Long Before Stonewall
In mid-eighteenth-century Massachusetts, the engraving featured on the cover and on the facing page, published in the Boston Evening Post, depicted the Freemasons of Boston engaged in anal penetration with a wooden spike or treenail. Treenails were commonly used in ship-building in the eighteenth century and joined timbers by becoming engorged when wet. Thus, the very object being used for penetration was a multilayered phallic symbol. The image also included the figure of an “ass” (furthering the anal emphasis) that brayed “Trunnel him well, brother.” A poem accompanied the engraving and depicted the Masons as romantically and sexually interested in one another. It only added to the focus on the phallus (note that the word “trunnel” was highlighted with capital letters) and the posterior with the lines: “I’m sure our TRUNNELS look’d as clean / As if they ne’re up A—se had been; / For when we use ’em, we take care / To wash ’em well, and give ’em Air, / Then lock ’em up in our own Chamber, / Ready to trunnel the next Member.” Sodomy was, of course, still a capital crime in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, yet the story managed to muster humor about the act by calling on a cultural association of depraved and inferior manhood with same-sex sexual interest.1 That by the eighteenth century an all-male secret social club could raise the specter of homosexuality is significant. We might even speculate that the satirist was referencing molly houses of London, which were reported on in local newspapers.
Traditional scholars might argue that the engraving displays the scatological, not the sexual. But to draw too fine a line around the sexual limits our understanding of ways in which the erotic, romantic, intimate, reproductive, and physical join together with so-called nonsexual areas of life and society in early America. The anal “intimacy” depicted in the image necessarily raises the possibility of sodomy, enabling us to speak of same-sex sexuality without actually locating the term sodomy in this discussion.
This book, a collection of reprinted and original ground-breaking work, uses history, anthropology, psychology, literary criticism, political theory, and sociology to tease out various histories of same-sex sexualities in early America. Parts one and two chart the contours of same-sex sexuality in colonial societies, including interactions among Native Americans and Europeans. Parts three and four examine new meanings of same-sex sex in the early United States. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that long before the modern era, individuals came together to express their same-sex romantic and sexual attraction. Some reflected on their desires in quiet solitude. Some endured great hardship for their words or actions that expressed homosexual interest.2
The eighteenth century in particular was a critical period in the development of traditions of sexuality. These languages and ideas around sex and personhood were only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries officially enshrined in the professional terms of the then-relatively new fields of psychology and sexology. Long Before Stonewall exposes the deep foundations that modern sexual political movements and identities are built upon.
Reconceptualizing sexuality in preindustrial America has broader implications for our understanding of the development of the modern subject or self. Studying same-sex sexuality can also tell us something about life in early America, in particular something about connections of sex and reputation and character. Sexuality in early America was not as cordoned off into a realm of “private” behavior as it is today. The distinction between private and public was not so starkly drawn yet and therefore sex and sexuality affected more “nonsexual” arenas than has generally been understood. Indeed, the modern propensity to view sex as part of one’s private life has led to its teleological absence from studies of public life. Early American society was agrarian and localized. Face-to-face interactions established one’s personal reputation in the community. In colonial America, troublemakers always ran the risk of being pushed out or worse. But we should keep in mind that character and reputation were about more than simply being able to hold one’s head high. The entire economic system, of both credit and household economies of barter, was based on character and reputation. In an era before depersonalized credit scores, what one did with one’s self (drink too much? engage in extramarital sex?)—male or female, elite or ordinary, could play a vital role in securing one’s livelihood and status in the community.3
This general emphasis on character and reputation is familiar to students of early America. What is less well understood, however, is the extent to which personal behaviors regarding moral behaviors played an important role in establishing one’s social and economic position. Taking into account sexual behaviors raises questions about the extent to which sexuality was part of that broader public reputation. It is within this context that a discussion of same-sex sexuality in early America must be situated.
