A Queer History of the United States (5 page)

From Puritanism to Enlightenment Thought

We now refer to the extraordinarily radical political, cultural, and scientific ideas of the eighteenth century, collectively referred to—using a phase coined in the mid-nineteenth century—as the Enlightenment. In Europe, the Enlightenment drastically transformed intellectual life, majority consciousness, and social structures. Its effect on the colonies was profound, since it led directly to the American Revolution and the establishment of the Republic with the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776.

At heart, the Enlightenment was a rejection of the age of faith—belief and acceptance of ideas and concepts without evidence. The Enlightenment grew out of the new scientific methods of thinkers such as Isaac Newton, who “proved” the existence of gravity in his 1684
On the Motion of Bodies in an Orbit,
and René Descartes, who in his 1637
Discourse on the Method
helped invent rationalism, a philosophical system that prioritized logic to arrive at its conclusions. One of the most important claims of the Enlightenment was the insistence that every human being had equal worth, dignity, and personal integrity. However, many of the Enlightenment thinkers who formulated these radical ideas did not apply them to everyone, harboring prejudice against nonwhites, Jews, and women even as they argued for equality. Some even constructed “scientific” evidence to rationally prove a biological inequality.

Some colonialists embraced one of the most radical ideals of the Enlightenment: John Locke’s concept of the separation of church and state. For millennia, religious and political structures had been inextricably bound together. The Papacy forced kings and emperors to enact Catholic policy; monarchies were predicated on the divine right of kings; civil legal systems were based largely on canon law. That is why sodomy—in Catholic and Protestant theology, a sin—was written into civil law. The First Amendment’s religion clauses—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—marked a critical and significant turning point in how the United States would be governed. Certainly the thinking of colonialists such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams was enormously influenced by Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Almost all of the men who wrote the foundational documents of the new American political system were deists—they believed in a supreme being but not necessarily in organized religion, and they rejected the belief that the scriptures were divinely inspired. They envisioned the laws of United States to be, in true Enlightenment tradition, based on reason and equality.

There was one aspect of continental thought that had no impact on how the founders viewed sexuality. By the mid-1780s many European countries were enacting penal reform to recodify confusing and repetitive statutes and bring laws more in line with contemporary thinking. Sodomy laws were in direct conflict with principles of the Enlightenment that called for personal sexual autonomy. But despite a clearly articulated separation of church and state, the colonies never abolished their sodomy laws.

This was not true in France, which abolished its sodomy law using Enlightenment precepts. In 1789—more than a decade after the American Declaration of Independence—the French National Assembly produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, boldly stating that true civil liberty included the right “to do anything that does not injure others.”
3
By 1791 this progressive thinking reached its logical conclusion when the Constituent Assembly abolished punishments for crimes “created by superstition, feudalism, the tax system, and despotism.” These included blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft, and sodomy, all crimes that were distinctly related to the persecuting society throughout European history. The only crimes connected with sex punished under the new French legal code were rape, child prostitution, and the selling of obscene pictures. This extraordinary legal reform had wide-ranging effects when, in 1810, it was incorporated into the Napoleonic Code. As a result, it was implemented in all French colonies and wherever Napoleon established governments in Europe and the Americas.

In the context of the European Enlightenment, such a reform makes sense. Writers such as Denis Diderot, Jean-Paul Marat, Montesquieu, and Voltaire had written about the need to decriminalize personal sexual behavior (which they saw as an ethical decision, not a criminal one), even if they personally thought sodomy was wrong or unnatural. (Voltaire’s famous quip about his own forays into male-male sexual activity displays Enlightenment ambivalence: “Once, a scientist; twice, a sodomite.”)

Why did the American revolutionaries not follow France’s example? Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson attended dinner parties in Paris with some of these philosophers. The notion of sexual autonomy even rearticulated, for Enlightenment thinkers, the Puritan concept of individuality and care of the self and body. Yet not only did the thirteen original colonies keep their sodomy laws, they maintained, elaborated on, and enforced them for the next 212 years. Was it that the United States, composed of colonies rooted in many conflicting religious and civil polities, would be unable to agree on a nonambivalent way to conceptualize sexual behavior? Or was it that a country premised on dissent from England had to continue to assert its identity as such?

A crucial response to this question—which is central to thinking about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people—is that during the Revolutionary era, American culture was undergoing significant and complicated transformations regarding gender. Gender was understood by the majority of Americans as a stable system that had its roots in Genesis 5:2: “Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam.” Gender is a primary organizational focus in any culture. In the newly formed United States—predicated on revolutionary ideas, yet deeply flawed in the execution of them—concepts of gender would undergo major changes that evidenced this ambivalence. The presentation of a firm, masculine authority as the face of the new American citizen exposed the tension of wanting to be free and needing to assert control.

