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

by Michael Bronski

Contemporary LGBT writing on gender roles in indigenous cultures has often oversimplified, even sentimentalized, this history. The systems of berdache that existed before and after the European invasions were complicated and served different purposes for each tribe. More fluid than European gender arrangements, the creation of nonbinary genders was a different model and not necessarily more liberatory. Some contemporary writers, including LGBT Native Americans, interpret the berdache as equivalent to our contemporary understanding of “gay.” While superficial similarities exist between behaviors in some berdache cultures and present-day gay male, lesbian, or transgender cultures, the circumstances separating the two are radically dissimilar.

Puritans in the colonies viewed marriage as a civil contract, not a sacrament, and were concerned about the impact of divorce on the community, generally permitting it only for abandonment. Nonmarital sexuality was immoral because it did not contribute to the family on which society organized.

The Puritans had fled Great Britain to secure religious freedom for themselves, not others; they never intended to found a democracy. John Winthrop was clear: “If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy, first we should have no warrant in scripture for it: for there was no such government in Israel. . . . A democracy is, amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government. [To allow it would be] a manifest breach of the 5th Commandment” (honor your father and mother).17 For the Puritans, the family was central to religious and civil society; immoral and illegal acts that, by taking place in private, did not directly threaten it may have been viewed with some leniency.

While procreative sex between a husband and wife was the only officially acceptable mode of sexual activity, some statistics show that at least 10 percent of Puritan marriage occurred after a pregnancy, and premarital sex generally went unpunished if it resulted in a stable marriage.

As a theologically based society, Puritans acted harshly toward religious diversity. In 1634, when Salem, Massachusetts, pastor Roger Williams was accused of spreading “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions”—advocating more religious freedom and toleration of native peoples—he was exiled. (The commonwealth law under which Williams was exiled was not repealed until 1936.)

In understanding the historical ramifications of laws that control sexual behavior, it is useful to remember that no universal baseline of appropriate sexual or gender behavior exists. “Sexual deviance” is often the cultural and political wild card used to demonize people who do not conform to certain sexual norms. Its accusation can be used by mainstream culture against marginalized groups or between marginalized groups themselves. We see throughout American history that restrictions against LGBT people are enforced “as needed” to maintain the contemporary status quo—a clear example of Alan Bray’s concept of society as a process.

Sodomy laws play a key element in structuring ideas about acceptable and unacceptable behavior in U.S. culture, and in structuring society itself, because gender and sexuality are often the prime axis by which society distinguishes between “purity” and “danger.” These statutes are a legal device regulating all sexuality, not just same-sex activity. Their norms include not just sexual behavior but gender expectations as well. It is not acceptable, therefore, for a biological male to be penetrated by another male, nor is it acceptable for women to engage in anything other than reproductive sexual activity. This is why the legal act of “sodomy” has no articulated, stable meaning—why in some laws it is labeled “unmentionable.”

Accusations of sexual immorality often took two forms. The first was the charge of dangerous hypersexuality. In the second—and counterintuitive—form, the sexual outcast becomes the object of repressed sexual fantasies of the mainstream culture. This was certainly the case in America, in which dominant culture’s sexual fantasies were projected onto the sexuality of the enslaved Africans. These myths included prodigious sexual desire in African women and men and, in the post–Civil War years, the idea that all African men were capable of sexual violence and rape. These projections were used by the dominant group as reasons to maintain their position of physical and social power. A primary reason, for instance, why slave owners depicted enslaved women as hypersexual was to justify their right to rape these women. This presumed hypersexuality was the excuse for white men to be sexual with enslaved women and the reason they needed to be controlled.

Aside from fiction, few records document same-sex behaviors during this time. In his mid-century diaries, Philip C. Van Buskirk, an American marine, details mutual sexual interactions among sailors. They include mutual masturbation (called “going chaw for chaw”) and anal intercourse, as well as sexual and romantic relationships between older sailors, often officers, and cabin boys as young as thirteen. In 1853 his diary records an older sailor’s opinion about sex between men. While the sailor would punish men who had sex with men on land, he had no desire to do so at sea: “What can a feller do?—three years at sea—and hardly any chance to have a woman. I tell you . . . a feller must do so. Biles and pimples and corruption will come out all over his body if he don’t.”

In 1870, Ulrichs published Araxes: A Call to Free the Nature of the Urning from Penal Law. Using Enlightenment language, he mixes legal rhetoric about natural rights with moral arguments about the responsibilities of the state: The Urning, too, is a person. He, too, therefore, has inalienable rights. His sexual orientation is a right established by nature. Legislators have no right to veto nature; no right to persecute nature in the course of its work; no right to torture living creatures who are subject to those drives nature gave them. The Urning is also a citizen. He, too, has civil rights; and according to these rights, the state has certain duties to fulfill as well. The state does not have the right to act on whimsy or for the sheer love of persecution. The state is not authorized, as in the past, to treat Urnings as outside the pale of the law.

