A Queer History of the United States (2 page)

In the twentieth century, we have become accustomed to a far wider range of words for an ever-growing number of public and private identities. “Queer,” originally meaning “odd” or “quaint,” acquired the meaning of “bad” and “worthless” in the early eighteenth century. Since the 1920s, mainstream British and U.S. vernacular has used “queer” negatively to describe homosexuals, although within the homosexual community it was always a purely descriptive term. “Faggot,” “dyke,” and “gay” came into usage in the United States in the 1930s. The two former words had negative mainstream connotations, and the latter was used only within the homosexual community until the 1970s, when it gained more mainstream acceptance. In a process of taking community control of language, “fag” and “dyke” eventually became acceptable terms used by LGBT people. The naming of the first national post–gay liberation gay male publication, Boston-based
Fag Rag,
started in 1970, was a political move to expressly challenge linguistic suppositions. The same was true of
Dyke,
a short-lived New York–based lesbian publication from the mid-1970s. In the late 1990s, the grassroots political action group Queer Nation popularized the reclaimed “queer” so successfully that within a few years, national television shows such as
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
used the word without offense. Today we routinely use LGBT, a fairly recent, and accepted, amalgamation of identities, each of which has a specific history that often had little to do with the others.

What History Teaches

While language informs identity, the elaborate emotional, psychological, and political intricacies of lives exceed identity, and even language itself. There is never a perfect word or set of words to fully understand oneself. Suetonious writes that Emperor Tiberius would bathe in a deep pool and have young boys, whom he called his “minnows,” swim between his legs and nip at his genitals. Plato may have considered himself a pederast, that is, a teacher and lover of boys and young men. Michelangelo may have thought himself a sodomite. Joan of Arc certainly saw herself as a divinely inspired savior of France who needed to wear soldier's garments and gear in order to defeat the British. Emily Dickinson may have thought of herself as just a woman who had affectionate and sexual feelings for other women. Virginia Woolf, who never actually named her own sexuality, did use the word “sapphist” in her writing; it is reasonable to think that this may have been a label she entertained for herself. I have been as linguistically accurate as possible when writing this book, but language is both an entryway and a dead end.

The same is true of the word “sexuality,” the main topic of this book. I use this word as expansively as possible, like the words “queer” and “gay.” Here “sexuality” connotes the never-ending constellation of factors that inform how people understand their sexual desires and actions. My use of the term is meant to connect the present with the past so that we can better understand both. Whatever sexuality means today and did not mean before, the word, like others before it, has always attempted to describe something we know is not reducible to a word, an identity, or even a set of behaviors.

Interpretations are best made with the long view in mind. They allow us to recognize the significance of what on the surface might have nothing to do with being LGBT. Of the many trends, similarities, and repeated occurrences throughout this book, I have found three that struck me as crucial in understanding the most important historical developments for LGBT people in the past five hundred years. Some of these surprised me; others reconfirmed what I already suspected.

Perhaps the most startling revelation, which did not occur to me until I had finished writing, was that many of the most important changes for LGBT people in the past five hundred years have been a result of war. From the American Revolution to the war in Vietnam, wars have radically affected LGBT people and lives. These wars have had an enormous impact on all Americans, but their effects on LGBT people have been particularly pronounced, in part because the social violence of war affects sexuality and gender.

The second realization was that entertainment in its broadest sense—popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels—has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironically, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them.

One of the most salient themes here is the battle between the social purity movements (which began in the nineteenth century and have numerous descendants) and the right of LGBT people, and all Americans, to decide how to use their imaginations and bodies. This has always been a tension in American life, but the circumstances of the nineteenth century institutionalized it. This tension remains with us today.

This history is told chronologically, beginning just before Columbus in 1492. I end the main narrative with the AIDS activism of ACT UP in the late 1980s. The story I tell covers five hundred years, and obviously much is left out, although some surprising details are included. My intention is to tell the story of this country through the lens of the multitudes of LGBT individuals and experiences. I hope to give a secure and realistic sense of how the lives, thoughts, and actions of LGBT people have made this nation into the country it is today, and show all non-LGBT people how this history has affected them as well. I believe it is the only way to honor both LGBT people and the nation to which they have contributed so mightily, even as that political entity often treats them with grave disrespect and harm. The heritage of LGBT people is the heritage of Americans.

