Americans love to talk—and fight—about sex. We argue over sexual identities, consent, and gender. We variously endorse and oppose limits on sexual freedoms and on sexuality’s influence in our culture. Questions of what we can or should do about any of this are among the most hotly contested issues in American life. These observations are important, but they’re also familiar. What is less often remarked upon is that many Americans seem to agree that sexuality doesn’t have a history.
To hear conservatives tell it, little related to sexuality changed until leftist radicals and feminists forced their ideas about liberation and bodily autonomy onto an American public perfectly content to keep things the way they were (and always had been). A counterargument, common in progressive circles, insists that today’s sexual identities are authentic because they are eternal. In this way, the left, too, is prone to anchoring its claims outside of history.
The first of these assertions is demonstrably false. The stories that fill this book reveal four centuries’ worth of transformation to Americans’ sexual ideals and behaviors. Claims that abortion was always criminal or that gender-fluid people did not exist until recently fail the most rudimentary tests of historical evidence. The second argument overlooks how novel the concept of sexual identity is, an omission that ironically diminishes how crucial history is to sexuality as we understand it today. Individuals in the past fiercely contested the meaning and consequences of their desires, long before the concept of sexual identity existed. Their struggles—and pleasures—only magnify the stakes in more recent debates over sexual rights. Those challenging draconian anti-abortion or anti-trans laws have real antecedents to call upon.
Fierce Desires presents a new account of sex and sexuality in America. It documents the persistent presence of gender nonconformity, of people who preferred non-heterosexual sex, of efforts to control the frequency of pregnancies, and of conflicts over the boundaries of permissible sexual behavior. It demonstrates that sexual desires mattered greatly to people living hundreds of years ago. But it is also a history of dramatic and often surprising changes. Over the last four centuries, Americans have shifted from interpreting sexual behaviors as reflections of personal preferences or values—such as those rooted in faith or community norms—to defining sexuality as an essential part of what makes a person who they are. Legislators, police, activists, and bureaucrats transformed the role of government in the regulation of sexual behaviors. And, more than once, Americans upended their ideas about the sexual natures of men, women, and individuals whose gender defies that binary.
This is far from the first book to examine sex and sexuality in America, but it is the first in more than thirty years to try to encompass the sweep of this complex, varied, and important history. It stands on the shoulders of John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, which first appeared in 1988. Intimate Matters explained that a sexual system organized around marriage and reproduction in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries made way in the twentieth century for a culture that prioritized individual pleasure, a phenomenon the authors identify as a transition to “sexual liberalism.” D’Emilio and Freedman synthesized a staggering amount of evidence about “the dominant language of sexuality” in each of the eras they covered.1
In the years since the publication of Intimate Matters, an outpouring of scholarship on the history of sexuality has had an effect that is less akin to renovating a kitchen than to tearing an entire house down to the studs and building it anew. Sexual histories of nonwhite Americans have exposed the extent to which ideas about racial difference developed in tandem with theories of gender and sexuality. Scholars have critically examined the connections between sexuality, religion, and politics; investigated the role of federal and state bureaucracies in formulating the very meanings of sexual identity; and creatively illuminated lives that left scarce historical traces.2
We have learned, for instance, even more about the importance of gender to the history of sexuality. For much of the period this book covers, a person’s gender, more than the object of their desires, determined their social acceptability. In the mid-nineteenth century, a woman who shared the same bed with another woman exclusively for decades usually avoided her neighbors’ disapproval as long as she did not assert the privileges of manhood. A person assigned female at birth with a self-understood masculine gender could likewise attain work in a typically male occupation and even find a wife without much fear at all of community backlash or legal jeopardy, if their behavior was otherwise unremarkable. That gender-based system made way, in the early twentieth century, for a new concept of sexuality that focused, instead, on sexual object choice. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that Americans and Europeans distilled the formerly generic category of “sex” into the distinct concepts of biological sex, gender, and sexuality. Even so, defining what it is we talk about when we talk about sex remains a strikingly complex task. Well into the twentieth century, some Black and Latinx communities used the term “gay” for any combination of embodiment, attire, and sexual object choice other than cisgendered heterosexuality. (The word “cis” indicates a gender identity that matches the bodily sex assigned at birth.)3
More recently, the concept of “queerness” has come to signify any configuration of genders, bodies, and desires that defy a particular culture’s expectations for “normal” sexuality. Once a pejorative term for same-sex-desiring people, “queer” has been reclaimed as a usefully descriptive word for non-normative sexualities and gender roles. The concept of queerness draws our attention to the interplay of gender, sexual desire, and identity. Put more precisely, queerness refers to what one scholar calls “sexual personhood,” comprising not only an individual’s erotic interests but their relationship to maleness, femaleness, or nonbinary gender.4
Informed by this scholarship, this book focuses on how and why Americans came to believe that sexuality was a singularly significant aspect of their identities. Over the four hundred years that the book covers, sexuality shifted from a reflection of social and religious status to a source of self-recognized personhood. By the twentieth century, new movements demanded erotic and reproductive autonomy as fundamental rights.
