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

by Michael Bronski

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.

The Puritans’ view of the world and sexuality—which would have a tremendous effect on America—was shaped by their experiences in Great Britain before arriving in the New World. The Reformation and the founding of the Anglican church by Henry VIII in 1534 brought about the collapse of a cohesive Roman Catholic polity in Europe. From 1558 to 1649 Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I ruled England and the colonies. During that time English culture accepted and promoted a wide range of diverse, sometimes conflicting, views about sexuality and gender. These ideas were intimately connected with how Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan culture thought about religion and religious practice. Cross-dressing—which had been condemned by Catholic theologians such as Augustine and Tertullian since the second century—was a mandated theatrical convention, since women were not allowed to perform on the stage. There was an enormous public fascination with female cross-dressing, as witnessed by several plays. For instance, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s popular 1607 play The Roaring Girl dramatized the life and celebrated cross-dressing criminal career of Mary Frith, who was also known as Moll Cutpurse. Ben Johnson’s 1609 play Epicoene revolved around cross-dressing and included numerous allusions to same-sex sexual behavior. Social and legal prohibitions against same-sex activity in Elizabethan England were applied haphazardly. Same-sex relationships were illegal, but the culture was accep...

The Puritans in the colonies were on a distinct social and religious mission. While they were reacting against what they perceived as the sexual excesses of Elizabethan culture—they would have disapproved of Shakespeare’s overt sexual puns as being immodest—this was not because they thought pleasure inherently bad. Rather, Puritan theology promoted the intrinsic worth and holiness of the body. This is one of the central reasons the Puritans called for the individual to have a personal, direct relationship with God. As authority in England was being deeply questioned, Puritans were attempting to “find a new master in themselves, a rigid self-control shaping a new personality. Conversion, sainthood, repression, collective discipline, were the answer to the unsettled conditions of society, the way to creating a new order through creating new men.”21 The Puritans readily acknowledged sexual desire and pleasure but insisted that it needed to be expressed within the sanctity of marriage, for the sake of the family, community, and individual. “Society,” claims Alan Bray, “is a process,” and nowhere is this more evident than in Puritan life in the American colonies.22 The “process” of Puritan society was found in the need to constantly refocus on theological “purity”—the essence of holiness and social order. However, the exigencies of surviving in this new land presented situations that led even the strictest Puritans to compromise some principles. Also, as exemplified by Wigglesw...

Moore argues that during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, European society underwent a profound and powerful transformation in which certain minorities, such as lepers, Jews, heretics, witches, “sodomites,” and prostitutes, were stigmatized and persecuted as groups and often physically separated from society. This physical isolation, which took the form of ghettos for Jews and social banishment of lepers, was often the precondition for a wide range of harsh punishments, including death.25 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. In the European mind, the non-gender-normative and non-sexually-normative body—however defined in each period and circumstance—was the dangerous body, the less-than-human body, even the disposa...

Ideas about the “natural” and the “civilized” are often at the heart of how a culture classifies people, groups, and actions. Sexual activity between people of the same sex is often described as “unnatural” in religious and legal discourse—it is contrary to what “nature” or “natural law” intended. This is why sodomy statutes often refer to “unnatural acts.” European and colonial society considered itself “civilized” when contrasted with nonwhite peoples. Yet the othering of a behavior or identity as dangerous may, under certain ambiguous conditions, make it more desired. In this way, the “unnatural” became “natural” only when enacted by an already “civilized” white person. This is an example of purity and danger congealing around sexuality and gender.

While both the labor and social purity groups were abolitionist, there were disagreements on race politics. Many people in the social purity movement were wedded to a model of racial purity that placed the “white race” above all others. They imagined the dangers of race and sex to be strikingly similar. Often they linked nonwhite races to sexual impurity and immoral sexual behaviors, including unrestrained sexual desire, rape, and “unspeakable acts” (a euphemism for same-sex sexual activity). Racial purity was intrinsic to their quest for purifying American culture and ensuring their class status. M. Carey Thomas—who was passionately involved with women her entire adult life and who, as president of Bryn Mawr, profoundly shaped women’s education in the United States—believed in white racial superiority. She refused to allow any Jewish faculty members at the school and frequently questioned the ability of nonwhite people to be educated. Frances Willard, also involved in passionate female-female relationships, voiced sentiments indicative of social purity politics in an 1890 newspaper column about temperance, Northern immigration, and race in the South: I think we have wronged the South, though we did not mean to do so. The reason was, in part, that we had irreparably wronged ourselves by putting no safeguard on the ballot-box at the North that would sift out alien illiterates. They rule our cities to-day; the saloon is their palace, and the toddy stick their sceptre. It is ...

