A Queer History of the United States (4 page)

In 1624 Thomas Morton and others, including thirty male indentured servants, founded a decidedly non-Puritan colony in Wollaston, now the township of Quincy outside of Boston. They named the colony Merrymount, punning on Mare-Mount and Mary-Mount, direct references to bestial sodomy and Roman Catholicism. Morton befriended the local Algonquian tribe, whose culture he admired, and urged intermarriage between native women and male colonists. He also released the indentured servants and made them equal “consociates.” In 1627 he erected an eighty-foot-tall maypole with buck’s horns attached to the top (indicative of the sexualized god Pan or, from a Puritan view, Satan) and held, as was customary in medieval England, revels. Morton declared himself a Lord of Misrule.

Morton understood the sexual implications of his permissive agenda. In one of his writings about Merrymount, he noted that “there was likewise a merry song made, which [to make their revels more fashionable] was sung with a corus, every man bearing his part; which they performed in a dance, hand in hand about the May-pole, whilst one of the company sung, and filled out the good liquor like Gammedes and Jupiter.”
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His invoking Gammedes (Ganymede) and Jupiter (the Roman name for Zeus) in Elizabethan culture was a clear reference to the archetypical male lovers in Greek mythology.

The reaction of the Puritans was immediate. William Bradford wrote in
Of Plimoth Plantation,
“They . . . set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians.” While Morton and his rapidly growing small colony posed no direct threat to Plymouth Colony, Bradford felt challenged enough to attack Merrymount and arrest its leader. In 1629 Morton was sent back to England. Merrymount was dismantled and its community dispersed. In London, Morton wrote political tracts that accused the Puritans of many crimes, including a fear of the native peoples that manifested itself in near-genocidal behaviors.

Expulsion from the Bay Colony was a mild punishment compared to death. The Puritans did execute women and men who they believed posed a danger to the community’s spiritual and political life. In 1658 the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill banning all Quakers from the colony under pain of death. Under this law, Mary Dyer and four other Quakers, known as the Boston Martyrs, were hanged on the Boston Common.

Unrepentant Quakers were jailed, as were others who contested Puritan doctrine. Ann Glover, for example, was an elderly Irish woman sold into slavery by Oliver Cromwell in 1650. She was a practicing Catholic who also spoke Gaelic. She was accused of being a witch—historically, in Europe, an accusation primarily aimed at women—and hanged on the Boston Common in 1688. Cotton Mather noted that she was “a scandalous old Irishwoman, very poor, a Roman Catholic and obstinate in idolatry.” Within the gendered, parental hierarchy of the family in Puritan society, husbands and fathers were heads of households, and wives and children were beholden to them. This is why Puritans disapproved of Anne Hutchinson’s preaching and were quick to accuse nontraditional women of witchcraft.

The strict laws of the Puritans regarding sexual and gender behavior described a “gold standard” of human behavior, the goal to which all women and men should aspire. Puritan theology understood that since humans were imperfect, no one could live up to this ideal. It was also unrealistic to punish everyone for every infraction. Common sense dictated that laws were enforced for the good of the community as it was understood at the moment. But the importance of striving for an ideal way of life applied equally to the communities formed by Puritan dissenters, such as Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and Thomas Morton. Although Morton returned to the colonies and died there in 1647, he could never realize his vision of a more open, even utopian, society, because the constant tension between control and liberation, the state and personal liberty, could not fully accommodate “extremes.”

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. Regardless of the status quo, process denotes adjustment, change, experiment, all in the name of an ideal way of life that is different for everyone. The Puritans, like most English dissenter groups, had been accused of envisioning “the world upside down.” Puritanism was, in this sense, a revolutionary movement.

Purity and Danger

Bradford’s intense antagonism to Merrymount cannot be explained simply by his disapproval of the maypole and Morton’s sexual behaviors. It was Morton’s social egalitarianism, his openness to treating the Algonquians as relative equals, and his theological liberality that set him decisively apart from the Puritans. Bradford’s actions are understandable placed in a broader, historically complex tapestry of European and British history and the emergence of what British historian R. I. Moore calls the “persecuting society.” Moore argues that during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, European society underwent a profound and powerful transformation in which certain minorities, such as lepers, Jews, heretics, witches, “sodomites,” and prostitutes, were stigmatized and persecuted
as groups
and often physically separated from society. This physical isolation, which took the form of ghettos for Jews and social banishment of lepers, was often the precondition for a wide range of harsh punishments, including death.
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Moore argues that a series of fundamental social changes—including the rapid growth of towns and cities, broad changes in agricultural distribution networks, and a radical shift in how hierarchical power was distributed—created this new set of social classifications. Its purpose was to create clear social and cultural boundaries that would stabilize society by safely containing groups designated as dangerous pollutants. This fear of pollution was less about sex or death than about power and social standing. As Moore notes, “Pollution fear . . . is the fear that the privileged feel of those at whose expense their privilege is enjoyed.”
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The colonists’ seizing of native peoples’ lands was not in self-defense, but for economic gain, resulting in the fairly rapid development of colonial capitalism.