Charged by the modern gay liberation movement, activist-scholars set about to develop a broader and deeper sense of history for gays and lesbians. In 1976, Jonathan Katz first compiled cases of sodomy and legal pronouncements and other writings in his ground-breaking volume Gay American History which was quickly followed by an equally important volume, Gay/Lesbian Almanac. Both volumes included a comprehensive survey of what documentary evidence existed for the study of homosexuality in colonial America. By culling from the historical record those cases focused on same-sex sexuality, the book underscored gay history as a field of inquiry.4
Early scholarship on same-sex sexuality in early America made good use of legal statutes and court records. Given this methodological emphasis on court records, our understanding of early American same-sex sexuality is greatest for male homosexuality in the seventeenth century and specifically for New England—the time and place that because of its court system and emphasis on policing moral and sexual behaviors left the most pronounced documentary evidence for historians to sift through. Despite the relative involvement of seventeenth-century New England courts, the absence of a very large number of sodomy cases even in that locale has led to two very different interpretations. Were there few cases because the population thoroughly embraced the official revulsion to same-sex sexual behavior? Or, was it because many managed to either avoid detection or were not actively taken to court by a sympathetic network of kin and community?
The scholarship on seventeenth-century New England has also had an unintended consequence. The draconian anti-sodomy pronouncements of court and church have been assumed to accurately reflect the broader lay understanding of sentiments toward sexual intimacy between members of the same sex. The focus on sexual acts, sinful or criminal, has been taken to reveal the broader cultural understanding of sodomy as only an act, fully disconnected from personhood and identity. Moreover, the emphasis on the seventeenth century has led to incorrect assumptions about lay opinions. Additionally, the Puritan milieu has come to stand for the broader preindustrial American history. While early scholars sought to say something definitive about Puritan society, many readers have extrapolated from this narrow time and region and concluded that these findings could stand in for findings on early America more generally. To date, much less has been written about eighteenth-century same-sex sexuality.5
The gulf in the history of same-sex sexuality in eighteenth-century America is all the more pronounced, given the body of literature that exists on much of the early modern world. Scholarship on Renaissance and early modern Europe and Latin America has deepened our understanding of sodomy and same-sex sexuality before the nineteenth century. Scholarship on Renaissance texts has demonstrated how sodomy figured in broader discussions of state power, family formation, lineage and patriarchy, aristocratic corruption, and early modern masculinity. Scholarship on early Latin America has also shown important connections between masculinity and gender and same-sex sexuality. Other works have shown how sex between men in classical and early modern Mediterranean cultures, for example, provided culturally sanctioned space for sexual and romantic relations among men and boys.6
In 1565, at St. Augustine, Florida, the Spanish established the first permanent European settlement in what would become the United States. According to research by Jonathan Katz, the earliest legal case of sodomy took place in Florida in 1566, when the Spanish condemned to death a “sodomite,” a French Lutheran interpreter. Reports of sex between men among indigenous peoples date as far back as 1528, however, when Cabeza de Vaca wrote about “one man married to another” while living as a captive among the Indians of Florida. Other such statements in the sixteenth century came from observations by Europeans in California and later from Illinois.7
From early studies, we know a fair amount about early American official and ministerial teachings against sodomy and expressions of sexual desire between anyone other than husband and wife. Virtually all colonies outlawed male same-sex sexual activity and punishments ranged from ostracism, fines, whippings, and castration, to execution. But sodomy was not handled in the same manner everywhere. Among, as the above cases suggest, Native Americans, it was generally not considered a crime. In the seventeenth century, however, when Europeans established New France, New Spain, New Netherland, and New England, in all locales sodomy was criminalized. In colonial Spanish North America, in some cases individuals were exiled from communities. In colonial New England in 1629, the first recorded punishments for sodomy occurred on the ship Talbot in Massachusetts. The result was not execution but rather the “5 beastly Sodomiticall Boys” were returned to England for their crime. As previously acknowledged, in New England, courts took the most active role of any region in policing the population and therefore the majority of cases come from this time and place. Broadly