A Queer History of the United States (10 page)

Stoddard’s work, two decades later, is laced with similar scenes, often more overtly erotic in tone and description. Here the narrator first meets Kána-aná:

So Kána-aná brought up his horse, got me on to it in some way or other, and mounted behind me to pilot the animal and sustain me in my first bare-back act. Over the sand we went, and through the river to his hut, where I was taken in, fed, and petted in every possible way, and finally put to bed, where Kána-aná monopolized me, growling in true savage fashion if any one came near me. I didn’t sleep much, after all. I think I must have been excited.
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After the narrator returns to the United States, he misses his chum and muses on what it would mean to bring him to “civilization”: “I could teach him to dress, you know; to say a very good thing to your face, and a very bad one at your back; to sleep well in church, and rejoice duly when the preacher got at last to the ‘Amen.’”
27
Stoddard presents a complicated relationship between the sexual freedom that Kána-aná represents and the narrator’s desire to bring his friend to “civilization,” even as he admits that civilization is riddled with repression and hypocrisies. Like Melville, Stoddard is concerned with finding a way to merge what he idealizes as sexual freedom and lack of social constraint with the conventions of U.S. life. His attempt remains all the more powerful as a radical ideal, not a reality.

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.”
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The open sea, like the open range, by offering escape from social condemnation, allowed for the articulation of same-sex desire and made same-sex sexual behavior natural and even utopian. Leslie Fiedler rejects the idea that male-male sex occurred because men were isolated from women in homosocial places; he suggests instead that this all-male isolation was “sought consciously as an occasion for male encounters.”
29

Yet few of these same-sex erotic relationships among men at sea were interracial, furthering highlighting that when authors used the theme of same-sex, different-race eroticism, they did so to discuss the place of race in American society. Clearly, this theme resonated with readers. Melville’s
Omoo
and
Typee
had a wide readership (
Moby-Dick
was not appreciated until the twentieth century), as did Stoddard’s
South-Sea Idyls
. While romantic friendship, “sympathy,” racial mixing, and the desire to flee civilization were literary conventions of the time, in Melville’s and Stoddard’s novels these themes becomes explicitly indicative of same-sex desire. In this context, Melville’s allusions in
Omoo
to Damon and Pythias (common in nineteenth-century writing on male friendship) become clearly sexualized. In the early chapters of
Moby-Dick,
Melville mentions Sodom and Gomorrah as a clue to his subtext.

In the United States at this time, there was a strong, growing culture of women writers, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote about race relations; none of them touch on same-sex, interracial erotic relationships. Perhaps social prohibitions against women writing sexually tinged material, or reader’s expectations that subject matter concern the domestic rather than exulting the natural wilderness, prevented them from doing so.

Although depictions such as
Moby-Dick
and
South-Sea Idyls
modeled a progressive view of sex and race relationships, they also carried mixed messages. They were implicitly racist in “othering” men of color, routinely described as savages and barbarians. But they also value and praise these men for being “natural,” untainted by the social and sexual repression that was embedded in American culture. Melville and Stoddard, because they were writing about same-sex couples, actively blurred these boundaries. Kooloo is both a “primitive” and a churchgoer; Queequeg’s “savage” tattooed arm becomes the New England quilt; Kána-aná must be “civilized,” but civilization is hypocritical, not natural. The same-sex-desiring American man feels the pull of freedom and persecution most keenly and is a ripe figure for exploring and understanding that dynamic. Whatever problems Melville and Stoddard betray in how they treat race, their work is clearly more complicated and nuanced than most of the contemporary political, public discussions about race in a country split by the fight over slavery.

Four. A Democracy of Death and Art

The Civil War

The Civil War is literally and metaphorically at the center of nineteenth-century American life. In this war the remaining United States fought the Confederacy, states that had seceded from the Union over economic issues closely related to the rights of states to sanction slavery. Even in a century riddled with violence, the amount of death wrought by the conflict was extraordinary. The death tolls from the century’s earlier two wars were 45,170; the Spanish-American War of 1898 would bring 11,570 deaths in battle, another 2,045 wounded, and 15,565 dead from disease. The Civil War eclipsed them all; it claimed 620,000 lives, or 2 percent of the American population at the time. Calculated for the U.S. population today, this number would be six million. Battles were often horrific, combining traditional forms of hand-to-hand combat with newly invented, more impersonal technologies such as the Gatling gun. The Civil War is the defining moment of the nineteenth century, and indeed of America. It staged on a national scale the ongoing conflict between freedom and enslavement that had wracked individuals, communities, colonies, and states for over three hundred years. It also exposed the underlying racial and gender-related violence that had been intrinsic to those everyday conflicts since the arrival of the first Europeans.

