Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (38 page)

The first known American sodomy case arose in Massachusetts in 1629, when the ship
Talbot
sailed into port with “5 beastly Sodomiticall boys” aboard. The youngsters had already confessed to “wickedness not to be named,” so the only task left to the authorities was to formally convict and punish them. Rather than do so, the Puritans shipped the rascals back to England, reasoning that because the “wickedness” had taken place on the high seas they had no authority to punish it.

The colony of Plymouth was slightly more inclined to prosecute sodomy. The first homosexuality trial took place there in 1636, in which John Alexander and Thomas Roberts confessed to “lude behavior and unclean carriage one with another by often spending their seed one upon another.” Additionally, there was evidence that Alexander was “notoriously guilty that way.” If ever there was an occasion to impose the death penalty for sodomy, this was it. The law had recently been passed, and the time was right to use these men to set an example. However, leniency prevailed. The court ordered Alexander whipped, branded, and banished, while Roberts, a servant, was whipped and sent back to his master.

Several years later, when dealing with a rather convoluted sex ring, the Plymouth courts were even more forgiving. This time, Edward Michell and Edward Preston were found guilty of “lude and sodomiticall practices” with each other. Additionally, Michell had fornicated with Lydia Hatch, and Preston had tried to have sex with yet another man. Despite the range of sex offenses involved, the court treated them all much the same. Hatch was whipped once, and both Michell and Preston, twice. The law mandating execution for Preston and Michell’s behavior was ignored, the judge evidently believing that it was only marginally worse than simple fornication.

By contrast, the colony of New Haven was quite intolerant of males having sex with each other, at least in extreme cases. The one execution for homosexuality in colonial New England took place in 1646, when William Plaine was convicted of “unclean practices” by engaging in mutual masturbation with boys “above a hundred times.” Plaine also seems to have been a rather vocal atheist, which could not have gained him many friends or supporters. As we have seen, regardless of what the law allowed, a few homosexual acts were not enough to earn anyone the death penalty, and neither were atheist opinions, but with these taken together and leavened with child abuse, Plaine had become a “monster in human shape,” and had to go.

Virginia holds the distinction of being the first American colony to execute someone for sodomy, in 1625. Seaman William Cornish had forced himself on a young man aboard an anchored ship. Being “in drinke,” Cornish followed his victim into bed, turned him on his belly and “put payne in the [man’s] fundament and did wett him.” A century and a half later, Thomas Jefferson suggested a series of revisions to Virginia’s criminal laws, including the reduction of the penalty for sodomy from hanging to castration. He suggested that the same “proportional” penalty be imposed on men for rape and polygamy. Punishment for a female sodomite, Jefferson advocated, should consist of “cutting through the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least.” His creative proposals were never adopted, however, and male sodomy was formally made a capital crime in 1792.
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The uneasiness American colonists felt at imposing the death penalty for homosexual behavior evaporated when the subject turned to sex with animals, which they usually called “buggery.” Bestiality was far more horrible to them than mere homosexuality, probably because they believed that such a union could result in freakish offspring. In 1642, a New Haven sow gave birth to a “monstrous” little premature piglet that resembled the unfortunate farmhand George Spenser. Both Spenser and the little pig had “whitish & deformed” eyes. Spenser first denied, then admitted, then again denied improper relations with the sow. Had the same legal standard in use for homosexuality been applied, his life would have been spared. There were, after all, no witnesses, and Spenser twice had denied the crime, once under oath; but that was not to be. He was put to death.

There was no pretense of fairness in buggery cases, at least so far as the animals were concerned. When young Thomas Granger was indicted for having had sex with “a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey,” the Massachusetts colonial authorities seemed to be making up rules as they went along. As Granger had confessed to buggering the animals, his death was assured, but the law also required that the animals be put to death—and Granger could not recall exactly which ones (especially among the sheep) he had violated. The court solved the problem by staging a lineup of local sheep, from which Granger was expected to point out which ones he had known intimately. Once the offending beasts were identified, they were killed before Granger’s eyes. Then he was executed.

In the case of the sadly named Thomas Hogg, accused in Plymouth in 1647 of buggery with a sow who had borne a deformed fetus whose “faire & white” skin resembled his own, the court went to the barnyard to determine the truth. Hogg was ordered to fondle (“scratt”) the mother sow. According to official records, “immedyatly there appeared a working of lust in the sow, insomuch that she powred out seede before them.” The magistrates then ordered Hogg to fondle another sow, who seemed unmoved. He was then whipped and sent to prison for crimes involving, among other things, “filthyness.”

The last known buggery case in early New England involved another unfortunately named man, Thomas Saddeler, who was accused in 1681 of carnal relations with a mare. He was found guilty of the lesser crime of
attempted
buggery, so his life was spared, but he was still whipped, forced to sit on the gallows with a rope around his neck, branded on the forehead with the letter P (for “pollution”), and banished from the colony. Saddeler’s treatment was hardly kind, but neither was he put to death as the law strictly required. Eventually, courts in New England seem to have stopped taking bestiality cases, in large part because the harsh sentences on the books failed to deter such unbiblical sex from taking place. In the words of one historian of the era: “Puritans became inured to sexual offenses, because there were so many.”