This book is titled
A Queer History of the United States.
But by beginning the story in 1492, I am really writing about America, an entity that existed centuries before the political entity of the United States was conceived and that continues today independent of the Republic. “America” is a mythical entity that has no boundaries. “America” is what people imagine it to be, as well as what people have made it.

Gertrude Stein, the mother of all queer wit, begins her novel
The Making of Americans
with the epigram, “Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.” Stein's recitation speaks to the intrinsic nature of my project. History teaches something new every time it is rewritten or interpreted. Pedagogy, like history, will never be able to contain all of America—a great country, an evil country, a place of tremendous generosity and welcome as well as pronounced disdain for foreigners and outsiders. America is not one thing or another. America is queer.
A Queer History of the United States
is one explanation of how it got that way. To become American, to benefit from the contributions of LGBT people to this fabulous, horrible, scary, and wonderful country we call America, is to be a little queer. As history teaches, America only gets queerer.

One. The Persecuting Society

If you were to ask average Americans when lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history started in this nation, some would cite the Stonewall “riots” that took place in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1969. Others might go back to 1950, when Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society, the first public gay group in the United States. Some may reach back even further in the previous century to Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass,
his homoerotic poetry of male love—what he called “male adhesiveness”—or Emily Dickinson’s love poems to her sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert. The well-informed might mention Deborah Sampson, an impoverished indentured servant who, as Robert Shurtliff, fought for the colonists during the Revolutionary War.

These examples highlight some of the problems that arise in writing a queer history of the United States. What do we consider to be gay history? How is it defined? In order to grapple with these issues in all their complexity, I begin this history in the late fifteenth century. The United States as a political entity will not exist for another 270 years. The word, and social identity, “homosexual” will not come into being for 350 years. Yet we know there were women and men who engaged in sexual activity with their own sex, as well those who resisted following the accepted, enforced gender roles of their time.

Understanding these people’s lives requires understanding basic social, political, intellectual, and psychological frameworks. To understand North America in the sixteenth century, we need to look at the lives and cultures of the people who were here before the European colonists arrived and how the clash between indigenous cultures and European cultures set the stage for the next five hundred years of United States history.

Europeans came to the Americas with an extraordinarily rigorous sense of how gender and sexuality should be organized. These strict ideas were bulwarked by rigid civil and religious statutes. The Europeans attempted to eradicate many non-European gender-normative customs, traditions, and behaviors. They often did this through accepted practices of violence, such as capturing and enslaving non-Christians and forced conversion. This legal and religious repression and violence provided a template for how mainstream European culture would treat LGBT people throughout much of U.S. history.

Strangers in a Strange Land

Numerous Europeans who journeyed to the “new” continent of America did so for the political and economic advantage of newly emerging and quickly growing European nation-states . Beginning with Columbus in 1492 and continuing for over a century, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and British soldiers, sailors, merchants, and adventurers sailed to the New World on business ventures. While this century-long project was entrepreneurial, what continues to influence our culture today is the religious and sexual attitudes of the Europeans. They saw the gender norms and behaviors of indigenous peoples as markedly different from their own, even as the cultures of individual tribes were completely different from one another. These startling gender differences took many forms. The presence of female divinities who were responsible for creation, or the fact that in many nations, women were the house builders, was antithetical to European theology and practice. Europeans found the native peoples alarmingly innocent and dangerously sexual. They were shocked that some tribes lived naked or wore few clothes, that they engaged in a wide variety of “immoral” sexual practices—not predicated on reproduction—and that marriage laws and traditional European mating conventions were unknown. Particularly disturbing was that some cultures allowed women various degrees of sexual equality. For the Europeans, the most extreme examples were the women and men who dressed and behaved as, in their eyes, the other sex.
1

