A Queer History of the United States (6 page)

Homosocial space at this time gave birth to distinct same-sex relationships that were referred to in popular and literary culture as romantic or intimate friendships. These friendships were important to the women and men who engaged in them—often as important and long-lasting as traditional heterosexual marriages—and were an accepted, praised, and significant social institution. Alan Bray argues that these friendships were largely a product of the Enlightenment—that the ideas of egalitarianism, brotherhood, and rational love (as opposed to uncontrolled, passionate love) helped contribute to a new concept of deeply committed, emotionally passionate friendship between members of the same sex.
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It is possible that some of these friendships embodied similarities to our contemporary ideas of romantic and sexual relationships. In many ways they were understood as a beneficial and complementary alternative to marriage. A major function of heterosexual marriage was to regulate sexual activity that would lead to reproduction, but this new idea of friendship, for men as well as women, often provided a more enlightening, expressive outlet.

We can easily find evidence of “romantic friendships” in the lives of both famous and common people. Feminist historians have uncovered extensive, complex networks of female friendships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and examined what they meant, not only to the individual women but to the society in which they lived.

Personal allegiance could be political allegiance, but not necessarily national allegiance. Women involved in these friendships understood the social significance and resonance, which sometimes challenged social norms, of their deep and intense connections. Sarah M. Grimke, the abolitionist and feminist, signed her letters to her beloved Mary Parker “thine in the bonds of womanhood.” Grimke—understanding the implications of “bonds” in slavery—used the phase to signify the deep connection between herself and Parker and how they were bound together as women, as well as oppressed together as women.

The writers’ language also situates them in the realm of the erotic. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Eunice Callender of Boston wrote to her cousin and intimate friend Sarah Ripley (whose letters, she wrote, “breathe forth the sentiments of my soul”): “Oh could you see with what rapture . . . all your epistles are open’d by me . . . then would you acknowledge that
my
Friendship at least equals your own, and yours I believe is as true as pure a flame as ever warmed the breast of any human Creature.”
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This language was common within male romantic friendships as well. Daniel Webster wrote to James Hervey Bingham in an 1804 letter: “Yes, James, I must come; we will yoke together again; your little bed is just wide enough; we will practice at the same bar, and be as friendly a pair of single fellows as ever cracked a nut.”
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Such intensity and devotion were emblematic of how these relationships reflected the newly professed equality and fraternity of society and the nation. The Marquis de Lafayette wrote affectionately to George Washington on June 12, 1799, during the height of the Revolution:

My Dear General . . . There never was a friend, my dear general, so much, so tenderly beloved, as I love and respect you: happy in our union, in the pleasure of living near to you, in the pleasing satisfaction of partaking every sentiment of your heart, every event of your life, I have taken such a habit of being inseparable from you, that I cannot now accustom myself to your absence, and I am more and more afflicted at that enormous distance which keeps me so far from my dearest friend.
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Because of their intensity, intimate friendships could be as complicated as any sexual relationship, and not always smooth, as we see in this letter from LaFayette to Washington, written a few months after the previous one:

My dear general—From those happy ties of friendship by which you were pleased to unite yourself with me, from the promises you so tenderly made me when we parted at Fishkill, gave me such expectations of hearing often from you, that complaints ought to be permitted to my affectionate heart. Not a line from you, my dear general, has yet arrived into my hands, and though several ships from America, several despatches from congress or the French minister, are safely brought to France, my ardent hopes of getting at length a letter from General Washington have ever been unhappily disappointed: I cannot in any way account for that bad luck, and when I remember that in those little separations where I was but some days from you, the most friendly letters, the most minute account of your circumstances, were kindly written to me, I am convinced you have not neglected and almost forgotten me for so long a time. I have, therefore, to complain of fortune, of some mistake or neglect in acquainting you that there was an opportunity, of anything; indeed, but what could injure the sense I have of your affection for me. Let me beseech you, my dear general, by that mutual, tender, and experienced friendship in which, I have put an immense portion of my happiness, to be very exact in inquiring for occasions, and never to miss those which may convey to me letters that I shall be so much pleased to receive.
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Lafayette’s second letter to Washington can be read a communication from a hurt, angry lover. We have no conclusive evidence that George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette were sexually involved as lovers—nor, as historian Charley Shively points out, do we have any evidence that they were not—but what we do know is that the two men had an intensely emotional, companionate friendship with erotic overtones. Their relationship can only be understood in the context of a national fight for freedom from political oppression and the ideals of the Enlightenment. Passionate same-sex friendships were often public and acknowledged by the culture in which they thrived. As public relationships, they influenced and were influenced by the political culture of the time.
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Revolutionary Gender

In 1778 an anonymous contributor to the
Worcester Spy
wrote that the newly formed American people had “broken the line that divided the sexes.”
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At the end of the eighteenth century, three very different people—two real and one fictional, all of them born women—captured the pubic imagination for breaking that divide.

The first was Jemima Wilkinson, a charismatic evangelist who was born a Quaker in 1752. In 1775, during a series of debilitating illnesses and fevers, she believed that Christ entered her body and that she was now neither female nor male, but was commanded to bring her ministry to the new country. She renamed herself “Publick Universal Friend,” refused to use the pronouns “she” or “he,” and dressed in gender-neutral clerical garments that made her sex unreadable (although contemporary accounts state that many in her audience saw her as male). Wilkinson’s gender presentation, as well as her theological message—she preached complete sexual abstinence, strict adherence to a narrowly defined interpretation of the Ten Commandments, unqualified universal friendship, and the apocalyptic vision of the harshest Hebrew Bible prophets—made her a sensation throughout Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. In the mid-1780s the popular press and pamphlet culture covered her sermons in detail and placed particular emphasis on her sexually ambiguous persona. She had a huge following that verged on a cult and eventually started her own religious settlement in central New York State.