This book is also, necessarily, a history of pleasure. The enjoyment of erotic experience will strike many readers as the obvious aim of sex, but finding telltale historical sources can be difficult. Some individuals documented gratifying sex, even notating their journal entries with coded symbols to indicate orgasm or a particular act. Stashes of love letters, poetry, and diary entries recount longing and delight. But many more surviving documents depict moments when something went terribly wrong. We have trial testimony from fornication and rape prosecutions, first-person testimonies about abuse, and police records of arrests for “vice,” among other evidence of sexual pain and discrimination.
A search for first-person accounts of sexual desire and identity reminds us that people in the past did not always have the means or opportunity to write down and preserve their thoughts. Candid sexual self-expression has proved especially complicated—and often dangerous—for nonwhite people and immigrants in the United States, who contend with assumptions that their race determines their sexuality. Pernicious stereotypes about Black men as hypersexual and of Black women as lascivious, of Mexican women as hyper-fertile, and of Asian and Middle Eastern people as sexually “exotic”—among other false generalizations—have imposed sexualities on individuals that they would typically not claim for themselves. One of the most profound transformations of the second half of the twentieth century was the formation of social justice movements that centered the sexual freedoms of previously marginalized people.
Even though most of the voices of sexual pleasure prior to the 1850s are those of white men, we can read “against the grain” to locate traces of other people’s erotic encounters. Medical records diagnosing “perversion” are in many ways pathologizing, but they often show what kinds of sex their subjects preferred. The same holds true of police records. Learning that men in Portland, Oregon, were arrested for performing oral sex in the 1910s tells us, at the very least, that they were doing it. That said, several chapters in this book address sexual violence not because those were the only records I could locate but because actual and feared abuse has harmed far too many people. There are some constants in this history; that is one of them.
Fierce Desires unspools these arguments largely by telling stories. Some of these stories are well known and some are hardly known at all. Some present individuals at odds with their communities while others discuss larger social movements for or against sexual freedom. There are stories here about culture, politics, religion, and race. Many individuals appear in a single chapter, but a few are featured across numerous ones. Narrative writing suits the larger points this book makes: that individual and collective experiences have given sexuality its meaning, that the intimacies of sex bear upon our politics and culture, and that the stories we tell about this history alter our ability to grapple with its complexities today.
I have organized these stories into three parts, each addressing a particular era. When Part One begins, in the seventeenth century, Americans viewed desire as a reflection of other forces in their lives, such as their religious faith or their community’s standards. Their identities—as “gentlemen” or servants, freemen or enslaved, Indigenous or English, and so on—were not intrinsically sexual. Rather, their sexual behaviors indicated their success or failure in cultivating civility, faith, and other valued qualities. They took offense at efforts by authorities to tell them how to behave because relative degrees of sexual freedom indicated a person’s place in the world. Indigenous North Americans, for their part, seem to have understood sexual acts as expressions of both desire and the division of female and male energies reflected in nature.
Stereotypes of priggish Puritans have warped our perceptions of the sexual cultures in early America. Euro-Americans esteemed marriage as the singular site for moral sex, but they rarely pried open bedroom doors to identify exceptions to the rule and bristled when magistrates prosecuted engaged couples for fornication. Well into the nineteenth century, Americans were far less troubled by same-sex and gender-nonconforming desires than we might imagine, largely ignoring intimacies that did not disrupt communities, lead to out-of-wedlock pregnancies, or challenge the privileges of the male head of household. Although sodomy remained religiously forbidden and illegal, relatively few were arrested for it, let alone convicted, until the early twentieth century. The history of sex in America is not a narrative of fixed, timeless desires, but neither is it one of simple, linear “progress.” Earlier generations were far more open about sex than we might think.
Instead, Americans fixated on the marketplace for erotic enticement, which grew dramatically after 1750. Erotica became ubiquitous. Improvements to printing technology accelerated the circulation of pornographic texts and images, and nifty devices such as the stereoscope permitted viewers to see scenes of Paris—or naked women—in three dimensions. Americans also grappled with the horrific commerce in enslaved people, whether to denounce or justify the valuation and sale of human beings for overtly sexual purposes.