In the European mind, the non-gender-normative and non-sexually-normative body—however defined in each period and circumstance—was the dangerous body, the less-than-human body, even the disposable body. This wedding of draconian moral judgment to the need to separate and punish led to violence, particularly sexual violence, that was to shape attitudes in future centuries. Throughout history, sexual and gender deviance have always been used as reasons for almost all cultures, no matter how progressive, to deny certain people full rights as citizens.

In this view, the founding of modern society was predicated on the creation of minority groups whose only purpose was to be vilified as unclean and persecuted for the illusion of a comprehensive sense of societal safety. This idea, based on anthropologist Mary Douglas’s widely accepted theory of purity and danger, is helpful in explaining broad trends in European and American culture.
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The idea of purifying religious and secular thought and society was at the heart of Puritan identity. These ideas were continuous with the long European tradition of a persecuting society and emerged at a time of grave political and religious disruption that neatly dovetailed with the impulse to stabilize society through persecution. Throughout American history there is a pattern of persecuted groups, like the Puritans, treating other outsider groups in a similar manner.

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.”

Early colonial life in the northern continent was a mass of contradictions. It was extraordinarily intolerant, yet often surprisingly lax. The European settlers’ relations to the native peoples ranged from murderous genocide to a complex series of eroticized relationships. While Europeans brought with them a persecuting society, the manifestations of that society took many forms. One of the lasting legacies of colonial social and legal culture was the application of laws prohibiting and punishing sexual activity between people of the same sex. Treating some sexual behaviors differently because potentially they had less impact on the community had a twin effect on future American culture. It gave rise to the social (and eventual legal) concept of “consenting adults” and to a domestic-based idea of privacy that offered protections to some people at certain points in history.

This concept of privacy, however, had another, damaging, impact on future social convention and law. By assigning sexuality to a private sphere, it prevented any public acknowledgment or discussion of almost all sexual activity. Thus it laid the groundwork for same-sex sexual behaviors and identities to be hidden and even considered shameful. While the Puritans rejected what they saw as sexual license or overt licentiousness in British culture, they fully accepted the role of sexuality and sexual desire in everyday life. This sharp divide—not exactly a contradiction, although it may have appeared so later, as sexual mores in American culture became more lenient—has remained a basic tenet of America’s cultural life. The tension between the needs and demands of society and the decisions of an individual to live her or his life as part of, yet separate from, the community informed the four centuries that followed Europeans arriving in this foreign land.

Two. Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions

The transition from the colonial period to the Revolutionary era, during which a daring political experiment took root, led to the emergence of a new nation. Fundamental to this new nation was the reshaping of ideas about gender and sexual behavior as they related to the political concept of the citizen.

The period from the Pilgrims’ landing to the early eighteenth century was a time of enormous population growth. In 1700 the Anglo-European population in the Northeast was 250,000. By 1720 that number had almost doubled to 475,000. This surge in population was accompanied by the rapid growth of cities—by 1725 the population of Boston was over 12,000, nearly doubled from 6,700 in 1700; Philadelphia was home to 10,000 people. New York, although growing rapidly, had just 7,000 residents (by 1800 it would have 60,000). In 1760, colonists numbered 1.5 million—six times the population at the turn of the century.

This expansion of colonies and people meant that the influence of Puritanism was waning. Many of the newer colonies were founded on non-Puritan beliefs.