construed, same-sex sexual intimacy was criminalized, as “sodomy” stood for a host of sexual transgressions. In New Haven, its own colony until the late seventeenth century, William Plaine was executed in 1646 for masturbating with “a great part of the youth of Gilford—above 100 tymes.” In New Netherland in 1646, Jan Creoli, a slave who admitted that he had committed sodomy in the West Indies, was executed for forcibly sodomizing a ten-year-old African, one Manuel Congo. Creoli was strangled and then burnt at the stake. The boy, for taking part in the sinful act, was beaten. By 1664, the time of the English takeover of New Netherland, the Dutch had executed three individuals for sodomy. In the seventeenth-century British mainland colonies, men were executed in Virginia, New Netherland, and New Haven.8
Although courts in established colonies over time took a decreasingly active role in monitoring and enforcing norms of sexual behavior, well into the eighteenth century policing sodomy was one tool of the colonial project. Europeans used sodomy in an emblematic effort to destroy perceived wickedness among indigenous populations. But for some the focus on sodomy and other Christian sins was also a means to reform and civilize a supposedly heathen population. Elsewhere, Jonathan Goldberg has shown how this was part of the Spanish model of colonization. Tracy Brown’s essay in part one looks at one particular case from eighteenth-century New Mexico and finds it to be part of the same colonial project.9
Broadly construed, sexuality in early British America shifted in the eighteenth century. As historian Richard Godbeer argues, sexuality in general made a shift in the eighteenth century that mirrors the well-charted course alteration American society made from community to individual. The explosion in print sources and rise of authorities and discourses outside of the church, and the broader diversification of the population and the economy, all combined to make the eighteenth century markedly different from the seventeenth-century British American colonies.10
Given the Enlightenment emphasis on individual rights and liberties, in the era of the American Revolution many crimes were removed from capital status. Although his plan was rejected, Thomas Jefferson proposed that sodomy in Virginia be punished by castration not execution. In 1777, Georgia’s legislature also resisted making it noncapital. But in 1787, the Pennsylvania legislature made sodomy punishable by imprisonment, not death. Other states removed sodomy from the list of capital crimes in the long wake of the American Revolution: New York and New Jersey, for example, followed suit in 1796, Massachusetts in 1805, New Hampshire in 1812, Delaware in 1826, North Carolina in 1869, and South Carolina in 1873.11
In the 1960s, the historical profession began to explore the lives of ordinary people and lay individuals, a move nurtured by the liberation movements of the 1970s and identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s. Like the fields of African-American history, women’s and gender history, working-class and labor history, and social history in general, the history of sexuality has benefited from studying history from the bottom-up (by looking at the lives of ordinary Americans), as well as from the top-down (focusing on official rhetoric and the lives of elites). It is this move away from official pronouncements of court and church that have had the greatest impact toward revising our understanding of same-sex sexuality in early America.
In many ways, the sources available to scholars of same-sex sexuality are no different from those available for other studies. Although court records provide the most obvious location, in colonial America, given the relative absence of cases, scholars, almost by necessity, have begun to look elsewhere. Clare Lyons in her examination of eighteenth-century Philadelphia, reprinted in part two, used not only imported literature but also lists of book borrowers to trace the transatlantic circulation of ideas of same-sex sexuality. Print culture offers one of the richest veins for examining imported ideas. Newspapers can provide evidence of both regional cases and awareness of those from afar. But Lyons also brilliantly employs “reading silences” in the historical record, for what one doesn’t say often reveals as much as what one does articulate. Finally, personal papers provide glimpses of experience and identity.
Richard Godbeer’s fresh examination of one of the earliest cases of sodomy, also reprinted in part two, draws heavily on court testimony and importantly charts the distinction between popular and official views of sex between men. Informed by the relatively recent emphasis on the lives and views of ordinary people, Godbeer turns his focus on the testimony of those involved in the court hearing of Nicholas Sension. By listening to what Sension’s neighbors, servants, and townsmen had to say about his behavior, and their assessment of the man, himself, Godbeer moves us away from simply hearing the legal and religious absolutism. Indeed, Godbeer finds only shades of gray. Community members knew of Sension’s sexual interest in servants and more often than not, turned something of a blind eye.
