A Queer History of the United States (3 page)

The Puritans not only rejected the Church of England, but also rejected what they saw as the political and social excesses of the other dissenting groups. They critiqued the Church of England for veering toward Rome and wanted to return it to a “pure” state. All of the Protestant sects in England and throughout Europe viewed the Roman Catholic Church as emblematic of the decadent sensibility, including sexual profligacy, that they witnessed in England. They commonly referred to the Papacy as “the painted whore of Babylon” and viewed Italian culture itself as promoting sexually deviant, same-sex acts. Daniel Defoe, in his 1703 poem “A True Born Englishman,” opined “Lust chose the Torrid Zone of Italy / Where Blood ferments Rapes and Sodomy.”

Not accepted by others, and not accepting of them back, the Puritans fled England. They explicitly understood their emigration as an exodus, a direct analogy to the Jews leaving Egypt for Israel, seeking a promised land and freedom. John Winthrop, in his famous 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” likened the new colony to old Jerusalem: a “city upon a hill.”

When the Puritans established a religious society in the colonies, they were determined to ensure that its members did not fall prey to the temptations and errors they had left behind in England. Therefore they enacted strict legal sanctions against deviance from sexual and gender norms. Many of these norms directly impacted people who sexually desired members of their own sex or who challenged traditional gender roles. Sodomy laws in Europe and America were not specifically aimed at same-sex activity; they were intended to punish all nonreproductive sexual activity. Laws passed in the colonies to instill personal and social sexual morality were most often an amalgam of preexisting British law, such as Henry VIII’s Buggery Act of 1533, and biblical injunctions, in particular Leviticus 20:13. Dozens of these laws existed in the new colonies. They varied widely in specifics—some laws targeted public masturbation rather than anal sex—but they all had two commonalities: they used phrases such as “abomination” and “the unspeakable crime against nature,” and they considered such crimes capital offenses.
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Whatever the law, Puritans were having sex. Historian Richard Godbeer notes that more than one hundred women were convicted of having children out of wedlock in Essex County (in the Bay Colony) between 1640 and 1685, and that the Suffolk County Court adjudicated over two hundred of cases of illicit sex during the 1670s.
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Clearly, as indicated by the ever-increasing birthrate in the second half of the seventeenth century, husbands and wives were actively procreating.
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And other forms of sexual activity were not unknown.
The Problems of Aristotle,
a late seventeenth-century sex manual read in the colonies, discussed oral sex in the question of whether “carnal copulation [can] be done by the mouth.” Although such nonreproductive sexual information may have met with some disapproval, it was nevertheless available and part of public discourse.
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There were, without a doubt, women and men who desired and interacted sexually with members of their own sex. Over time, sodomy laws were used more often against same-sex coupling than opposite-sex coupling, and some men, and occasionally women, were punished for their sexual actions. Because most sexual behavior is private, much of the information we have about same-sex activity is from court cases or other public records, which provide a vivid but incomplete sense of the time.

Historian Jonathan Ned Katz
charts numerous incidents of men being punished, sometimes by death, for sodomy. In 1624 the Virginia colony hanged Richard Cornish, a ship’s master, for sexually assaulting a younger shipmate.
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In 1629 Rev. Francis Higginson noted in his diary that during his trip to the Massachusetts colony, five “beastly Sodomiticall boyes” were caught engaging in sexual activity and sent to be punished, potentially by death, in England.
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In his midcentury journals, John Winthrop wrote of Plaine of Guilford “being discovered to have used some unclean practices. . . . He had committed sodomy with two persons in England. And had corrupted a great part of the youth of Guilford by masturbations, which he had committed, and provoked others to the like above a hundred times.”
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We can assume that there was public concern about sex between women, or that it was occurring, since Rhode Island’s 1647 law and New Haven’s 1655 law both explicitly prohibit sexual activity between women.