Often referred to by French explorers as
berdache
—an incorrect name, implying a catamite or young male sodomite—these women and men took on the dress and the tribal duties of the other sex. Their roles in each culture differed. Sometimes they were placed in socially elevated positions as religious figures, shamans, or artisans. Among the Crows, “men who dressed as women and specialized in women’s work were accepted and sometimes honored; a woman who led men into battle and had four wives was a respected chief.”
2
In some cases, these “third sex” figures were integral to traditions of tribal violence and warfare. In some cultures young boys became berdache through enforced, institutionalized concubinage. For example, the Yuma, who resided in what is now Colorado, “appointed an infant to fill the post of fourth tribal berdache. Presumably upon growing up, this boy became a sexual resource or passive . . . for the nubile boys in the tribe.”
3

Contemporary LGBT writing on gender roles in indigenous cultures has often oversimplified, even sentimentalized, this history. The systems of berdache that existed before and after the European invasions were complicated and served different purposes for each tribe. More fluid than European gender arrangements, the creation of nonbinary genders was a different model and not necessarily more liberatory. Some contemporary writers, including LGBT Native Americans, interpret the berdache as equivalent to our contemporary understanding of “gay.” While superficial similarities exist between behaviors in some berdache cultures and present-day gay male, lesbian, or transgender cultures, the circumstances separating the two are radically dissimilar.

Military men, clergy, and explorers repeatedly made connections between indigenous people’s (real and imagined) sexual practices and their lower place in a European moral and economic hierarchy. In his journals of 1673–77, Jacques Marquette, the French Jesuit missionary, describes berdache practices among the native peoples he met on his first voyage down the Mississippi:

I know not through what superstition some Ilinois [
sic
], as well as some Nadouessi, while still young, assume the garb of women, and retain it throughout their lives. There is some mystery in this, for they never marry and glory in demeaning themselves to do everything that the women do. They go to war, however, but can use only clubs, and not bows and arrows, which are the weapons proper to men. They are present at all the juggleries, and at the solemn dances in honor of the Calumet; at these they sing, but must not dance. They are summoned to the Councils, and nothing can be decided without their advice. Finally, through their profession of leading an Extraordinary life, they pass for Manitous,—That is to say, for Spirits,—or persons of Consequence.
4

The 1702 “Memoir of Pierre Liette on the Illinois Country” notes that “the sin of sodomy prevails more among [the Miami] than in any other nation, although there are four women to one man. It is true that the women, although debauched, retain some moderation, which prevents the young men from satisfying their passions as much as they would like.”
5
In a diary from his 1775 trip to what is now California, Franciscan Pedro Font provides a lens to the way in which many Christian Europeans viewed indigenous cross-dressing figures, as well as his religious duty to them:

Among the women I saw some men dressed like women, with whom they go about regularly, never joining the men. . . . From this I inferred they must be hermaphrodites, but from what I learned later I understood that they were sodomites, dedicated to nefarious practices. From all the foregoing I conclude that in this matter of incontinence there will be much to do when the Holy Faith and the Christian religion are established among them.
6

In
Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expeditions
(written between 1804 and 1810), Nicholas Biddle notes that “Among Mamitarees if a boy shows any symptoms of effeminacy or girlish inclinations he is put among the girls, dressed in their way, brought up with them, & sometimes married to men.”
7
Such reports, which continued to be written into the early years of the twentieth century, were mixtures of journalism and crude anthropology that emphasized the sexual and gender “foreignness” of native people.

Violence against all native peoples, not just those that violated European gender norms, was widespread. Columbus, in his second expedition in 1495 after his search for gold faltered, invaded the interior of Haiti and abducted fifteen hundred Arawak children, women, and men to be shipped to Europe as slaves. Of the five hundred slaves shipped to Spain, only three hundred arrived alive and were put up for sale by an archbishop “who reported that, although the slaves were ‘naked as the day they were born,’ they showed ‘no more embarrassment than animals.’”
8

European religious and social thought held that people who did not adhere to Christian concepts of sexual behavior, gender affect, or modesty were less than human; they were like animals. This qualified them to be deprived of individuality, liberty, and life itself. Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, an Italian historian who documented the military campaigns of Spanish explorers, notes in his 1516
De Orbe Novo
that Vasco Núñez de Balboa had vicious mastiffs rip apart forty Panamanian men dressed as women who were engaging in sodomy with other men. This account was the first mention of berdache in European literature.