Even in his acknowledgment of the severe possible penalties for sodomy, Godbeer reminds us that Sension was not punished harshly by the courts. Relative leniency by the courts in New England is a story fairly familiar to scholars of colonial America. Works by Cornelia Dayton, Mary Beth Norton, and others have shown that colonial courts were interested primarily in securing communal harmony and in protecting social hierarchies of status, race, and gender, rather than enforcing the letter of the law. Juries consistently hesitated to convict middling white men of crimes, instead saving their harshest punishments for cultural outsiders, including men of color, transients, and poor men and women.12
Although court records and personal papers figure prominently in many of the essays here, print representations and the role of print undeniably played a critical role in the formulation of eighteenth-century American understandings of same-sex sexuality. Unlike the discourse of medical and psychological orientations that were fashioned from case histories and disseminated by medical treatises, eighteenth-century society developed an understanding of same-sex sexuality through a variety of popular print media.
The essays in this volume situate same-sex sex in the legal, social, and cultural setting—but at the same time recognize that in colonial America and the early United States, it was at moments distinguishable and separable. What distinguishes the preindustrial world from the modern world is this ability of same-sex sexual desire and behavior to at times be similar to other sinful acts, that all individuals could be capable of, and at other times to appear distinct and unusual. In the modern world, same-sex sex becomes more consistently and firmly, if still inconsistently, attached to personhood and identity.
Nearly all scholars of preindustrial Europe and Latin America find that same-sex sexuality could be understood to be a part of a person’s identity and conceptual categorization. In this way, sodomy as a simple, discreet, sinful “act” does little to describe the richness of sexual expression and identity in the early modern era. This calls into question the accuracy of the traditional manner of describing that difference between the modern and early modern world as a development of a same-sex sexual identity. Although psychological models for same-sex sexuality, and the terms homosexual and heterosexual are indeed modern, dating only from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays here indicate that the acts-versus-identities pronouncement is an oversimplification made from the vantage point of modernity and focusing on psychological models at the expense of others. Long before Stonewall, the history of same-sex sexuality took root and began establishing cultural precedents that later medical models drew upon.13
Just as today, there were a variety of ways that one’s sexual behavior could influence one’s identity in early America. Some saw it as a religious failing. Well-known Puritan and Harvard instructor, Michael Wiggles-worth viewed his sexual desires for male pupils with disgust and horror. He saw this interest as a signal that he had not achieved spiritual favor and longed to purify himself of his lusts. But others saw it as part of a general interest in pleasures. Most would have recognized the dominant idea that self-control was absent in those who gave over to interest in a member of the same sex.14
All of the individuals discussed in this volume, in some measure, resisted social conventions of sexual expression and instead followed their own path to sexual, emotional, physical, or romantic satisfaction. Individuals punished by the courts resisted social restrictions by their very actions. Other records suggest that some Americans claimed an unrepentant defiance of norms of the day. But unlike today, although some groups of individuals did engage in group sex, generally there is little evidence that many stood together in open collective defiance of condemnation of the day. In part four, Stephen Shapiro’s original reading of Ormond, however, challenges even this notion by pointing to novelist Charles Brockden Brown’s emphasis, indeed strategy, for collective defiance of heteronormative social norms.
We also know that early Americans were aware that cooperative defiance was occurring in mother England. In eighteenth-century London and in other European cities, men had been congregating in “molly houses,” semipublic clubs for socializing, sexual intimacy, and conviviality. A series of raids on these inns and popular public cruising spots led to numerous arrests and trials of men for sodomy. In some of the court records, individuals express outrage at their being harassed and view themselves as perfectly within their rights to seek out members of the same sex for sexual and romantic interactions. London newspaper accounts of molly house raids were selected to be reprinted in eighteenth-century newspapers in Massachusetts. While those colonials reading about these arrests may not have seen molly houses as part of American urban life, they would have learned that same-sex intimacy could be more than simply a wicked sinful act, it could be an expression of intimacy between members of the same sex, who defiantly chose to eschew normative patterns of integrating romance and sexuality into their lives.15
Private papers, court testimony, lay literature, popular print culture, and lives lived all show that same-sex sexual interest did in many cases come to characterize an individual’s interior self. Individuals would not have understood their sexual interest in members of the same sex in the same way that early twentieth-century psychological models of sexuality created. Nonetheless the early modern interests in character and reputation and in connections between private vices and public virtues reveal much about the significance of sexual behavior outside of the “acts” rhetoric of the church or the courts.
