A Queer History of the United States (9 page)

June 11, 1852

Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say—my heart is full of you, none other than you is in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here—and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language—I try to bring you nearer, I chase the weeks away till they are quite departed, and fancy you have come, and I am on my way through the green lane to meet you, and my heart goes scampering so, that I have much ado to bring it back again, and learn it to be patient, till that dear Susie comes.
16

What does it mean that Dickinson wrote poems, some explicit in their eroticism, that she never shared? Were they intended for a larger audience? Or did she simply write them for herself? There is no concrete answer. But Dickinson’s quiet, domestic life was the reality for many women, and her poetic dictum “tell the truth but tell it slant” (Poem 1129) recognized that writing outside of prescribed codes was dangerous, especially for a woman.

For men, the social and political atmosphere of mid-century allowed for public expressions of same-sex desire when it was intertwined with democratic ideals of community and nation. Herman Melville’s 1850 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
Mosses from an Old Manse
in
The Literary World
is written in the voice of a man reading Hawthorne’s book in an empty barn:

A man of deep and noble nature had seized me in this seclusion. . . . The soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams. . . . But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.
17

Melville’s articulation of erotic attraction for Hawthorne is extraordinary, even if coded. In a culture in which same-sex desire was not discussed openly, Melville’s erotic words are completely absorbed into the American nation, from the North to the South. This vision, at once private, public, national, and emotional, is emblematic of how same-sex desire had become American.

The same-sex desires presented in literature were idealistic. In reality, same-sex sexual behavior was not always easily understood. The highly public marriage and highly private lives of Julia Ward Howe and Samuel Gridley Howe demonstrate how nineteenth-century domestic culture was shaped by the emotional and sexual complications of people’s lives. Born in 1801 to a prominent Boston family, Samuel Howe was inspired by Byron to fight in Greece’s 1820 revolution. Returning to Boston, he dedicated himself to abolition and the education of the blind, a radical idea at the time. He also formed a passionate friendship with Charles Sumner, later one of the most vocal antislavery voices in the Senate, that was central to his life. In 1843 Howe married Julia Ward, later a prominent writer, social reformer, and author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” While on his honeymoon, Samuel Howe wrote to Sumner:

You complain of your lonely lot, & seem to think your friends will lose their sympathy with you as they form new ties of love, but dearest Sumner it is not so with me and in the days of my loneliness & sadness I never longed more for your society than I do now in my joy & in the whirl of London life: hardly a day passes but [I] think of you & long to have you by my side.
18

For most of the marriage, Julia was emotionally estranged from her husband because of his attachment to Sumner. In the third year of wedlock, while raising two children, she wrote to her sister: “Where shall I go to beg some scraps and remnants of affection to feed my hungry heart? It will die if it not be fed.”
19

During this time Julia Ward Howe began writing
The Hermaphrodite,
an uncompleted novel that details the life and loves of Laurence, who is both woman and man. Laurence has “bearded lip and earnest brow . . . falling shoulders, slender neck, and rounded bosom” and tells Emma, a woman who falls in love with him/her, “I am as God made me.” Howe uses the noted Greek sculpture known as the Sleeping Hermaphrodite as a central image in the work and, as Fuller did with classical allusion, uses it to convey a multiplicity of meanings. The bi-gendered Laurence is often confused about her/his life, but feels filled with enormous emotional and sexual potential that is, like the sculpture, sleeping. Although Emma calls Laurence a “monster,” Howe’s attitude to the character is kindly ambivalent. Later in the book, when Laurence has a passionate, unconsummated affair with sixteen-year-old Ronald, Howe is overtly sympathetic.

Scholar Gary Williams argues that
The Hermaphrodite,
which was not finished or published in Howe’s lifetime, was her way of attempting to understand her husband’s relationship with Sumner. Not having a specific language for a love between men that can coexist with a love between a man and a woman, Howe imagines a man-woman, in the classical mode, who is capable of both. Julia Ward Howe knew how to directly express what was wrong with her life. In 1854 she published
Passion-Flowers,
a book of poems that openly spoke of her isolation as a woman and mother in a difficult marriage. But
The Hermaphrodite
is not simply coded fiction about a personal problem. It is a manifestation of a culture in which gender role limitations and nontraditional sexual relationships were actively, albeit in a coded way, discussed as political issues. Howe’s involvement with a wide range of social change movements—helping to organize the American Woman Suffrage Association, convening the first national meeting of women ministers, and, as editor of
The Woman’s Journal,
advocating a feminist argument for peace—informs how she thought her views about gender and sexuality were a vital component of full citizenship.

Same-Sex Desire and the Democratization of Race

The influence of the transcendentalists and their bold philosophical and social views promoted a public discussion that treated issues such as race, science, reproduction, gender, and sexual activity outside the realm of religion. For many of the transcendentalists, science replaced theology as they embraced the new work in the natural sciences, including the theories of Charles Darwin. One of the transcendentalists’ greatest political legacies—articulated by Thoreau, but embraced in various forms by most of his circle—was the concept of civil disobedience: an individual’s legitimate resistance to legal authority when her or his standard of personal morality is compromised.

