Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (52 page)

Few at the time disagreed that masturbation caused insanity, sickness, and death. Well-meaning parents everywhere were warned to look for signs of self-pollution in their children, including bashfulness, acne, and pencil-chewing. Among the profusion of “authorities” on the subject was Sylvester Graham, who advocated a sex-drive-diminishing diet of coarsely ground grain combined with molasses or sugar—the same ingredients that later went into his signature Graham cracker. John Harvey Kellogg promoted his Corn Flakes as antimasturbation fuel as well.

Comstock and the society were not interested in improving diets. They saw only one course of action, to “[h]unt [smut dealers] down as you hunt rats, without mercy.” They wrote a new bill, which they offered up to the government, to give them almost complete freedom to move against the pornography industry. The plan was to use federal control over the mail—through which most commerce passed at some point—to seize Satan’s handiwork and imprison smut dealers.
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Comstock went to Washington, D.C., in 1873, where he lobbied hard for the new federal antipornography law. He brought with him fifteen thousand letters purportedly “written by our students of both sexes . . . ordering obscene literature” and set up an exhibition of pornographic materials students had received by mail. This popular “chamber of horrors,” set up in Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s office, included “lowbrow publications and their advertisements, gadgets purportedly designed to stimulate sexual potency, and ‘fancy books’ and . . . other abominations which were sold through the ads.” The bill’s official sponsor, Rep. Clinton Merriam of New York, argued that the fate of the country was at stake, and claimed that “low brutality” threatened to “destroy the future of the Republic by making merchandize of the morals of our youth.”
The New York Times
joined in, expressing its disgust at the sexual materials “sent by post to the girls and boys in our schools” and lionizing Comstock for having already seized tons of “the most loathsome printed matter ever sent into the world to do the devil’s work.”

After months of effort, Comstock and the New York Society got exactly what they wanted. In 1873, President Ulysses S. Grant signed an act for the “Suppression of, Trade in, and Circulation of Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” The law, commonly known as the Comstock Act and modeled on the United Kingdom’s 1857 Obscene Publications Act, empowered the U.S. Postal Service to seize just about anything its new special agent—Comstock himself—thought was indecent, and to arrest the senders. As worded, the law was unbelievably broad, prohibiting erotic, contraceptive, and sometimes purely medical materials:

That no obscene lewd or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, print or other publication of an indecent character or any article or thing designed . . . for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion, nor any article or thing intended or adopted for any indecent immoral use or nature, nor any written or printed card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement or notice of any kind giving information directly or indirectly, where, how, or of whom, or by what means, either of the things before mentioned may be obtained or made . . . shall be carried in the mail.

Comstock was off to the races. In the law’s first six months of operation, he claimed to have confiscated massive amounts of bad stuff, including fifty-five hundred sets of naughty playing cards and 31,151 boxes of pills and powders (mostly aphrodisiacs). However, as much as Comstock loved to quantify his achievements, numbers alone do not say enough about the effects of his crusade. It involved living, breathing individuals, many of whom did not fit the demonic image of the smut dealer preying on American youth.

The reach of the Comstock Act beyond the erotic became clear when Comstock put a physician on trial for disseminating birth-control information. Dr. Edward B. Foote had already sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his physiology book
Medical Common Sense
when he came out with the popular
Plain Home Talk
. The edition of the book that Comstock bought in 1876 suggested that readers could obtain birth-control information from another Foote pamphlet called
Words in Pearl
. The pamphlet merely contained advice to married couples on how to prevent conception, but the judge ruled that it was obscene—so much so that he did not let the jury look at it. As many courts would later rule, the judge in Foote’s case refused to let the case record be “polluted” with “obscene matter.” The fact that the book was medical and not meant to arouse its readers made no difference. The judge ruled that even medical advice given by a doctor could be illegal if it was mailed. Foote received a ten-year suspended prison sentence plus a big fine.

The following year, Comstock bought a twenty-three-page mail-order pamphlet called
Cupid’s Yokes
, written by the socialist and free-love advocate Ezra Heywood. Predictably, Comstock hated Heywood and thought the book “loathsome” and “too foul for description.” In reality, it was a rather clumsy polemic for keeping the government out of marriage and letting individuals regulate their desires as they pleased. “If government cannot justly determine what ticket we shall vote, what church we shall attend, or what books we shall read,” Heywood argued, “by what authority does it watch at key-holes and burst open the bed chamber doors to drag lovers from sacred seclusion?” Nothing erotic there, but it was too much for Comstock. As he sat in the audience of a Boston free-love rally at which Heywood and his wife spoke, Comstock saw the horror of “lust in every face.” He stayed to the side of the stage, silently praying to God for the strength he needed to stop this “horde of lusters.”

As soon as Heywood left the stage, Comstock had him arrested and charged with mailing an obscene publication. The Boston judge, Daniel Clark, made no secret of where his sympathies lay. He told the jury that Heywood’s ideas would transform Massachusetts into a vast house of prostitution. Refusing to let the jury see
Cupid’s Yokes
during the trial, Clark read just two bits of the pamphlet for the record and then asked jurors: “What could be more indecent than those?” “Nothing,” it seems, was the jury’s reply, although Heywood won in the end: President Rutherford B. Hayes later pardoned him because the U.S. Attorney General failed to find anything obscene in the little book.