America was already a devout country—religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, ending in 1840, had won 40 percent of the population over to some form of Christian evangelicalism—and the horrors of the war moved many to embrace their beliefs more deeply. Other Americans began to question traditional ideas about providence, the belief that life is guided by God. This questioning stance, reminiscent of the Deism of the founders and the European Enlightenment, as well as the transcendentalists, was reinforced by advances in the sciences—Charles Darwin’s 1859
On the Origin of Species
is the most notable—that were at odds with traditional religious beliefs.

Defenders of slavery and abolitionists both quoted Bible verses to make their arguments. As early as 1787, British politician and abolitionist William Wilberforce used the Bible to justify his cause. Both sides held considerable sway in a country still in the wave of massive conversions. Beneath the debate lurked the more substantial issue of biblical inerrancy, the belief that the Bible is literally true in every detail. The use of biblical texts to justify the persecution of a class of people within a secular democracy is still with us today, including the justification for legal prohibitions against same-sex sexual behavior, because scriptural rationales and the rhetoric of persecution continually set the terms of national discussions.

An immediate effect of the Civil War on LGBT lives and history was how it shaped ideas about gender; specifically, what it meant to “be a man.” Historian Drew Faust notes that during the Civil War, manhood was “defined and achieved by killing.” W. E. B. Du Bois noted in his 1935
Black Reconstruction in America
:

How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men. The slave pleaded; he was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man!
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The war was a rite of passage for young white men. Data for the Confederate army are sketchy, but many scholars claim that two million soldiers in the Union army were twenty-one or younger, and one million were eighteen or younger. The intense patriotism on both sides ensured that full gendered citizenship was measured by being an effective soldier, which meant being a ruthless killer. Violence by Confederate soldiers against captured “colored” Union troops was prevalent, as was mutilating the bodies of those who had been killed in action or executed. Brutality was also present in the Union army. On June 21, 1864, General William Sherman wrote to Edwin McMasters Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war: “There is a class of people [in the South] . . . men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”

The Civil War had deeply affected men’s relationships to one another. Killing now defined a new type of American masculinity, but it also exposed men’s physical and emotional vulnerability. In confronting their own mortality, men could explore, often with one another, new expressions of sexuality. This is seen most clearly in the writings of Walt Whitman. Considered by many to be the most notable nineteenth-century poet of American democracy, Whitman’s poems and letters are a perfect example of affectional and sexual behaviors between men in this period.

Historian Charley Shively, among others, has documented Whitman’s romantic and sexual relationships with numerous young men, and Whitman’s work is crucial for understanding the centrality of male homoeroticism in nineteenth-century American culture.
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Whitman’s wartime writings, influenced by his experiences as a nurse on the battlefield and in hospitals, are vibrant examples of how the harm done to the male body shaped narratives of male same-sex desire. His “Hymn of Dead Soldiers” from
Leaves of Grass
is a prime example:

Phantoms, welcome, divine and tender!

Invisible to the rest, henceforth become my companions;

Follow me ever! desert me not, while I live.

Sweet are the blooming cheeks of the living! sweet are the musical voices sounding!

But sweet, ah sweet, are the dead, with their silent eyes.

Dearest comrades! all now is over;

But love is not over—and what love, O comrades!

Perfume from battle-fields rising—up from fœtor arising.
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This conflation of desire, death, and love epitomizes the horror of the war as well as new gender roles open to men. The stream of homoerotic sentiment in transcendentalist thought, along with the mandate to take the American concept of equality seriously, confirmed and sustained these feelings. The American man as capable killer was augmented by a new type of citizen who could, as part of his patriotic duty, empathize with and mourn the dead. These sentiments are present in many of Whitman’s notes of his meetings with wounded soldiers and other young men:

The Army Hospital Feb 21, 1863 There is enough to repel, but one soon becomes powerfully attracted also.

Janus Mayfield, (bed 59, Ward 6 Camp[bell] Hosp.) About 18 years old, 7th Virginia Vol. Has three brothers also in the Union Army. Illiterate, but cute—can neither read nor write. Has been very sick and low, but now recovering. Have visited him regularly for two weeks, given him money, fruit, candy etc.

Albion F. Hubbard—Ward C bed 7 Co F 1st Mass Cavalry/ been in the service one year—has had two carbuncles one on arm, one on ankle, healing at present yet great holes left, stuffed with rags—worked on a farm 8 years before enlisting—wrote letter—for him to the man he lived with/ died June 20th ’63
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There can be no doubt of Walt Whitman’s intentions when he wrote
Leaves of Grass,
first published in 1855 and revised in five more editions before Whitman’s death in 1892. Praised by Emerson for its echoes of transcendentalism, it is also overtly homoerotic. Stanza 5 from “Song of Myself” describes an act of oral sex with a personification of his own soul:

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,

And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,

Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,

Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.
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The eroticism of
Leaves of Grass
had far-ranging effects. In 1865 Whitman was fired from his job in the Department of the Interior. Influential anthologist and literary critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold labeled the poet a lover of men when, in an 1855 review, he wrote that Whitman was guilty of
Paccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum
(“that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians”).