Deborah Sampson Gannett’s public career was as noted as Wilkinson’s. She was born in 1760 outside Plymouth, Massachusetts. In May 1782, dressed as a man, she enrolled in the Continental Army under the name Robert Shurtliff. She fought in several battles until she was discovered, after being wounded in 1783, to be a woman. She received an honorable discharge and in 1785 married Robert Gannett. In a few years’ time they had three children. Sampson Gannett was relatively unknown until 1797 when, in conjunction with the writer Herman Mann, she published a semifictional narrative of her time as a cross-dressed Revolutionary soldier. It was titled
The Female Review: or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady, Whose Life and Character Are Peculiarly Distinguished—Being a Continental Soldier, for Nearly Three Years, in the Late American War.
The work was a straightforward tale that touched on the author’s possible homosexuality through descriptions of titillating, affectionate interactions with women. Sampson Gannett’s intention in publishing the narrative was to gain public attention for her attempt to be awarded a military pension.

In 1802 Sampson Gannett commenced a series of public lectures about her life. She spent much of her time on stage—after stating that she could not explain why she chose to cross-dress and join the Continental army—extolling traditional gender roles for women. Near the end of the presentation, she left the stage, returned dressed in her army uniform, and executed complicated and physically taxing military drills. Her presentation was extremely popular in Boston, and she repeated it in other New England cities. In 1816, after years of petitioning and with help from Paul Revere, Sampson Gannett was finally awarded the full pensions she deserved by both the state of Massachusetts and Congress.

The Female Review
and Sampson Gannett’s public performance were popular because her dual public image as a brave soldier and a traditional woman tantalized the post-Revolutionary audience. By consciously refusing to be cast firmly in either gender role, Sampson Gannett insisted that she would be both and neither at the same time.

This transgressive approach to gender identity was also present in an 1815 work of fiction titled
The Female Marine, or the Adventures of Miss Lucy Brewer.
Most probably written by Nathaniel Hill Wright, an obscure Boston literary figure, it is a breathless, first-person narrative that frequently references Sampson Gannett’s life.
The Female Marine
tells the story of a young woman who is seduced, impregnated, loses her child, and then is forced to work in a Boston brothel. She escapes and, dressed as a man, spends three years on the USS
Constitution
as a sailor. After many adventures, including potential romantic entanglements with women, she marries well.
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The Female Marine
was so popular that it brought forth five sequels, testifying to the enormous reader interest in cross-dressing literature. These sequels included a self-defense from the madam of the brothel in which Lucy had been sequestered and a new story of male impersonation by a character named Almira Paul.

The public interest in the topic of female transvestism was not isolated to stories about these three strikingly different women. Late eighteenth-century American literary and popular culture was obsessed with this new notion of the cross-dressed female warrior.
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Novels such as Charles Brockden Brown’s
Ormond, or The Secret Witness
; the memoir of famous cross-dressing British sailor Hannah Snell, a popular version of which was published in
Thomas’s New-England Almanack
; several plays based on the life of Joan of Arc; numerous broadsides of popular ballads detailing the exploits of cross-dressing female soldiers and sailors—all were extraordinarily popular with audiences.

These sermons, books, lectures, pamphlets, novels, plays, and ballads struck a chord with the new American audience. Female and male readers saw themselves at the center of a whirligig, a quickly evolving culture that was breaking from the old world but not yet settled in the new. Howard Zinn points out that “between the American Revolution and the Civil War, so many elements of American society were changing—the growth of population, the movement westward, the development of the factory system, expansion of political rights for white men, education growth to match the economic need—that changes were bound to take place in the situation of women.”
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Certainly the examples of Wilkinson, Sampson Gannett, and the fictional Lucy Brewer all point to new, if not explicitly articulated, freedoms that were opening for women in a country that was expanding on an almost daily basis. But they also are an indication of new ways of looking at gender.

In highly public ways, these three women opened a liminal space in which new ideas and constructs of gender and sexual behavior could be discussed. In news reports and public presentations, both Wilkinson and Sampson Gannett were mythologized—even fictionalized as much as Lucy Brewer. Historian Susan Juster claims that Wilkinson is best understood as a “spiritual transvestite.”
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She makes the point that Wilkinson took seriously Paul’s claim in Galatians 3:28 that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In this sense, Wilkinson’s “transvestism” is indeed spiritual. But it is also gendered. It can easily be understood as a purely American phenomenon that blurs the line between male and female while at the same time creating the perfect U.S. citizen—literally the Publick Universal Friend—who is both religious and secular. This image supports and yet contradicts the Revolution’s new gender roles, as well as the concept of separation of church and state central to the Constitution. To be neither male nor female, to experiment with coded representations of lesbianism, to banish—as Wilkinson did—traditional pronouns was a radical embrace of new articulations of public sexuality and understanding of gender.

Can we call Jemima Wilkinson, Deborah Sampson Gannett, or Lucy Brewer transgender or transvestite? Not by the standards and the vocabulary of their time. These women, however, helped set the groundwork for a national culture that was open to experimentation in gender and sexual identity. The connecting line moves backward as well as forward. It applies to the Enlightenment-influenced passionate friendships and the nationalized gender roles for women and men of the Revolution. Some of these new manifestations of gender behavior offered alternatives to social expectations, but they can also be seen as the building blocks to a more concise dichotomy between the public and private as a form of gender regulation.