Throughout the century, the subject of race and racial difference was central to discussions of personal liberty and how the promised ideal of freedom could be manifest in a country that, amid institutionalized slavery, was becoming more diverse. These discussions happened in myriad venues: pamphlets, broadsides, sermons, lectures, novels, and theatrical dramatizations such as
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Discussions of race did not focus solely on abolition. Leslie Fiedler’s 1948 essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” elucidates how American literature has a history of connecting same-sex male eroticism and interracial friendships between white males and men of either Native American or African descent. Such relationships appear in novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, among others. The association between male homoeroticism and race was not accidental and was easily integrated into American culture. Fiedler claims that these relationships are not just about race, but are reflective of a desired male flight from the “civilization” of women and the family into the freedom of natural wilderness.
20

Sexuality and race are about bodies. In the nineteenth century, when both of these categories were hotly debated, they were inextricably bound with one another.
21
Firm categories of race were disrupted by the shifting lines between indentured servant and slave and between slave and freeman, and by the children of interracial couples. Intense same-sex friendships blurred the line between the romantic, the platonic, and the erotic. The categories of same-sex and opposite-sex relationships were consistently being redefined in relation to the categorization of race. Film historian Richard Dyer notes that same-race heterosexual relationships reproduce racial similarity.
22
Different-race relationships do not. Fear of mixed-race offspring led to a variety of legal statutes designed to control individuals’ behavior connected to race, especially sexual behavior. These statutes included miscegenation laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races; the first American miscegenation law was passed in 1664 in the colony of Maryland. They also included a wide range of Jim Crow laws, passed mostly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that mandated segregation.

The joint construction of the categories of race and sexuality had implications for people who desired those of the same sex. Because same-sex couples could not have children, their relationships, while illegal under sodomy laws, were less scrutinized under race laws than heterosexual relationships and could often go unnoticed if the parties involved were discreet (as was always mandated by the sodomy laws). Because it was not reproductive—and thus, ironically, was safer—same-sex interracial coupling was often the subject of certain genres of fiction or travel literature. These works set a cultural standard in gay male writing and iconography in which interracial erotic relationships were a central theme. As an embodiment of the “sympathy” of social equality, as well as erotic desire, that is evident in Emerson and Thoreau, this literature became a place in which ideas about citizenship, especially in relationship to sexuality, gender, and race, could be publicly articulated and discussed.

Many of these homoerotic novels are considered canonical to American literature (even as the same-sex eroticism is rarely discussed). Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick
(1851), as well as
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life
(1846) and
Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
(1847), are discussed in high school and college English classes. Charles Warren Stoddard’s books, such as
South-Sea Idyls
(1873),
A Trip to Hawaii
(1885), and
Island of Tranquil Delights
(1904), popular when published but infrequently read today, also contain explicit homoerotic content. These same themes, to a lesser degree, can be found in works such as James Fenimore Cooper’s
Last of the Mohicans
(1826), Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s
Two Years Before the Mast
(1840), and Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884). The prominence of these titles indicates that homoerotic themes continue to be part of a vital discussion in American culture.

Melville’s novels, partially based on his South Pacific whaling ship expeditions, contain passages describing erotic feelings between sailors and island men. In
Omoo,
Melville writes:

In the annals of the island are examples of extravagant friendships, unsurpassed by the story of Damon and Pythias: in truth, much more wonderful; for, notwithstanding the devotion—even of life in some cases—to which they led, they were frequently entertained at first sight for some stranger from another island.
23

In the next chapter, the narrator describes how he became the object of one native’s affections:

Among others, Kooloo was a candidate for my friendship; and being a comely youth, quite a buck in his way, I accepted his overtures. By this, I escaped the importunities of the rest; for be it known that, though little inclined to jealousy in love matters, the Tahitian will hear of no rivals in his friendship.
24

The relationship dynamic gets more complicated in
Moby-Dick,
when Ishmael, the narrator, half-willingly shares a bed at the inn with the South Pacific harpooner, Queequeg:

Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade—owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times—this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.
25

In this passage, implicit homoeroticism is juxtaposed with the domesticity of the classic New England quilt. Melville has titled this chapter “The Counterpane,” so there is no question that he intends for us to compare Queequeg’s multicolored tattoos with the designs of the quilt: they are one and the same, inseparable. The homoeroticism is not expressed as an exclusive identity, but rather as a marker of democracy and American civilization, which is neatly folded into the “uncivilized” Queequeg. Melville’s use of the metaphors of weddings and marriage throughout the book reinforces his vision of a republic resonant of interracial, same-sex relationships that blend nature with civilization to the point of creating a “natural” democracy.