking reached its logical conclusion when the Constituent Assembly abolished punishments for crimes “created by superstition, feudalism, the tax system, and despotism.” These included blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft, and sodomy, all crimes that were distinctly related to the persecuting society throughout European history.

Writers such as Denis Diderot, Jean-Paul Marat, Montesquieu, and Voltaire had written about the need to decriminalize personal sexual behavior (which they saw as an ethical decision, not a criminal one), even if they personally thought sodomy was wrong or unnatural. (Voltaire’s famous quip about his own forays into male-male sexual activity displays Enlightenment ambivalence: “Once, a scientist; twice, a sodomite.”)

Gender is a primary organizational focus in any culture. In the newly formed United States—predicated on revolutionary ideas, yet deeply flawed in the execution of them—concepts of gender would undergo major changes that evidenced this ambivalence. The presentation of a firm, masculine authority as the face of the new American citizen exposed the tension of wanting to be free and needing to assert control.

As the colonies claimed their political independence from Great Britain, it was clear they would have to establish a new, distinct culture that would reflect their own political ideology. One of the ways they did this was to consciously invent a new “American man” who represented all of the new virtues of the Republic and had little connection to the traditional Englishman. 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.

The new American man, a mythic prototype defined by his heroic actions in the colonial militia, was also a prototype of the citizen. Not only were slaves unable to join a militia, but so were friendly native Americans, free Africans, white servants, and white men without homes. These restrictions ensured that the prototypical American man was of a certain class, ethnicity, property, and citizenship status.

In one grand speech, Tyler connects the colonial revolution to American manhood, national pride, personal honor, and different-sex desire. This is, in part, why the United States did not abolish its sodomy laws. Highly gendered societies reinforce traditional ideas about gender through regulating sexual behavior.

Like all strictly delineated systems of gender, the new American models could not represent the diverse lives of actual people.

In societies in which gender and power are inexplicably intertwined, often little respect is given to people who desire their own sex or who do not conform to accepted gender expectations. Same-sex relationships and desires, however, manifest themselves in various, often more socially acceptable, ways. This is especially true in the complicated interplay between companionship, community, and eroticism in people’s lives. The clearly defined separate social spheres for women and men—both the public and the private for men, and most often the domestic for women—give rise to clearly defined same-sex cultures, usually referred to as “homosocial.” This term does not necessarily imply an erotic or sexual component—although those could, and often do, exist—but rather describes a social construct that emerged in specific ways during the eighteenth century. 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. These friendships were important to the women and men who engaged in them—often as important and long-lasting as traditional heterosexual marriages—and were an accepted, praised, and significant social institution.

At the end of the eighteenth century, three very different people—two real and one fictional, all of them born women—captured the pubic imagination for breaking that divide.

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.

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. It was permissible for women and men to have passionate private friendships, which may have included an erotic or sexual component, as long as they conformed to accepted gender norms in public. It was acceptable for women such as Sampson Gannett to transgress gender norms in public as long as they adhered to traditional norms in their personal relationships. This increasing split in public spheres and private spheres was a major shift in how sexual behavior and gender—and also citizenship—were conceptualized. Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping unacceptable behavior private. This complicated relationship between the public and private is at the heart of LGBT history and life today.

Jackson stood in bold contrast to the founding fathers. He, along with Daniel Boone, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett, represented the new American hero and was mythologized in popular culture for his masculine adventures. These iconic men who refused to follow society’s rules were emblematic of the era’s westward expansion. America was not only the land of the free, but the land of fewer rules.

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.

the early and mid-nineteenth century West promulgated the image of an independent man who did not need civilization, women, or even overt heterosexuality to define his manhood.

Life on the western frontier was frequently sex-segregated, creating homosocial communities and relationships. Brothels, for instance, which thrived in towns such as Deadwood and Rapid City as well as cities such as San Francisco, resulted in complicated female-centered social groups as the women who worked in them offered one another comfort and safety.

Nineteenth-century American western culture produced the mythic cowboy whose iconic image resonates today as the prototypical American male. 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. This paradox is predicated on the idea that men are more free outside of the “civilizing” presence of women, who demand they behave in accord with artificial social standards. “Civilization,” often signified by home and family, is contrasted with “the wilderness,” which becomes a male refuge. As cultural critic Chris Packard notes, “The cowboy is queer; he is odd; he doesn’t fit in; he resists community.”2 The myth of the American West often locates civilizing forces in the teeming, conformist, urban East—the antithesis of the natural wilderness. The mythic, lone cowboy, sometimes coupled with a “pardner,” is emblematic of the revolt against not only social dictates and conformity, but also institutional heterosexuality. The cowboy is culturally positioned as a man outside of the law.