Inventing the American Man

One of the most important changes of the Revolutionary era was the invention of a new form of American masculinity. As the colonies claimed their political independence from Great Britain, it was clear they would have to establish a new, distinct culture that would reflect their own political ideology. One of the ways they did this was to consciously invent a new “American man” who represented all of the new virtues of the Republic and had little connection to the traditional Englishman. This new American man was bold, rugged, aggressive, unafraid of fighting, and comfortable asserting himself. This model was in complete contrast to the Englishman, who was stereotyped as refined, overly polite, ineffectual, and often effeminate. The new American man was personified in popular myth-making by rural colonists such as Ethan Allen, who fought the British in Vermont and New York State, and John Paul Jones, the Scottish-born naval mastermind who famously said in battle, “I have not yet begun to fight.”

This new action-oriented American man already existed in some form, due to the conditions of survival on the frontier. The Revolution was well fought by the colonists because they were an armed society and “just about every white man had a gun and could shoot.”
4
The new American man, a mythic prototype defined by his heroic actions in the colonial militia, was also a prototype of the citizen. Not only were slaves unable to join a militia, but so were friendly native Americans, free Africans, white servants, and white men without homes. These restrictions ensured that the prototypical American man was of a certain class, ethnicity, property, and citizenship status.

A prime example of this fabrication of American manhood is Royall Tyler’s 1787
The Contrast,
the first American-written play produced in the United States. A traditional comedy of manners, the play pitted the foolish, duplicitous, American-born but British-identified Mr. Billy Dimple—a “flippant, pallid, polite beau, who devotes the morning to his toilet . . . and then minces out”—against the play’s hero, the very American Colonel Manly, who is all that his names implies.
The Contrast
is insistently didactic and aimed at creating a new American citizen-based culture. The play’s prologue states its political purpose: “Exult, each patriot heart!—this night is shewn / A piece, which we may fairly call our own; / Where the proud titles of ‘My Lord! Your Grace!’ / To humble Mr. and plain Sir give place.”

At the play’s end, as he is called a coward for refusing to fight with Dimple, Manly explains:

Yes, Sir. This sword was presented to me by that brave Gallic hero, the Marquis De la Fayette. I have drawn it in the service of my country, and in private life, on the only occasion where a man is justified in drawing his sword, in defence of a lady’s honour. I have fought too many battles in the service of my country to dread the imputation of cowardice. Death from a man of honour would be a glory you do not merit; you shall live to bear the insult of man and the contempt of that sex whose general smiles afforded you all your happiness.
5

In one grand speech, Tyler connects the colonial revolution to American manhood, national pride, personal honor, and different-sex desire.

This is, in part, why the United States did not abolish its sodomy laws. Highly gendered societies reinforce traditional ideas about gender through regulating sexual behavior. In the fervor of those revolutionary years and the promotion of a national masculinity, the idea that sodomy laws might be abolished might have been understood, even by Enlightenment men, as counterproductive.

But the creation of a prototype American man presented a host of broader questions and problems. If there was a new American man, did there also have to be a new American woman? Would she be as bold and adventurous as her male counterpart? There is no question that colonial and Revolution-era women worked hard and exhibited enormous physical and psychological strengths; they often ran homes and businesses when men were off fighting. Life was filled with everyday hardships as the country grew and the Revolutionary War continued for eight years. Yet in the traditional Puritan equation of different-sex relationships in a family, a man’s strength was defined, enhanced, and complemented by a compliant woman. At this point the myth of the new American man—and the nation’s new gender roles—become less coherent. Like all strictly delineated systems of gender, the new American models could not represent the diverse lives of actual people.

The evolving American culture was filled with enormous anxiety over the meaning of gender roles. First, many of the men who conceptualized this new country were not good examples of the new American man. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, with their fine manners, powdered wigs, large estates, and voluminous libraries, were far closer to the image of the wealthy, aristocratic, educated Englishman from which the country was distancing itself. Second, the women in this circle were also well educated and frequently spoke their minds, contrary to the subordinate role women were thought to hold in society. During the 1776 Continental Congress, Adams and his wife, Abigail, wrote one another frequently, and she was direct in her concerns:

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. . . . If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.
6

John Adams dismisses her concerns with a joke: “We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat . . .” But it is clear that the new American nation and the new American man valued free white men above women and all other men.
7

Abigail Adams was not the only woman with these ideas. Over the next decade, women lobbied for suffrage, only to be consistently denied the right to have a voice in their government. While some states allowed female suffrage for a short while, this quickly changed. Women were denied suffrage in New York in 1777, in Massachusetts in 1780, and in New Hampshire in 1784. In 1787 a constitutional convention allowed the states to decide on suffrage; all states but New Jersey denied women the right to vote. New Jersey revoked female suffrage in 1807. In 1867 the Fourteenth Amendment stipulated specifically that suffrage is the right of male citizens alone.

Just Friends

In societies in which gender and power are inexplicably intertwined, often little respect is given to people who desire their own sex or who do not conform to accepted gender expectations. Same-sex relationships and desires, however, manifest themselves in various, often more socially acceptable, ways. This is especially true in the complicated interplay between companionship, community, and eroticism in people’s lives. The clearly defined separate social spheres for women and men—both the public and the private for men, and most often the domestic for women—give rise to clearly defined same-sex cultures, usually referred to as “homosocial.” This term does not necessarily imply an erotic or sexual component—although those could, and often do, exist—but rather describes a social construct that emerged in specific ways during the eighteenth century.