In 1682 Charles II granted wealthy English Quaker William Penn a large tract of land west of what is now New Jersey. Penn named it Sylvania for its densely wooded terrain, and then renamed it Pennsylvania after his father. (Like many of the colonies, Pennsylvania was a commercial venture that was intended to turn a profit for its investors, in this case through the trading of furs and lumber.) Penn’s charter for the new colony reflected his progressive Quaker views. There was freedom of religion for all who believed in God, and a constitution that called for two “houses” of government and that allowed, in the spirit of a Quaker meeting, “open discourse.” Most important, Penn treated the native peoples of the area—primarily the Lenni Lenape, called the Delaware tribe by the Anglo settlers—with respect, buying land from them rather than attacking and taking it. Pennsylvania grew quickly as Quakers from all over Europe settled there, joined by Catholics, Amish, Mennonites, and Jews. Penn designed Philadelphia—the city of brotherly love, denoting many faiths—between 1682 and 1684. Within fifty years it was the second largest urban area in the colonies. Progressive Quaker views on religious freedom and abolition—and later, sexual freedom—would be a strong influence on American political thought.

This rapid growth and diversity meant that the social and religious cohesiveness of the early colonies was lost; the Puritans’ strict social demands on the individual were waning and being questioned. The infamous Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693, in which twenty people were executed and five more died in prison, were a grim manifestation of the excesses of the Puritan imagination. However, the Massachusetts General Court issued a public apology for the trials five years later and eventually granted monetary compensation to the families of those executed. The 1682 Pennsylvania sodomy law did away with the death penalty for sodomy and replaced it with a whipping, six months of hard labor, and the forfeiture of a third of the accused’s estate. (Thirty-two years later Pennsylvania made sodomy a capital crime again, reflecting changing demographics and belief systems.)

The growing assemblage of people, social structures, and political entities fostered a sense of pluralism unique to the colonies. But this pluralism did not reconcile the tension between the freedom of the individual and the need for a strong state formally embodied by the personal moral rectitude of the Puritans.

Slaves and Citizens

Despite the progressive inclination of some colonies, the persecuting society persisted. Colonists continued their sexualized treatment of native people, sodomy laws proliferated, and the legal, economic, and cultural institution of slavery was introduced into the colonies. It is impossible to understand American history—including the position of LGBT people—without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country. From the mid-seventeenth century, organized, profit-driven slavery influenced all aspects of American life. Slavery struck at the heart of the ideals of individualism, personal liberty, and equality that were present, in sophisticated and rudimentary forms, at the birth of the colonies. Slavery was integral to how the colonies, and later the Republic, continued to reconceptualize individual freedom, race, property, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, over 650,000 Africans were brought to North America as slaves. However, this is a relatively small number compared to the twelve million Africans who were transported and sold, mostly in the Caribbean and South America, in the mid-Atlantic slave trade, also referred to as the first Middle Passage.

Slavery arose in the colonies hand in hand with both European and African indentured servitude, which was commonplace. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more than half of all white European (mostly British) immigrants to the colonies were indentured servants. These were often rural people who, dispossessed of their land and unemployed, were living in poverty in English cities. Their indenture, a contractual agreement with the person or firm who brought them to the colonies, lasted five years, after which they were free.

In the mid to late seventeenth century, laws in the colonies began to change. In 1654 a Virginia court declared that John Casor, an African servant, was legally a slave for life. Gradually, African indentured servants became legally treated as slaves, with no possibility of ending their servitude. This shift occurred for a number of complex reasons, the most pertinent of which is that Africans, in contrast to indentured whites, had no outside social and cultural support systems of other Africans in the country and thus were more easily enslaved.

Contemporary European societies had not promoted or regulated persecution on this large a scale. By 1860, the slave population in the United States had grown to four million, a third of the population in the fifteen (out of thirty-three) states that sanctioned slavery. In some states slaves were in the majority. In 1720, just under 70 percent of South Carolina’s population was enslaved.

Slavery was also tied to religious belief. Virginia ruled in 1682 that

all servants . . . which shall be imported into this country either by sea or by land, whether Negroes, Moors, mulattoes or Indians who and whose parentage and native countries are not Christian at the time of their first purchase by some Christian . . . and all Indians, which shall be sold by our neighboring Indians, or any other trafficking with us for slaves, are hereby adjudged, deemed and taken to be slaves to all intents and purposes any law, usage, or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.
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Lawmakers in the colonies were constructing a separate class of nonwhite, non-Christian people to be an economic bulwark of free labor. They had several reasons: a growing landowning class that did not want the competition of a new class of freed indentured servants; a shift, mostly in southern states, to agricultural products such as tobacco and cotton that were labor intensive; and a massive westward expansion of colonies that needed labor.