THE RULES FOR dealing with sodomy on the high seas depended on which master one served. During the golden age of English piracy in the seventeenth century, the buccaneers who terrorized the merchant ships and trading posts of the West Indies were almost exclusively homosexual.
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The reasons for this are many, including prolonged separation from women, the absence of enforceable laws, and the happy rejection of traditional English models for an ordered and respectable life; but more than anything, that was simply how the pirates of the Caribbean wanted to live their lives. As explained by B. R. Burg in his delightful
Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition
, the men who manned pirate ships did not take up homosexuality as a temporary measure until they could return to their lives ashore. The boats were nothing like modern prisons, where men have sex with each other but still regard themselves as heterosexual. Pirates rarely took up opportunities to return home to take up relations with the opposite sex. “They were permanent pirates,” Burg tells us, preferring an exclusively homosexual existence over any of the alternatives. For those with authority, the pirate life usually involved the exclusive use of select boys and men with whom they had lengthy, devoted relationships. Some ships discouraged the sexual exploitation of boys because it aroused disruptive jealousies, but nowhere in the pirate world was homosexuality condemned as an evil in itself.

There was also no shortage of homosexuality on English navy and merchant marine ships, but it was handled differently. Henry VIII may have made “buggery with man or beast” a crime punishable by death in 1533, but British admirals waited almost one hundred years to follow the king’s decree: It was not until 1627 that the death penalty was formally instituted in the Royal Navy, and even then it was rarely put to use. Perhaps the admirals knew that executing all the homosexuals on their ships would result in a far smaller navy, which England could ill afford. For most of the seventeenth century, the few sodomy prosecutions that actually went to trial usually involved something taking the case beyond just male-male sex. For the defendant to be charged with sodomy, he had to have done something else to earn the enmity of his superiors. For example, sixteen-year-old John Durrant was indicted in 1649 because he had allowed himself to be penetrated by a Hindu named Abdul Rhyme, which made the case far more urgent. Nine Christians and a number of Hindus testified that they had seen the couple frequently buggering and masturbating each other in various places on the ship. For their crimes, Durrant and Rhyme were each given (among other punishments) forty lashes, with the additional command that the wounds be rubbed afterward with salt and water. It was the interracial quality of the sex rather than the sex itself that merited the harshness of the punishment. Significantly, however, despite the volume of evidence against them, the death penalty was not imposed.

Only in the eighteenth century did the British navy start to hand out frequent severe punishments for sodomy. Authorities had noticed a supposed increase in the practice, caused by “foreign” influences. In 1706, James Ball, quartermaster of the
Swallow
, was condemned to death for forcibly buggering a thirteen-year-old boy in his cabin. Five decades later, Henry Bicks was charged with repeatedly buggering a boy who later complained of “soreness in his fundament,” and then for molesting a sleeping fellow prisoner while in jail awaiting trial. For his sins, Bicks was given five hundred lashes and was turned out of service with a halter around his neck.

The eyewitness evidence against Bicks was overwhelming, but when that kind of proof was lacking it was difficult to make sodomy charges stick, at least to the extent necessary to put the prisoner to death. Navy judges often required proof of both penetration and emission of semen, which was rarely available. In 1762, Martin Billin and James Bryan were tried for buggery on what seemed like rock-solid evidence. The main witness testified that he saw the two men “behind a chest, Martin Billin with his face to the chest & James Bryan’s belly to Martin Billin’s back.” He continued: “I threw myself down on the chest & run my hand, down between the forepart of Bryan & the hinder part of Billin; Billin’s breeches were about half down his thigh, & Bryan’s trousers were down on his knees. I laid hold of Bryan’s yard and pulled it out of Billin’s fundament.” The judge asked the witness: “When you had Bryan’s yard in your hand, did you observe whether there had been any emission from it?” The witness replied that he was not sure whether there had been emission, but did say that Bryan’s penis had left his hand moist. The court pressed the witness further, demanding to know “by what means” he was sure Bryan had penetrated Billin. The response: “Because as I laid hold of part of his yard, the other part came out with a spring, as if a cork had been drawn out of a bottle.” Such proof was undoubtedly stronger than the usual case. Few witnesses reached in to touch an offender’s genitals or listened to the popping sound of a man’s “yard” as it was removed from his partner’s “fundament,” but the judges were still not convinced that the two accused seamen should be put to death. Instead, Bryan and Billin were each given one thousand lashes—not a slap on the wrist, but (at least theoretically) preferable to hanging.

Because actual buggery was so difficult to prove, navy courts often resorted to charging sailors for less severe offenses such as indecent behavior and indecent liberties, for which the punishments were often quite ferocious. In 1800, one prisoner who had made a habit of cornering boys, groping them, and “with a wonderfully capricious and brutal depravity, making them ease themselves into his hands” was removed from the navy in maximum disgrace and given two hundred lashes on a charge of attempted sodomy. Records of such harsh punishments for relatively minor sexual offenses are extensive. In fact, in the British navy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a charge involving homosexual behavior was more likely to result in execution than one for murder.
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7

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: REVELATION AND REVOLUTION

OPEN MINDS AND SELF-ABUSE

It was in the eighteenth century that life for many in the West began to resemble life as we know it today: urban, mobile, sexually liberal. All things being equal, if a reasonably capable man of the present time was dropped into a crowded London, Paris, or New York street circa 1760, he could have gotten along without too much trouble. The language of the day was different, but not incomprehensible. The streets were full of trash and manure, but at least a few were paved. There were mass-produced iron goods in shops and people wore cloth woven in mills. They spoke less about the Lord above than about money on earth. For a growing number of people, heaven no longer meant paradise after a life well lived; rather, it signified material abundance and physical pleasure in the here and now. If our time traveler were to enter a tavern and strike up a conversation, he would find common ground for chatter. If he were interested in finding sex, it would be likely to be available in the alehouse’s back rooms, or close by.

The age of the American and French revolutions began to push God out of the legal business. By century’s end, many countries looked to “reason” and to the “people’s will” to guide the law. The world was no longer just the product of divine effort, nor was human suffering due to heavenly vengeance. When the new generation of “enlightened” men looked to the night sky, they saw mathematical equations. When they gazed at the mountains, they saw coal for burning in factories. And when they felt familiar stirrings in their breeches, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were the last things on their minds.