A Queer History of the United States (7 page)

The reality of the persecuting society never completely vanishes from U.S. history. It becomes increasingly refined. In the colonies, social and political persecution of certain groups was relatively indiscriminate, making few distinctions among individuals within a minority group. Gradually, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, we see a growing cultural schism occurring between the private and the public, which was largely the reason people were able to explore nontraditional gender roles. It was permissible for women and men to have passionate private friendships, which may have included an erotic or sexual component, as long as they conformed to accepted gender norms in public. It was acceptable for women such as Sampson Gannett to transgress gender norms in public as long as they adhered to traditional norms in their personal relationships.

This increasing split in public spheres and private spheres was a major shift in how sexual behavior and gender—and also citizenship—were conceptualized. Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping unacceptable behavior private. This complicated relationship between the public and private is at the heart of LGBT history and life today.

Three. Imagining a Queer America

Through the Revolution, Americans developed a firmer sense of themselves as a nation. As the century moved forward, the process was complicated by the abolition of slavery, a huge increase in Asian and European immigration, and debates about the enfranchisement of women. By the 1870s many minority groups in America had cohesive collective identities, and individuals within those groups saw themselves as Americans. These collective and individual identities, sometimes race- or immigrant-based, were frequently rejected by those who were here earlier and saw themselves as the “real Americans.” The challenge of how diverse peoples could form a single American identity resulted in tremendous institutional and individual violence against people whose identities or actions were viewed as threatening to mainstream culture.

At the center of this violence is the Civil War, fought between 1861 and 1865. As terrible as this war was, America was already familiar with violence. In the War of 1812, the Republic fought the British for almost three years. The fighting was brutal. Fatalities for both sides mounted to 24,181 from combat and rampant disease, with 8,184 combatants wounded.

Three decades later, in the midst of U.S. westward expansion, Mexico declared war on the United States in response to the U.S. annexation of Texas. Fought between 1846 and 1848, the Mexican War claimed the lives of 6,863 soldiers and 14,126 civilians. In addition, along with the endless, and sometimes deadly, violence perpetrated on African slaves, extraordinary violence was used to put down numerous slave rebellions. As the country expanded to the west and the south, hundreds of thousands of native peoples were forcibly evacuated from their homelands and relocated in the West. Thousands of these native peoples died during the relocation, and thousands more died resisting.

Violence was intrinsic to the expansion of the United States, in a process known by the self-aggrandizing euphemism “manifest destiny.” As the Federal government rapidly acquired land—the Louisiana Purchase occurred in 1803, the Mexican Cession in 1848, and the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867—the size of the United States more than tripled in just over forty years. For the growing white population of the United States, the early years of the nineteenth century were still heady from the excitement of the Revolution. There were ongoing crises, but also a sense of fresh possibilities and new ideals of personal and national freedom. The Revolution had been conceptualized and run by colonial men of wealth—it was essentially a transfer of power from the European imperial elite to the local elite—but its radical ideals took root in society. This new spirit is best exemplified in the rise of soldier, and later president, Andrew Jackson in the 1820s. Jacksonian democracy, an early populism, extended the vote to all white men, not just property-owning white men. Jackson’s championing of the common man—a rejection of both the “civilized” behavior of the Englishman and the eastern “city man”—extended and expanded the revolutionary masculinity of the War of Independence.

Expansion: The West

Jackson stood in bold contrast to the founding fathers. He, along with Daniel Boone, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett, represented the new American hero and was mythologized in popular culture for his masculine adventures. These iconic men who refused to follow society’s rules were emblematic of the era’s westward expansion. America was not only the land of the free, but the land of fewer rules.

Certainly the women and men who migrated westward in the nineteenth century lived under far fewer rules, including those governing gender and sexual behavior. Because of harsh living conditions, the absence of strict legal policing, and relaxed demands of accepted propriety, gender norms in the West were markedly different from those in the East. For men, this meant being able to embody the image of the American man who was bold, adventurous, and often uninhibited in his behaviors, including sexual behavior. Not all men in the West adhered to this image; there were tradesmen, preachers, and schoolteachers as well as men who worked the mines and the plains. Still, the early and mid-nineteenth century West promulgated the image of an independent man who did not need civilization, women, or even overt heterosexuality to define his manhood.