In 1893 Dr. F. E. Daniel, editor of The Texas Medical Journal, gave a speech, later reprinted multiple times, titled “Should Insane Criminals or Sex Perverts Be Permitted to Procreate?” He argued that it is more humane to castrate sex criminals than to execute them or spend public money on imprisonment.13 This reasoning is a logical outcome of the social purity movement’s desire to curb all forms of lust and restructure society on an ideal of sexual and reproductive purity. Daniel explicitly placed his arguments in the context of creating a “sanitary utopia” based on both purity and applied eugenics, a theory and practice of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries designed to improve society through elective human reproduction. The “sanitary utopia” of the social purists was the nightmarish opposite of the utopian visions of the more radical strands of the labor movement and the African American civil rights movement. All three emerged in response to the circumstances of mid-nineteenth-century America. The latter two embraced two different political languages, both of which stood in stark opposition to the ideology of social purity. Some labor organizers embraced anarchism, a wide-ranging political philosophy that espoused, as an alternative to government, the option of self-regulation by citizens. Most African Americans, however, sought more protection from the state against lynching and other forms of racial violence. They also looked for more inclusion in the ...

The dissemination of information about sexuality and reproduction, almost all of which was in a heterosexual context, was an important development in a culture in which sexuality had not been discussed openly. The emergence of a homosexual identity that increasingly refused criminalization and discrimination—what Prime-Stevenson called “any intelligent civilization’s disrespect”—related directly to the newly emerging reproductive rights movement. Both embodied a social ideal that reflected the integrity of the human body and the integral importance of sexuality to the citizen. Most important was the radical idea, literally embodied in homosexual activity, that sex and reproduction can be completely separate, that sex can be enjoyed without the fear of pregnancy. This distinction between sexual activity, pleasure, and reproduction threatened the social purity advocates, who prized motherhood and the family. Ironically, even those who advocated sexual freedom were often not immune to social purity ideology. Margaret Sanger, for instance, who was highly influential in forging a national movement for birth control and family planning, held racist, eugenicist views about nonwhite people. And while a firm believer in women controlling their bodies, she was not a sexual liberationist. She believed that “every normal man and woman has the power to control and direct his sexual impulse. Men and woman who have it in control and constantly use their brain cells thinking deeply, are n...

Marriage manuals were best sellers because the average American wanted to read and think about sexuality. Americans discovered that the changes wrought by the sexology movements allowed them to have discussions not possible before. Changes in book distribution, the low cost of mass book production, and increasing literacy rates made this information easily accessible to a huge, diverse readership. Not all Americans could agree on the specifics of sex education, but most agreed that the topic should be discussed. As Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio point out, “[B]y the 1920s circumstances were present to encourage acceptance of the modern idea that sexual expression was of overarching importance to individual happiness.”33 This “modern idea” was antithetical to the social purity movement, since one person’s sexual expression was another’s mortal sin. The vision of social purity was fueled mainly by women and men who were attempting to gain full citizenship for women through suffrage and other reforms. Some, such as Frances Willard, had lives centered on other women. Unfortunately, this vision was essentially denying full citizenship to others, especially racial minorities. The social purity movement also reinforced social standards that were directly antithetical to sexual freedom and directly harmful to many women and men who desired their own sex. These standards, predicated on traditional heterosexual ideals of gender, were written into laws clearly delineating what wa...

While cities had always provided living accommodations for the unmarried, the new wave of single people—many of whom had immigrated to cities from rural areas—mandated many more. The options included boarding with a family and sharing a life with them, living in a boardinghouse that provided meals, or renting a room, or even just a bed, in a rooming house in which food was not served. Large cities such as New York also saw the construction of apartment buildings designed especially for unmarried people. Work spaces were often segregated by gender, and so were living conditions. Working women, even with lower-middle-income salaries, also had the option of single-gender residential hotels. (There were mixed-gender residential hotels as well.) By 1915, there were fifty-four women’s residences in New York City run by nonprofit organizations, some housing up to one hundred women.6 The advantage of these arrangements was that women were freed from the traditional “woman’s work” of shopping, cooking, laundry, and often even cleaning. In the 1930s two-thirds of the women living in the city’s residential hotels were single.7 While most of these residences catered to middle- and lower-middle-class women and men, all cities contained much cheaper lodgings for men who had extremely low-wage jobs or worked only occasionally. These cheap lodging houses, sometimes called flophouses, were usually located in poor parts of a city. In 1915, an area of only a few blocks in San Francisco’s Sou...