Except for Quakers, most colonists did not consider slavery contradictory to Christian theology. Its proponents justified the practice by citing verses in the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, including Genesis 9:25–27, in which Noah’s grandson Canaan is condemned to slavery: “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” The biblical justifications for slavery, not unlike the biblical justifications for the condemnation of same-sex sexual activity, were used to both enforce draconian laws and justify extraordinarily harsh punishments.

Because slaves were deemed to be “property,” slaveholders had unlimited legal power over them, including the right to sell them for profit and separate them from their loved ones. Thus slaves were denied the basic right of maintaining relationships with their biological and chosen families. Slave owning was not simply a matter of personal property, but was woven into the social fabric of the Republic. For example, laws held slave owners accountable for not punishing runaway slaves, since such behavior was seen as a threat to public safety.

It would be inaccurate and unwise to make strict parallel claims for the oppression of slaves and gay people. But the extensive legal and social effects of slavery have shaped the social and political context of America today. The acceptance of slavery as a philosophical concept and political reality laid the groundwork for the justification of “othering”—designating a group of people as “different,” placing them outside of the legal, social, and moral framework granting full citizenship. As was the case for both native people and religious dissenters, othering is the enactment of Moore’s persecuting society and Douglas’s sequestering of the impure from the pure. The template of othering in slavery has two main effects that apply to LGBT people and other minorities.

First, slavery constructed a legal system that mandated noncitizenship for slaves (which, after slavery was abolished, evolved into second-class citizenship for African Americans). This denial of citizenship, however, did not release slaves from the obligation of obeying the law, which was often enforced more harshly on them than on full citizens. While racialized slavery—abolished by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865—is clearly the extreme example of noncitizenship, its hierarchical legacies are applied to other marginalized groups throughout U.S. history.

Second, the widespread acceptance of legalized slavery reinforced and normalized mainstream society’s ideas about moral and sexual inferiority. Just as early Spanish settlers accused native peoples of a natural inferiority and intrinsic sexual immorality, white colonists, even if they were not slaveholders, presumed that Africans were less than human and incapable of moral Christian behavior. To the Europeans, native people and Africans who looked and behaved differently from them were dangerous to the accepted morality of the dominant culture, and therefore they were treated with varying degrees of moral and social scorn.

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.

The articulation of these sexual fantasies raised enormous anxiety in the dominant culture, thus making the minority group the target of more physical violence. Under slavery, this violence manifested itself in a pervasive culture of sexual humiliation, sexual harassment, and rape, all used to control and subjugate Africans. Projected sexual fantasies tell us nothing about the Africans or their descendants, but a great deal about the women and men who held them. By othering, European colonists began constructing a new national identity and citizenship premised on a massive displacement of their own sexual and gender anxieties onto marginalized groups.

This mixture of erotic fascination and anxiety is embedded in the numerous Indian captivity narratives, such as the best-selling 1682 memoir
A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
, that were hugely popular from the late seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. These works—usually about European women captured by, then forced to live with (and often marry) native people—excited and titillated European readers, as the “innocence” of “white women” was threatened by the ravenous and dangerous sexuality of nonwhite men. (William Bradford saw a similar threat at Merrymount with the intermarriage of white men and Native American women.)

This othering of Native Americans was a major way that colonists conceptualized sexuality and same-sex relationships. In a complex mixture of displaced sexual idealization and fear, Native American characters appear as eroticized demons and ghosts in European American literature from the mid-seventeenth century on. In the popular colonial and European American imagination, these Native American characters embodied the overt sexuality and “natural” desire that the Europeans lacked or repressed. These fantasies of native people were, in essence, a critique of what was considered by majority culture to be normative sexual desire and behavior. This idea of nonwhite people possessing a “natural” or uninhibited sexuality—recalling, in a more positive way, how the early Spanish conquistadors saw native people—is inherently racist. Nevertheless, by the mid-nineteenth century it had evolved to become foundational to how America culture was to conceptualize male-male relationships.
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Ideas about the “natural” and the “civilized” are often at the heart of how a culture classifies people, groups, and actions. Sexual activity between people of the same sex is often described as “unnatural” in religious and legal discourse—it is contrary to what “nature” or “natural law” intended. This is why sodomy statutes often refer to “unnatural acts.” European and colonial society considered itself “civilized” when contrasted with nonwhite peoples. Yet the othering of a behavior or identity as dangerous may, under certain ambiguous conditions, make it more desired. In this way, the “unnatural” became “natural” only when enacted by an already “civilized” white person. This is an example of purity and danger congealing around sexuality and gender.