For women, westward expansion often meant a release from the enforced gender restrictions they faced in the East. Wives and mothers in the western territories often did not conform to urban gender expectations, since they were running farms or ranches. Many women took on jobs traditionally held by men. Martha Jane Cannary Burke, known as Calamity Jane, was an innkeeper and an army scout. “Stagecoach Mary” Fields, a former slave, gained fame as a stagecoach driver, the first African American driver for the U.S. Post Office. There is extensive documentation of women who dressed and passed as men. Charlotte Darkey Parkhurst, known as One-Eyed Charley or Six-Horse Charley, was an expert stagecoach driver who turned to ranching and lumbering when her job was eliminated by the railroad. San Francisco’s Jeanne Bonnet was repeatedly arrested for cross-dressing and petty theft; at the end of her short life, she organized prostitutes to leave their work and make a living shoplifting.

Life on the western frontier was frequently sex-segregated, creating homosocial communities and relationships. Brothels, for instance, which thrived in towns such as Deadwood and Rapid City as well as cities such as San Francisco, resulted in complicated female-centered social groups as the women who worked in them offered one another comfort and safety. Little concrete evidence can be found of sexual relationships among men or women within these communities. Such relationships, even if tacitly acceptable, would have been illegal and thus unacceptable or dangerous to record.

There is, however, strong evidence in fiction and poetry of the frequency of intense male-male relationships. (Less evidence exists for women’s same-sex relationships in the West, perhaps because women had less access to publishing.) Jonathan Ned Katz documents the implicit eroticism in these relationships in Western poet Badger Clark’s “The Lost Pardner”:

We loved each other in the way men do

And never spoke about it, Al and me,

But we both knowed, and knowin’ it so true

Was more than any woman’s kiss could be.

We knowed—and if the way was smooth or rough,

The weather shine or pour,

While I had him the rest seemed good enough

But he ain’t here no more!

What is there out beyond the last divide?

Seems like that country must be cold and dim.

He’d miss this sunny range he used to ride,

And he’d miss me, the same as I do him.

It’s no use thinkin’—all I’d think or say

Could never make it clear.

Out that dim trail that only leads one way

He’s gone—and left me here!

The range is empty and the trails are blind,

And I don’t seem but half myself today.

I wait to hear him ridin’ up behind

And feel his knee rub mine the good old way.
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These verses, written in the early twentieth century, offer a glimpse of what a romanticized, homosocial world of the American West meant in American culture. Nineteenth-century American western culture produced the mythic cowboy whose iconic image resonates today as the prototypical American male.

This is a central paradox of U.S. masculinity. Masculinity has been increasingly defined by active heterosexual desire and relationships, yet is also defined by participation in an all-male homosocial world that has the potential for sexual interaction. This paradox is predicated on the idea that men are more free outside of the “civilizing” presence of women, who demand they behave in accord with artificial social standards. “Civilization,” often signified by home and family, is contrasted with “the wilderness,” which becomes a male refuge. As cultural critic Chris Packard notes, “The cowboy is queer; he is odd; he doesn’t fit in; he resists community.”
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The myth of the American West often locates civilizing forces in the teeming, conformist, urban East—the antithesis of the natural wilderness. The mythic, lone cowboy, sometimes coupled with a “pardner,” is emblematic of the revolt against not only social dictates and conformity, but also institutional heterosexuality.

The cowboy is culturally positioned as a man outside of the law. Clark’s poem “The Outlaw” argues that the cowboy and the outlaw are the same. The internal struggle it conveys—metaphorically, a cowboy breaking a horse—is between the natural man, “the beast,” and the civilized man.

When the devil at rest underneath my vest

Gets up and begins to paw

And my hot tongue strains at its bridle reins,

Then I tackle the real outlaw.

When I get plumb riled and my sense goes wild

And my temper is fractious growed,

If he’ll hump his neck just a triflin’ speck,

Then it’s dollars to dimes I’m throwed.

For a man is a man, but he’s partly a beast.