Puritanism: The Individual and the Community

France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain viewed the Americas as potential financial and political windfalls, and they embarked on myriad destructive colonization projects. The British, however, had the most influence on what was to become the United States. French and Spanish cultural legacies—especially a tradition of Roman Catholicism—are integral to American identity, but English common law and British Protestantism overwhelmingly shaped American thinking and culture, particularly in relationship to sexual behavior and gender.

British colonies grew rapidly: Jamestown, founded in 1607, quickly began to ship raw materials back to England. In 1620 just over one hundred British “Pilgrims,” members of a radical religious separatist group, landed in what is now Massachusetts and signed the Mayflower Compact, the template for self-governance in the newly forming colonies. Ten years later, nearly a thousand Puritans fled religious persecution in England and, under the leadership of John Winthrop, formed a self-ruling community and established the city of Boston. The growth of the colonies was the beginning of a distinctly new colonist culture that was intent on defining itself.

The Puritans’ view of the world and sexuality—which would have a tremendous effect on America—was shaped by their experiences in Great Britain before arriving in the New World. The Reformation and the founding of the Anglican church by Henry VIII in 1534 brought about the collapse of a cohesive Roman Catholic polity in Europe. From 1558 to 1649 Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I ruled England and the colonies. During that time English culture accepted and promoted a wide range of diverse, sometimes conflicting, views about sexuality and gender. These ideas were intimately connected with how Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan culture thought about religion and religious practice. Cross-dressing—which had been condemned by Catholic theologians such as Augustine and Tertullian since the second century—was a mandated theatrical convention, since women were not allowed to perform on the stage. There was an enormous public fascination with female cross-dressing, as witnessed by several plays. For instance, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s popular 1607 play
The Roaring Girl
dramatized the life and celebrated cross-dressing criminal career of Mary Frith, who was also known as Moll Cutpurse. Ben Johnson’s 1609 play
Epicoene
revolved around cross-dressing and included numerous allusions to same-sex sexual behavior.

Social and legal prohibitions against same-sex activity in Elizabethan England were applied haphazardly. Same-sex relationships were illegal, but the culture was accepting enough to allow for public representation and discussion of same-sex attraction and sexual behavior. Christopher Marlow was widely rumored to have sex with men and was accused, during a trial for heresy, of stating that “all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.” More shocking, he is alleged to have proclaimed that “St. John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodom.” Marlow’s 1592 play
Edward II
detailed the death of an English monarch murdered, in part, because of his relationship with Piers Gaveston. Shakespeare’s sonnets are filled with gender and sexuality ambiguity that give us a sense of the wide range of what was culturally permissible during the Elizabethan era. Furthermore, James I, who reigned from 1603 to 1625, was widely understood to have had erotic relationships with court “favorites” such as George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham—even as his treatise
Basilikon Doron
lists sodomy among crimes “ye are bound in conscience never to forgive.”

In response to this sexually permissive behavior—as well as the economic and class dissatisfaction that eventually led to the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles I in 1649—highly politicized, radical religious groups dissented from the Church of England. The theological and political range of these groups, which included the Levelers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Quakers, and Puritans, was broad, but they all sought radical reorganization of British society. Ranters and Levelers were utopian and anarchistic, seeking to eliminate class and economic privilege and rejecting norms around sexual behavior. They rejected so much traditional Christian doctrine that mainstream social and religious leaders accused them of licentiousness and were suspicious of their views about gender behavior. Quakers were considered particularly dangerous, since they rejected established government, forbade men to carry arms or fight, and encouraged women to speak at religious meetings.