Feminist social activists in the settlement house movement were intent on constructing communities that placed the power of the individual in the wider realm of social change. The settlement house movement, founded in London, aimed to bring together middle-class and lower-income people in an urban group-living situation. Settlement houses attempted to build community in working-class neighborhoods, providing lodging, meals, adult and child education, exercise, and cultural programs. They also prioritized the sharing of knowledge and skills among their residents and the community. Jane Addams and her companion Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House, the first U.S. settlement house, in Chicago in 1889. (Later in her life, Addams would be partnered with Mary Rozet Smith, a major benefactor to Hull House.) Addams, born in 1860, was a product of late Victorian American culture. She believed deeply in some of the traditional ideas about sexuality and gender, even as she herself transgressed them in her own life and work. Addams’s most radical idea, and one that was at the heart of the settlement house movement, was expanding the notion of family to include broader, diverse social groups that needed to “combine” for a common goal. Julie Abraham notes that Addams’s vision of “combining” is a “joining of the personal and the political.” Addams was interested in a project that was at once “a deeply personal enterprise and a release from the personal,” an expansion into what Addams her...

The social purity movement’s impulsive regulation of sexual desire and promotion of healthy bodies through gender, class, and racial segregation had an unintended consequence: the use of single-gender residences and recreational venues as meeting places for homosexual women and men. George Chauncey charts how the YMCA, especially through the 1920s and 1930s, became a visible and internationally noted place for homosexual men to find one another for sex and socializing. He notes that by the 1930s some gay men joked that YMCA meant “Why I’m So Gay.”17 The YMCA, and other all-male facilities that promoted socializing and health through (nude) swimming, calisthenics, and other forms of physical exercise, were logical places for homosexual men to meet one another. Historian John Donald Gustav-Wrathall describes how the friendships promoted by the YMCA “had an embodied element: a delight in one another’s physical proximity, an awareness of each other’s bodies, a sort of excitement that overtook them at the prospect of spending time together.”18

While the pansy was a stock figure in popular culture, this was not true of the female invert: the mannish lesbian, recognizable by her masculine clothing and short-cropped hair. She was present in some comic, visual images that lampooned her, but largely absent from popular culture’s images of lesbians. Perhaps this is because the image was associated with progressive causes such as suffrage, and was specifically, not generally, subversive. In contrast, the pansy was rarely connected to public figures or overt political activity. Also, the stereotype of the mannish lesbian was relatively new (the effeminate man can be traced back to the European fop). For this reason—as well as because the pansy was more flagrantly sexual and instantly recognizable, fluttering his hands and fussing over women’s clothing—the pansy image enjoyed much wider appeal.

Cities, providing anonymity as well as diversity, promoted a new blurring of traditional ideas about privacy. George Chauncey charts the vital, public “fairy” culture that thrived in New York’s Bowery and Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 1930s. As ideas of public space changed, homosexuals found public streets and parks useful for meeting one another. These public places became a space to enact formerly private aspects of life. Earl Lind, in his 1919 Autobiography of an Androgyne, describes at length an active homosexual culture, often centered around the role of fairy or pansy, in New York City earlier in the century. Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent wrote about public homosexuality in his 1932 novel Gentleman Jigger: In Washington Square he sat and watched the people pass. Lithe Italian hoodlums in exaggerated clothes creased to razor sharpness, with dark, sallow skin and oiled hair, strutting with clicking heels and a cocky grace. . . . Painted boys who ogled the hoodlums hungrily and lowered their eyes in false modesty and brazen coquetry as they passed, leaving trails of perfume. . . . A hoodlum would say “hello, sweetheart,” and then turn to his companions and pass some remark that would cause them to laugh loudly.38 This emerging street culture was present in New York’s Harlem and Greenwich Village, but also in other major cities. Public cruising often relied on sexology’s inversion stereotypes, which Nugent portrays here, to make same-sex desire leg...