From its earliest days, San Francisco was known as a wide-open town: an urban space with few social restrictions and a high tolerance for illegal behavior, including same-sex sexual activity and deviation from gender norms. The roots of this reputation can be found in the mostly all-male culture of the gold rush. Saloons, dance halls, rowdy theaters, and brothels were plentiful and, except for a small number of female workers, were patronized only by men.

John D’Emilio argues that historically, LGBT communities benefit in societies predicated on free labor—that is, a non-family-unit-based economy in which unmarried women and men are able to sustain economic independence.5 The boom economy of San Francisco in the second half of the nineteenth century is a prime example. A closely connected idea is historian George Chauncey’s argument that gay and lesbian communities found their earliest manifestations in poor and working-class cultures, because wealthier classes could maintain a greater degree of personal privacy.6 For LGBT people, the luxury of privacy was antithetical to forming communities, which are, by their nature, public in bringing similar people together.

In 1837 Emerson published “Nature,” an essay fundamental in defining transcendentalism: the distinctly American philosophy promoting individual spiritual transcendence through experiencing the material world, especially nature, rather than through organized religion. The next year, in his “American Scholar” speech, he urged his audience to rethink the idea of the American man (by which he meant humans) and to create an independent, original, and free national literature. Animated by the ideal of an expansive sympathy influenced by the “naturalness” of America, Emerson argued for an egalitarian society that values all of its members’ individual contributions to a whole:

But Dickinson’s quiet, domestic life was the reality for many women, and her poetic dictum “tell the truth but tell it slant” (Poem 1129) recognized that writing outside of prescribed codes was dangerous, especially for a woman.

Fear of mixed-race offspring led to a variety of legal statutes designed to control individuals’ behavior connected to race, especially sexual behavior.

The joint construction of the categories of race and sexuality had implications for people who desired those of the same sex. Because same-sex couples could not have children, their relationships, while illegal under sodomy laws, were less scrutinized under race laws than heterosexual relationships and could often go unnoticed if the parties involved were discreet (as was always mandated by the sodomy laws). Because it was not reproductive—and thus, ironically, was safer—same-sex interracial coupling was often the subject of certain genres of fiction or travel literature. These works set a cultural standard in gay male writing and iconography in which interracial erotic relationships were a central theme.

Defenders of slavery and abolitionists both quoted Bible verses to make their arguments.

The use of biblical texts to justify the persecution of a class of people within a secular democracy is still with us today, including the justification for legal prohibitions against same-sex sexual behavior, because scriptural rationales and the rhetoric of persecution continually set the terms of national discussions.

Whitman’s popularity and reputation grew with each new edition of Leaves, contributing to a social climate that made other expressions of same-sex male desire permissible.

Albert Cashier was a Union soldier who fought in over forty battles. Not until years later did anyone discover that he was biologically a woman, having been born Jennie Irene Hodgers in Ireland around 1844. Hodgers immigrated to the United States as a child, and after passing as a man for some time, joined the Union army in 1862 as Albert Cashier. After the war Cashier continued living as a man.

Albert Cashier lived as a man until 1913, when at the age of 69 and failing mentally, he was admitted to Illinois’s Waterville State Hospital for the Insane. When it was discovered that he was biologically a woman, he was forced to wear a dress until his death in 1915. Even though his secret was made public, his tombstone described him as “Albert D. J. Cashier, Co. G, 95 Ill. Inf.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning noted in a letter that “I understand that [Cushman] and Miss Hays have made vows of celibacy and of eternal attachment to each other—they live together, dress alike . . . it is a female marriage.”

There are numerous documented instances of women living together as domestic partners and being socially accepted as a couple. The common term for this arrangement was “Boston marriage,” suggested by the title of Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians.

Alcott, who published twenty-nine books and story collections in forty-four years, told poet Louise Chandler Moulton in 1873 that she had remained a spinster “because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”

Like most of the reform-minded women in her circle, Alcott was an ardent feminist and questioned how women’s relationships with men affected their place in society. In the 1870s she and friends, including Julia Ward Howe, recommended that women not use “Mrs.” or “Miss” to avoid discrimination.15