Carpenter and Symonds were also influenced by Whitman’s conflation of sexual freedom and citizenship. Symonds’s first major work, privately printed in 1883, was a historical analysis of same-sex male love titled A Problem in Greek Ethics. It was followed by a contemporary political analysis, A Problem in Modern Ethics, in 1891. As a critic, Symonds was interested in manifestations of same-sex desire in classical art and literature and how they could be used to argue for personal freedom under the law. Along with Symonds’s work, Edward Carpenter’s 1894 pamphlet Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society and his 1908 book-length The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women were fundamental in constructing a language and a mode of political thinking that would eventually form the modern LGBT movement.

Anthropologist Esther Newton notes that the concept of the masculine woman who loves other women made emotional sense to both homosexuals and heterosexuals, because it played into the popular idea that if sexual desire is masculine, then a woman who desires a woman must be mannish.19 Lillian Faderman argues that the mannish lesbian was a break from the concept of romantic friendship, because her masculinity gave her access to sexuality. This new step in how mainstream culture understood sexual attraction between women made the concept of the romantic friendship—so integral to personal and social acceptance of both female and male same-sex relationships—impossible.20 The mannish lesbian was also used in the popular imagination to “explain,” as well as demonize, the new twentieth-century woman who was active in the public sphere, including the suffragette. The mannish lesbian was not, however, conflated with the well-known concept of the “passing woman”—a woman who dressed to pass as a man, like the Civil War soldiers—which was understood as a masquerade, not an identity.

Medically based marriage guides of the early twentieth century, such as the 1926 best seller The Doctor Looks at Love and Life by Joseph Collins, MD, gave similar messages. Collins was in favor of less sexual repression and rejected religious morality in favor of scientific fact. He was sympathetic to the struggles women faced, arguing that the “problem” of frigidity may well be caused by male selfishness. He also viewed “natural homosexuals”—those born that way—as “victims of fate,” but his arguments were complicated: There are many persons who indulge in unnatural sexual relations who are not homosexuals. They are the real degenerates. There are many potential and actual homosexuals whose intercourse with persons of their own sex is confined to emotional and intellectual contacts. . . . They are not degenerates. . . . They are victims of Fate, the only ones who do not excite our compassion; and all because we cannot distinguish between the work of God and Satan.

Some cities saw disturbances caused by men gathering outside department store windows. These shockingly new displays of public sexuality were common in almost all American cities.22 By the 1920s and 1930s, the art of window design and display was spearheaded by homosexual men who, like Leyendecker, drew on a tradition of homosexual aesthetics to promote this wave of consumerism. Vincente Minnelli, who had relationships with women and men and later became a noted Hollywood film director, got his start as a window designer in Chicago. The role of the female consumer also became more and more important as women gained more access to money, either earned or through their husbands.

Marie Equi was born to Irish and Italian immigrant parents in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1872. At the age of twenty-one she moved to Portland, Oregon, with her partner, Bess Holcomb, who had a job offer there. Several years later they moved to San Francisco, where Equi studied medicine. Her disaster relief work after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake earned her a commendation from the United States Army. In Portland, she performed abortions and worked with Margaret Sanger, with whom she may have had a sexual relationship. A member of the Wobblies, Equi was known for her suffrage and labor organizing. She later became an anarchist. In 1915, with her partner Harriet Speckart, she adopted a child named Mary, who referred to her mothers as “ma” and “da.” In 1920, convicted under the Sedition Act, Equi began serving a three-year sentence in San Quentin State Prison. Her crime was protesting against the United States’ entry into World War I; during a rally in Portland supporting preparedness for war, she had unfurled a banner that read “PREPARE TO DIE, WORKINGMEN, J. P. MORGAN & CO. WANT PREPAREDNESS FOR PROFIT.”

Psychology had risen in American culture to be an influential lens through which people understood themselves and society. In 1956 Dr. Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist at UCLA, used funding from the National Institute of Mental Health to administer three standard personality tests to thirty homosexuals and thirty heterosexuals. The anonymous responses were read by three experts, who discovered absolutely no differences between the two groups. Hooker’s paper was published in 1957, but made little impact on the thinking of the professional community. Why was this?

Robert Wood argues that mainstream male fashion trends in the 1950s and early 1960s were primarily influenced by trends that first surfaced in the male homosexual community. Popular styles such as patterned and brightly colored shirts, strapped undershirts, black sports shirts, tighter-fitting pants, chinos, loafers, and low-cut boots all began as homosexual fashions. The same was true of flashy watchbands, ornate rings, pinky rings, wrist jewelry, and neck chains. All of these fashions were worn to eroticize the male body or to make it more sexually attractive through ornamentation.

many heterosexual feminists and civil rights advocates held biases against homosexuals. Some heterosexual feminists felt that open lesbians in the feminist movement would give credence to the accusation that feminists were all man-hating lesbians. The irony is that the feminist movement’s fundamental critique of sexual power differences, inequalities in the workplace, and the legal inequities and problems faced by women in relationship to family, marriage, and children were all first articulated by the Daughters of Bilitis. Issue after issue of The Ladder contained articles and letters describing the problems faced by women. Heterosexual feminists never acknowledged their debt to lesbians.

The introduction of the birth control pill, interestingly enough, helped the cause of homosexual liberation and struck against anti-homosexual prejudice. The major moral, scientific, and legal argument against homosexual activity had always been that it does not lead to reproduction and is thus unnatural. The birth control pill made the separation between sex and reproduction socially acceptable.