In part four, Mark Kann’s examination of prison reform in the new nation underscores how sodomy could be a singular concern and part of a host of vices and sins. In the founding era, the shift away from punishing the body to reforming the self gave voice to notable concerns about same-sex sexuality, and in particular, sex between adult men and male youths. Kann finds that even in the early nineteenth century acts and identities as models for understanding sodomites vied for cultural play. The discourses of prison reform in the new nation importantly remind us that the development of sexual orientations has not only long roots—but also an uneven pattern of growth.
Some scholars have noted with concern the frustratingly high burden of evidence placed on scholars of sexuality and of same-sex sexuality, in particular. These scholars argue that historical figures are heterosexual until proven otherwise (beyond a shadow of a doubt). Elsewhere, current scholarship on several prominent historical figures innovatively reads clues and signals of same-sex sexual and romantic interest and argues that there may never be a “smoking gun” to locate the sexuality of such individuals. Work by Bob Arnebeck on Washington DC architect, Pierre L’Enfant, and first-son, Charles Adams, child of John and Abigail Adams, argues that records suggest both men may well have been homosexual. Similar work by William Benemann argues that Lewis of the famed exploratory team Lewis and Clark was likely homosexual, again by a preponderance of tantalizing evidence. The essays in this volume may focus more on cultural and social discourse about same-sex sexuality, than the behaviors and interests of individuals, but nonetheless share a similar concern with Arnebeck and Benemann in finding a history of same-sex sexuality by reading old sources in original ways.16
Scholars of same-sex sexuality have ground various lenses for viewing their subject. Some have argued that an exclusive focus on genital contact is either anachronistic or overly simplistic or both. In the early nineteenth century intensely romantic same-sex relationships for men and women were both commonplace and celebrated. The relationships arguably provided the sanctioned private opportunity for sexual relationships. Essays in part three demonstrate that studying homosocial relations can bring richness to our understanding of romantic and sexual relationships of the past. A reprint of Caleb Crain’s examination of the close personal relationship of two men in the late eighteenth century, finds that intimacy in early America need not involve a record of genital expression. Similarly, an excerpt from Lillian Faderman’s classic 1981 work, Surpassing the Love of Men, uses the novel Ormond to locate eighteenth-century same-sex relationship standards. Finally, in her original essay, Lisa Moore takes the pastoral poem of one early Republic woman and asks what it means that she wrote this poem, complete with female imagery and depictions of intimate relationships between two women, for a close female friend of hers. All of these examples tell us a great deal about opportunities for close personal bonds between members of the same sex.17
Several of the essays in this volume pay particular attention to racial discourses. Although the scholarship tends to privilege the study of Euro-Americans, in part because of the availability of sources, essays here both examine Anglo-American racialized homoerotics and shed light on same-sex sexuality within communities of color. Tracy Brown demonstrates that a legal case of sodomy in Spanish colonial New Mexico can be read for understandings of sodomy and intimacy not only between men in official Spanish colonial society but also among Pueblo Indians. Gunlög Fur’s inquiry into Delaware Indian nation culture moves away from focusing on Anglo-American culture and takes up the question of what sodomy, same-sex sexuality, and homoeroticism meant to eighteenth-century Native Americans living in the northeastern American colonies. Ramón Gutiérrez begins this volume with an original essay that challenges the fundamental and widely held understanding of the berdache. Gutiérrez’s controversial essay will likely spark more debate around how to interpret the figure. Was the berdache a figure of celebrated sexual and spiritual status and hence a historical role model for a queer movement today? Or has our historical knowledge of the berdache been misinformed by contemporary concerns seeking a positive queer history? In part four a reprint of John Saillant’s examination of the homoerotics of abolitionist imagery suggests additional examples of racialized understandings of same-sex sexuality. Finally, Stephen Shapiro’s discussion of Brown’s gothic novel, Ormond, recognizes the racial boundaries that Brown plays with as being implicated in his examination of categories of gender, class, and sexuality.