It is misleading, however, to think that Puritan legal culture vigilantly sought out and punished all sexual transgressions immediately and with the same ferocity. The case of Nicholas Sension of Windsor, Connecticut, is a good example. Sension was married and childless. From the 1640s to 1677, when Sension was brought before the colony’s General Court for sodomy charges, he had a long and fairly well-known history of propositioning men for sex, offering to pay for sex, and sexually assaulting male servants. Although town elders had admonished Sension in the late 1640s and again in the late 1660s, he was not formally charged for another decade. While some of his neighbors disapproved of his behavior, there was a general consensus not to bring formal legal charges. Historians speculate that some of Sension’s activity was with willing partners and was viewed, by enough people, as moderately acceptable. Perhaps Sension’s status in the community protected him, or the fact that many of his partners were men of lesser social rank may have lent his crimes a lower profile. Sension’s trial in 1677 resulted in his being convicted of attempted sodomy. He was whipped, publicly shamed on a gallows with a rope around his neck, and “his entire estate was placed in bond for his good behavior.”
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Windsor’s laxness in prosecuting Sension may have been because his sexual activity took place in private. While his actions were certainly considered grievously illegal and immoral, as private acts
they had less impact on the community than, say, an act of adultery, which might result in pregnancy or the dissolution of a marriage. Puritans in the colonies viewed marriage as a civil contract, not a sacrament, and were concerned about the impact of divorce on the community, generally permitting it only for abandonment. Nonmarital sexuality was immoral because it did not contribute to the family on which society organized.

The Puritans had fled Great Britain to secure religious freedom for themselves, not others; they never intended to found a democracy. John Winthrop was clear: “If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy, first we should have no warrant in scripture for it: for there was no such government in Israel. . . . A democracy is, amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government. [To allow it would be] a manifest breach of the 5th Commandment” (honor your father and mother).
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For the Puritans, the family was central to religious and civil society; immoral and illegal acts that, by taking place in private, did not directly threaten it may have been viewed with some leniency.

We have a few clues about how men like Sension related (likely in private) to others who engaged in similar behavior, or what kind of nonfamilial community they formed. The Boston Gay History Project examined court records between 1636 and 1641 of men accused of sodomy, “lude behaviour and unclean carriage” and
charted what appears to be a series of relationships among a number of men, including Thomas Roberts, John Alexander, Abraham Pottle, and George Morrey. In 1640, when the court ordered Thomas Roberts to no longer live with George Morrey, it is possible to infer that what was worrisome to the judiciary was not a personal and possibly sexual relationship, but the publicness of men with such reputations living together.
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Did these men, who may all have been involved in sexual relationships with one another, see themselves as part of a minority community? Did their sexual activity give them a specific personal or social identity, or sense of a sexual self, even if the concept of “gay” did not exist?

Personal diaries and letters must be interpreted in historical context. When a letter writer uses elaborately passionate language, as Susanna Anthony did when writing to Sarah Osborn in the early eighteenth century—“my bosom friend, I feel my love to you to be without dissimulation, therefore wish you the same strength and consolation, with my own soul”—can we presume an erotic intent?
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Conversely, there is a long history of interpreters of historical material who refuse to see
any
same-sex desire in letters and diaries. If we acknowledge that some personal writings attest to the presence of same-sex desire, we then must discern what these erotic feelings meant to the writer.