He kin brag till he makes you deaf,

But the one lone brute, from the west to the east,

That he kain’t quite break is himse’f.
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“The Outlaw” is an example of the internal conflict between control and liberation, a struggle that also reflects the ambivalence of society at large. The relationship between the cowboy and his “pardner” is distinct from the idealized romantic friendship seen in the letters of Daniel Webster or Lafayette. The cowboy is an isolated man, and his intimate friendships have more to do with being away from civilization, as this excerpt from Owen Wister’s 1891 short story “Hank’s Woman” demonstrates. Here two intimate friends call off their futile attempts at fishing to go swimming:

“Have yu’ studied much about marriage?” he now inquired. His serious eyes met mine as he lay stretched along the ground.

“Not much,” I said; “not very much.”

“Let’s swim,” he said. “They have changed their minds.”

Forthwith we shook off our boots and dropped our few clothes, and heedless of what fish we might now drive away, we went into the cool, slow, deep breadth of backwater which the bend makes just there. As he came up near me, shaking his head of black hair, the cow-puncher was smiling a little.

“Not that any number of baths,” he remarked, “would conceal a man’s objectionableness from an antelope—not even a she-one.” . . .

We dried before the fire, without haste. To need no clothes is better than purple and fine linen. Then he tossed the flap-jacks, and I served the trout, and after this we lay on our backs upon a buffalo-hide to smoke and watch the Tetons grow more solemn, as the large stars opened out over the sky.

“I don’t care if I never go home,” said I.
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This domestic scene, complete with making dinner, is “home”—literally “home on the range”—for the narrator, but a home removed from civilization and women. These men are outside of society’s control, but feeling at home with themselves.

These sentiments in nineteenth-century American western literature increase in the later decades of the century, when the West was becoming more “civilized.” They offered imaginative alternative models to heterosexuality and some forms of same-sex friendship. Clark’s and Wister’s writings, published just after the time when the Old West was the frontier between nature and civilization, exemplify how the associations between same-sex desire and frontier life became all the more powerful as reverberations in memory. Whatever the sexual and affectional lives of the cowboys, the decidedly nonheterosexual myths that grew about them became deeply entrenched in mainstream culture. The actual conditions that bred these myths, however, were much more systemic than two “pardners” alone on the range.

The Beginnings of Community

From its earliest days, San Francisco was known as a wide-open town: an urban space with few social restrictions and a high tolerance for illegal behavior, including same-sex sexual activity and deviation from gender norms. The roots of this reputation can be found in the mostly all-male culture of the gold rush. Saloons, dance halls, rowdy theaters, and brothels were plentiful and, except for a small number of female workers, were patronized only by men.

In 1846 the population of San Francisco—then called Yerba Buena—was just over five hundred. In 1948 gold was discovered at nearby Sutter’s Mill in Coloma. The next year nearly 90,000 people journeyed to Northern California, only half of them from the United States. By 1855 the area’s population had swelled by another 300,000. San Francisco’s population grew correspondingly. In 1850 it had jumped to 25,000, a decade later it was 56,800, and by 1870 it had nearly tripled to 149,500. Housing consisted mainly of rooming houses and cheap hotels, augmented by all-male public baths. In 1849 there were only three hundred women, two-thirds of them prostitutes, in a population of 25,000.

In 1850 organized same-sex dancing was perfectly acceptable, as was entertainment featuring cross-dressing. The public social life in San Francisco was so vibrantly nonconformist that British adventurer Frank Marryat, in his 1855 memoir
Mountains and Molehills, or Recollections of a Burnt Journal,
dubbed it “Sodom by the Sea.”

The racial and ethnic diversity of this nearly all-male population contributed to a culture of uneasy and frequently disrupted tolerance unique to the area and the time. Many men who migrated to California and San Francisco were from South America, China, and Europe. In 1870, when San Francisco was the eighth largest city in America, close to 60 percent of its citizens were of foreign birth. There was also a large influx of fugitive slaves and free Africans during this time; in 1867 African Americans could use public transportation, and by 1869 they could vote. Six years later, San Francisco schools were desegregated for blacks. Hispanic and Chinese communities were central to creating San Francisco’s economic infrastructure and shaping its sensibilities in food, architecture, and popular culture.