Despite the criticisms—even Emerson found the “Children of Adam” poems too overtly sexual—Whitman’s popularity and reputation grew with each new edition of
Leaves,
contributing to a social climate that made other expressions of same-sex male desire permissible. Theodore Winthrop, who died in battle in 1861 at the age of thirty-two and was a direct descendant of Puritan leader John Winthrop, wrote the posthumously published
Cecil Dreeme,
a satirical novel that flirted with same-sex relationships and fluid gender roles. Charles Warren Stoddard’s
South-Sea Idyls
found a large readership in 1869. Noted poet Bayard Taylor’s novel
Joseph and His Friend
was published a year later, and Frederick W. Loring’s
Two College Friends
in 1871. Each of these authors moved away from idealizations of romantic friendship and closer to presenting conjugal love. Taylor wrote of his two protagonists in
Joseph and His Friend:

They took each other’s hands. The day was fading, the landscape was silent, and only the twitter of nesting birds was heard in the boughs above them. Each gave way to the impulse of his manly love, rarer, alas! but as tender and true as the love of woman, and they drew nearer and kissed each other. As they walked back and parted on the highway, each felt that life was not wholly unkind, and that happiness was not yet impossible.
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Performing Manliness

New definitions of masculinity were not the only gender issue affected by the war. Many women passing as men fought for both sides in the Civil War. It is impossible to know the exact number—perhaps over a thousand—but we know the names of the most prominent. Some women enlisted with their husbands and fought side by side with them. Satronia Smith joined the Union forces with her husband, and after he died in battle, she continued fighting. Some, like male soldiers, enlisted out of intense patriotism. Loreta Velazquez, who served the Confederacy under the name Lt. Harry Buford, had enough money to finance her career as a soldier. She likely deeply believed in the South’s political principles. Sarah Emma Edmonds joined the Second Michigan Infantry as Franklin Thompson in 1861. After fighting in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, she deserted in 1863 when, after coming down with malaria, she refused to be hospitalized and have her secret uncovered.

Undoubtedly, some women, bored and trapped by gender restrictions, may have enlisted to experience a more exciting life. Mary Ann Clark, as Henry Clark, joined the Confederate forces in 1861 after being abandoned by her husband. She fought for a year, then came home, only to join again after placing her children in a convent. She was captured a year later and returned home in a prisoner exchange. V. A. White, a well-to-do prostitute in Nashville, Tennessee, joined the Union army around 1862 as penance for her professional life, which she chose after having a child as an unmarried woman.

Still other women, most probably a small percentage, spent most of their lives passing as men. Enlisting was simply the logical course of action for them. Albert Cashier was a Union soldier who fought in over forty battles. Not until years later did anyone discover that he was biologically a woman, having been born Jennie Irene Hodgers in Ireland around 1844. Hodgers immigrated to the United States as a child, and after passing as a man for some time, joined the Union army in 1862 as Albert Cashier. After the war Cashier continued living as a man.

It is impossible to apply any single description to these women. Were some of them transgender? Albert Cashier may have been, but the women who cross-dressed and fought had a wide variety of reasons for doing so. Most apparently came from poor rural or urban backgrounds that prepared them for the excruciating life of a soldier. Without doubt, their “passing” was facilitated by the presence of so many young male soldiers, which allowed them, without beards and deep voices, to be seen as boys. If they took up gambling, chewing tobacco, swearing, and drinking, their passing was made easier. We know almost nothing about their time in the army, except that by necessity, they performed as well as any male soldier.
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It would be naive to think that their fighting was not as brutally murderous as that of their compatriots. It would also be naive to believe that the women who fought for the Confederacy did not hold abhorrent views about race or did not partake in the savageries against captured black Union soldiers.

America was fascinated with these passing women.
Women of the War: Their Heroism and Self-Sacrifice,
a popular 1866 history written by Frank Moore, contained a full chapter on cross-dressing women soldiers. Loreta Velazquez published her memoirs in 1876. Satronia Smith married veteran John Hunt after the war, and her obituary mentioned her military service. Sarah Emma Edmonds Seelye, along with other women, received government pensions. Albert Cashier lived as a man until 1913, when at the age of 69 and failing mentally, he was admitted to Illinois’s Waterville State Hospital for the Insane. When it was discovered that he was biologically a woman, he was forced to wear a dress until his death in 1915. Even though his secret was made public, his tombstone described him as “Albert D. J. Cashier, Co. G, 95 Ill. Inf.”