The essays in this volume also shed light on early American associations of same-sex sexuality and gender. In particular, several essays question early American notions of transgender and transexuality. This theme is present in Brown’s Ormond, which is discussed by both Faderman and Shapiro, and it is also raised by Gunlög Fur and by Tracy Brown as she probes court testimony for evidence that individuals believed one of the men involved in the sodomy case she examines, might have been a berdache. The subject of biological sex, same-sex sexuality, and gender performance is handled directly by Elizabeth Reis in her original examination of hermaphrodism.18
Others have looked outside of what might be considered same-sex to shed light on the history of same-sex sexuality. In her essay in part two, Anne Myles, for example, argues that we can learn much about the history of same-sex sexuality by studying how deviant religious practices in colonial New England mirror the marginalization of sexual practices. Her essay on the controversy over Quakers in Puritan New England asks what studying historical challenges to dominant models of family and sexuality can show us about the roots and trajectory of the position of homosexuals in later society.
Myles and others also demonstrate how queerness and sodomy could figure in cultural “othering” whereby same-sex behavior, or deviant sexual behavior in general, served to demarcate outsiders while simultaneously underscoring shared values and practices of the in-group. The sodomite as outsider or cultural other in this way could serve as a repository for concerns about the stability of the early American family, the foundation of the early American state, the strength of patriarchy, or the sexual power and prowess of white heterosexual manhood.
Some scholars have begun a history of heterosexuality that has dramatic implications for the history of homosexuality. Jonathan Katz’s book on the nineteenth-century “invention of heterosexuality” has important implications for the development of homosexuality as he sees it. Laura Mandell’s original essay in part four uses newspaper discussion of bachelorhood and marriage to plum the norms and ideals of heterosexuality in the new nation.19
My own work on heterosexuality, specifically on manliness and sexual incapacity, used seventeenth-century divorce records from New England, coupled with imported household and reproductive manuals to examine a discourse of marital sexuality and normative male sexuality in early New England. In addition to arguing for a standard of manliness that took into account sexual performance and virility, thereby enhancing our understanding of early modern masculinity by turning away from an exclusive focus on politics and commerce, the study also challenged the “acts versus identities” paradigm, given the evident connections between manly self and sexuality. By looking at understandings of impotent men, as sexually and socially different in disposition and body, the study found early modern sexuality—one that looked more modern than not.20
In June 1969, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals at the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York City, refused to quietly comply with what had become commonplace harassment at gay bars, the police raid. In those days, kissing, holding hands, and cross-dressing could all justify a charge of indecency. But on this particular night and for several days, they violently resisted. Newspapers carried the story of the “Stonewall riot” (a local gay organization dubbed the event as “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World”) and within a year’s time gay rights organizers marked the occasion with reverence as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. Ever since then, cities and towns around the country (and now around the globe), in ever increasing numbers, have celebrated the moment of resistance with summertime gay rights parades and celebrations. Stonewall became a symbol for the birth of a gay rights movement—a movement that for some, seemed to come out of nowhere.21 Although Stonewall symbolically marks the start of the gay rights movement, a political movement had been building for nearly a century. And for centuries, Americans generated records that point us to those who held intimate and romantic desires for members of the same gender.
