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

by Michael Bronski

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 ...