Ideas about women’s sexuality, the purposes of marriage, and the boundaries of permissible sexual violence also transformed across these decades. A small but influential group of reformers insisted that accessible information, especially for women about their bodies, could bring about a host of improvements, including better health and more loving marriages. These efforts to empower women were impeded by a countervailing development: the democratization of white, male sexual privilege. Anglo-Americans had long recognized men’s sexual entitlements within their own households, rarely punishing men who abused their wives, children, servants, or slaves. But traditionally, only higher-status men had the privilege of sexual access to women and other subordinates beyond their households. After 1800, that prerogative extended to nearly all white men.
Part Two opens in the mid-1800s, when small numbers of rebels and seekers argued that sexuality itself had meaning and value. They recognized desire as a fundamental element in their lives and rejected laws that hindered sexual expression. Nearly all these reformers focused on the appropriate parameters of male-female sex, imagining monogamous marriages in which women were men’s equals. The radicals among them advocated for nonmonogamous reconfigurations of the family and even communal experiments. Religious iconoclasts envisioned worlds beyond this one in which unorthodox sexual relations would create the conditions necessary for the arrival of a new millennium. Women’s rights activists and advocates for Black equality critiqued a political culture that discouraged them from speaking about sexual matters, bringing to light the prevalence of sexual violence as a matter of public concern.
Ironically, the most far-reaching attempt to rein in sexual desires, the Comstock Act of 1873, ended up making sex more visible and more relevant to U.S. governance than it had ever been before. Named for its author, the obsessively anti-sex Anthony Comstock, the law prohibited the use of the U.S. mail to send anything Comstock considered obscene. In addition to banning erotic photographs and texts, it also criminalized the distribution of printed materials explaining how contraception and abortion worked. On the heels of Comstock’s national campaign, police departments began to identify certain sexual behaviors as threats to civil society. Many gender nonconforming, queer, and feminist people rejected these attempts at repression; condom sales and sex work did not decline in the late nineteenth century but moved, instead, to a black market.
A new science of sex—“sexology”—sought explanations for the nonmarital sex acts that Comstock and police surveilled. Sexologists variously classified sexual perversions as things a person might inherit from a parent or as a kind of social contagion that put vulnerable populations at risk of infection. By the early twentieth century, new definitions of “normal” sexuality emphasized heterosexuality (a word not yet widely known) and conventional gender roles. Such theories cast queer desires as evidence of deviance, but they also contributed to emerging communities of people whose gender expressions and sexuality defied the norm.
Part Three begins in 1938, when sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey taught his first class on marriage to undergraduates at Indiana University. The revelations of his 1948 and 1953 “Kinsey Reports” on human sexual behavior shined a national spotlight on the kinds of sex acts that Americans performed, and with whom. Arguments over the acceptability of premarital sex, queer sexuality, and masturbation, however common they might be, crowded into the public square. Two major contentions—that sexuality is a fundamental aspect of human freedom, and that everyone possesses a sexual identity—began to strike many Americans as axioms close to common sense. Harsh federal and state policies, however, limited the civil rights of lesbians and gay men and constrained women’s reproductive health, in turn inspiring activists to organize to defend their sexual autonomy. Feminists weighed the importance of sex to women’s liberation, pushed for protections from sexual harassment, and otherwise challenged the presumption of male sexual privilege that often seemed as entrenched in the 1980s as it had been centuries earlier. Campaigns for LGBTQ+ rights and the response to HIV/AIDS provided more evidence of the power of social movements to change how Americans think about, express, and respond to matters of sexual equality and safety.
But a counter-proposition endured: that sexual desires and behaviors are reflections of individual self-control and belief systems, not inherent in the self. The anti-abortion movement that took shape in the 1970s, in other words, was less of a “backlash” against feminism than a reassertion of a long-standing view: that sex is secondary to morality. As the thinking went (and still goes, for many Americans), behaviors contrary to the heterosexual norm undermine principles of right and wrong and threaten the authority of those who decide which is which. Conservatives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries relied on the apparatus of government to enforce their beliefs about sexuality, much as Comstock had when he launched his anti-obscenity crusade in 1873. But contrary to earlier eras, since 1970, such efforts have confronted movements for sexual liberation much larger and more popular than anything that came before. Plenty of Comstock’s contemporaries sneered at his censorship, and a few free-speech radicals defied him (often at great personal cost), but those individual actions lacked the muscle of the campaigns for sexual equality that emerged out of the twentieth century’s feminist, reproductive justice, and LGBTQ+ equality movements.
Debates over sexual self-expression have taken center stage in American life not because sex is suddenly important to people, or because the sexual revolution threw a wrench in some supposed national consensus about sexual ethics, but because the very nature of desire remains a subject of passionate disagreement. Today, struggles over abortion rights, the ability of transgender people to access medical care, and the inclusion of books with LGBTQ+ themes in public libraries, among many other issues, demonstrate yet again how fiercely Americans value their desires and what they are willing to do to defend them.