The essays in this volume sketch out same-sex sexualities in early America, particularly of the late colonial and early national periods, at the time of the nation’s founding. But these histories should also give readers cause for reflection on the various ways that sex, sexuality, gender, race, class, and power are conceived of today and in their own lives. Regrettably, we will never know how many well-meaning family members destroyed the intimate same-sex confessions (or proud boastings) written in personal papers and in private diaries. Even in the early twentieth century some sexually explicit court records were sanitized before being transcribed and reprinted. But the scholars featured here continue the painstaking work of combing through extant papers and reading between the lines to recover long lost feelings, desires, and relationships.
1. Thomas A. Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 96–7, 169–73.
2. On the history of homosexuality in modern America see, for example, George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1991); Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976); Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York: Harper & Row, 1983); and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993).
3. On sexuality in early America, see, for example, Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: UNC Press for OIEAHC, 2006); Cornelia Dayton, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press for the OIEAHC, 1995); Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man; Richard God-beer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Clare A. Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press for the OIEAHC, 2006); Merril D. Smith, ed., Sex and Sexuality in Early America (New York: NYU Press, 1998); Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649–1699 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986).
4. Katz, Gay American History; Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac.
5. On sodomy in the seventeenth century see, Alan Bray, “To Be a Man in Early Modern Society: The Curious Case of Michael Wigglesworth,” History Workshop Journal 41 (1996): 155–65; Richard Godbeer, “‘The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England,” in this volume; John M. Murrin, “‘Things Fearful to Name’: Bestiality in Colonial America,” Pennsylvania History 65 (1998): 8–43; Robert Oaks, “‘Things Fearful to Name’: Sodomy and Buggery in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in The American Man, eds. Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980), 53–76; Colin L. Talley, “Gender and Male Same-Sex Erotic Behavior in British North America in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (1996): 385–408; Roger Thompson, “Attitudes Towards Homosexuality in the Seventeenth-Century New England Colonies,” Journal of American Studies 23 (1989): 27–40; Thompson, Sex in Middlesex; Michael Warner, “New English Sodom,” American Literature 64 (March, 1992): 19–47.
6. On the Renaissance see, Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, eds., Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Gregory W. Bred-beck, Sodomy and Interpretation, Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, eds., Premodern Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996); Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Goldberg, Queering the Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). On colonial Latin America see the excellent collection by Pete Sigal, ed., Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). On early modern Spain and New Spain see Federico Garz Carvajal, Perceptions of Manliness in Andalucia and Mexico, 1561–1699 (Amsterdam: Amsterdamse Historische Reeks, 2000).
7. Jonathan Katz, Gay American History; Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac.
8. Ibid.
9. Carvajal, Perceptions of Manliness in Andalucia and Mexico, 1561–1699; God-beer, Sexual Revolution in Early America; Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries, 179–222.
10. Jonathan Katz, Gay American History; Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac.
11. Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: UNC Press for OIEAHC, 1996); Dayton, Women Before the Bar; Fischer, Suspect Relations; Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America; and Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
12. On “acts versus identities” see, for example, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); and John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay, eds., Sexualities in History: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002). Scholarship on sexuality in early modern Europe has offered significant challenges to this paradigm, while studies of early America have not.
13. Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653–1657: The Conscience of a Puritan (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
14. On molly houses, see Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 89–104; Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution: Volume One, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Stephen Shapiro, “Of Mollies: Class and Same-Sex Sexualities in the Eighteenth-Century,” in In a Queer Place: Sexuality and Belonging in British and European Contexts, eds. Kate Chedgzoy, Emma Francis, and Murray Pratt (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 154–76.
15. Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man.
16. See Bob Arnebeck’s work at http://www.geocities.com/bobarnebeck/LEnfant.htm; William Benemann on Lewis and Clark http://www.law.berkeley.edu/library/staff/
benemann/Text02.doc
17. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs, 1 (Autumn 1975), pp. 1–29.
18. Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006).
19. Jonathan Ned Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Penguin, 1995).
20. Thomas A. Foster, “Deficient Husbands: Manhood, Sexual Incapacity, and Male Marital Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century New England,” WMQ 56 (October 1999): 723–44. On eighteenth century see, Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man.
21. Hairpin quote from Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: A Dutton Book, 1993), as cited by D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 232.