The diaries of Michael Wigglesworth exemplify this point. As a tutor at Harvard College in 1653, the distraught, twenty-three-year-old Wigglesworth wrote in his diary, “Such filthy lust flowing from my fond affection to my pupils whiles in their presence on the third day after noon that I confess myself an object of God’s loathing as my sin is my own; and pray God make it no more to me.” Is this passage proof that Wigglesworth experienced same-sex desires, and given Puritan culture, he felt guilt? Historian Alan Bray notes that a close reading of the diary also indicates that while Wigglesworth may have understood his sexual thoughts as incongruent with his morality, they were, because they were involuntary, less of a problem than the intense emotion that accompanied them. These intense feelings were a sin, because they were dangerously discordant with the Puritan concept of individualism that demanded, especially for men, emotional control. According to Bray, Wigglesworth’s “sin” was feeling emotions too strongly, not necessarily the content of the feelings.
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After considering the place of privacy, family, and community in understanding same-sex activity in early colonial culture, it is also important to examine this culture’s relationship to the body. The Puritans in the colonies were on a distinct social and religious mission. While they were reacting against what they perceived as the sexual excesses of Elizabethan culture—they would have disapproved of Shakespeare’s overt sexual puns as being immodest—this was not because they thought pleasure inherently bad. Rather, Puritan theology promoted the intrinsic worth and holiness of the body. This is one of the central reasons the Puritans called for the individual to have a personal, direct relationship with God. As authority in England was being deeply questioned, Puritans were attempting to “find a new master in themselves, a rigid self-control shaping a new personality. Conversion, sainthood, repression, collective discipline, were the answer to the unsettled conditions of society, the way to creating a new order through creating new men.”
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The Puritans readily acknowledged sexual desire and pleasure but insisted that it needed to be expressed within the sanctity of marriage, for the sake of the family, community, and individual.

“Society,” claims Alan Bray, “is a process,” and nowhere is this more evident than in Puritan life in the American colonies.
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The “process” of Puritan society was found in the need to constantly refocus on theological “purity”—the essence of holiness and social order. However, the exigencies of surviving in this new land presented situations that led even the strictest Puritans to compromise some principles. Also, as exemplified by Wigglesworth, strictly articulated sexual mores were often not followed in the letter or even the spirit of the law.

Puritanism was an experiment of a particular form of social and religious organization, not an arbitrarily repressive system. Puritanism was not, as twentieth-century social critic and wit H. L. Mencken famously defined it, “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” Puritan children were permitted simple toys and games when they were not doing chores or studying the Bible. Puritans allowed moderate drinking. While not sartorially extravagant, they did not adopt the plain dress of Quakers, but allowed color and some ornamentation. (All the colonies had laws regulating dress, usually with the intent of maintaining class distinctions, but in 1696 Massachusetts passed a law that explicitly forbade cross-dressing. Some historians argue that this law was intended to curb the possibility of same-sex sexual encounters.)
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While procreative sex between a husband and wife was the only officially acceptable mode of sexual activity, some statistics show that at least 10 percent of Puritan marriage occurred after a pregnancy, and premarital sex generally went unpunished if it resulted in a stable marriage.

The individual soul was the life of the Puritan community and, conversely, the community was an embodiment of the soul. The concept of the individual was inseparable from the concept of community. It was vital, then, that the structures of this community be stable.

As a theologically based society, Puritans acted harshly toward religious diversity. In 1634, when Salem, Massachusetts, pastor Roger Williams was accused of spreading “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions”—advocating more religious freedom and toleration of native peoples—he was exiled. (The commonwealth law under which Williams was exiled was not repealed until 1936.) Upon leaving the Bay Colony, he founded Providence Plantations, now Rhode Island. Three years later Anne Hutchinson was imprisoned, then exiled from Massachusetts Bay Colony, for dissenting from Puritan doctrine, freely interpreting the Bible, preaching as a woman, and running Bible study groups for women. She and her followers settled in Providence Plantations. Massachusetts Bay Colony ministers labeled Hutchinson a “Jezebel”—the implication being that she, like the figure from the Book of Judges, was a sexually dangerous woman. Hutchinson’s theological boldness caused others to view her behavior as gender deviance. “You have stepped out of your place,” noted one minister. “You have rather been a husband than a wife, a preacher than a hearer, and a magistrate than a subject.” Over the decades, Providence Plantations became, for its time, a progressive colony. Capital punishment was rare, and debtors’ prisons and trials for witchcraft were abolished. In 1652 it was the first colony to ban all slavery, regardless of color.