Unmoved by this setback, Comstock pressed his campaign against
Cupid’s Yokes.
He trained his sights on one of Heywood’s friends, D. M. Bennett, who published a freethinking newspaper called
Truth Seeker
, which advertised the pamphlet. Bennett was convicted at trial and given thirteen months’ jail time. This time, the president was not forthcoming with a pardon, and Bennett was forced to take the case up on appeal. The higher court not only affirmed the conviction, but also issued a written opinion that, along with
Hicklin
, would help define what was “obscene” in America for about fifty years. Comstock could not have written the definition better himself. Under the
Bennett
opinion, an entire book could be censored if only a small part of it—even a few sentences—tended “to deprave and corrupt” the most susceptible readers. In other words, a work could be outlawed and its sellers put in jail if any part of it could arouse an excitable adolescent boy.

With the passage of the Comstock Act and the
Bennett
opinion, the U.S. government became, in the words of a proud prosecutor, “one great society for the suppression of vice.” During the 1880s, Comstock won 90 percent of his cases, but eventually the public began to tire of him and came to regard him as a monomaniacal buffoon. Even
The New York Times
, which had supported him strongly at first, began to express reservations: “Our voluntary associations for the prevention of various evils resemble vigilance committees, regulators or lynch policemen.” Comstock’s crusading also earned him enemies when he moved against popular amusements such as Sunday concerts in Central Park, which he claimed were violations of the Sabbath. Yet his zeal never wavered.

In 1902, a shorthand teacher and self-described “divine science” authority named Ida Craddock slashed her wrists after being sentenced to five years in jail under the Comstock Act. Her crime was selling a pamphlet she wrote called
Advice to a Bridegroom
, which counseled young men on attaining “sweet and wholesome” satisfaction with their brides. Craddock’s previous work,
The Wedding Night
, had also brought a prosecution by Comstock. Her lawyer’s appeal for mercy in that case—that “no one in her right mind would write such a book”—had done Craddock no good, and she was convicted. As soon as she was released from jail she found herself under indictment again. This time it was even worse. The judge found
Advice to a Bridegroom
so “indescribably obscene” that he also kept it from the jurors, who convicted her without ever leaving their seats. She ended it all the day before she was to report to prison, leaving a note: “I am taking my life because a judge, at the instigation of Anthony Comstock, has declared me guilty of a crime I did not commit—the circulation of obscene literature.”

Craddock was not the only person to die under such pressure, but she was probably the last. Among the fallen who preceded her was the well-known abortionist Ann Trow Lohman, known professionally as “Madame Restell.” In 1878, Comstock went to Lohman’s home and told her he needed birth-control devices for his wife. When she supplied them, he arrested her on the spot. On the morning of her court hearing, she slit her throat. Comstock’s reaction: “A bloody ending to a bloody life.” Neither marriage counseling, birth control, nor abortions had anything to do with pornography, nor did they bear on the corruption of youth, which was the original rationale for the Comstock Act, but focus always gets lost in morality campaigns.
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SAPPHISM IN FRANCE

Pornography was easy to obtain in fin-de-siècle France, although authorities occasionally conducted raids against materials and performances that crossed the line. As no one had clearly defined where the line was, it was often a matter of chance whether a book, picture, or play would draw legal fire. Depictions of male homosexuality were risky even though private homosexual sex was no longer strictly illegal. There were more prosecutions against homosexual pornographers than there were against homosexuals. “Sapphism” was particularly irksome to the police. Absent special certification, women were not even permitted publicly to wear men’s clothing in public.

The French music-hall scene was famously bawdy. In 1907, at the Moulin Rouge, the writer Colette and her lover, the cross-dressing Marquise de Morny, performed a pantomime called
Rêve d’Egypte
(
Egyptian Dream
). In it, a male archaeologist discovers a female mummy who seductively unwraps herself and kisses the startled explorer. The first performance sparked an immediate uproar. Under pressure from the de Morny family, the Paris police prefect threatened to close the show if the two women performed together again. The marquise buckled to her family’s demands, but the show was shut down anyway the following day, after Colette performed it with another woman. In 1908, after a more explicit sexual performance between two scantily clad women called
Rêverie d’éther
(
Ether Intoxication
), the court fined the Moulin Rouge’s manager two hundred francs and sent him to prison for three months. The performers were also fined for exposing their “bare flesh” and acting in a way the judge said “appealed to the grossest, most excessive and dangerous lubricity” and “nervous passions.”

The judge was fighting an uphill battle: The French public was hungry for anything that might stir “nervous passions.” Lesbian-tinged public performances might be shut down, but there was no shortage of sapphic material in print. Back in 1857, when Baudelaire’s poems
Lesbos
and
Femmes damnées
were censored, the subject was rarely addressed in literature, but by the end of the century lesbian-themed pornography was much in vogue. There was no way to halt the trade entirely, so authorities prosecuted authors and publishers on a selective and rather arbitrary basis. For example, the mildly erotic novel
Zé’Böim
(named after one of the ill-fated five Cities of the Plain along with Sodom and Gomorrah) had already been in print for twelve years without incident when, in 1889, the book’s publisher decided to spice up the cover. The new artwork, which featured a woman with parted legs and a flash of light where her crotch would be, was too obvious. The entire stock was seized, and the writer and publisher punished. A later revision to the cover illustration, which put an image of a cat in place of the pubic light flash, led to another indecency charge.
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THE EMERGENCE OF THE “HOMOSEXUAL”

On April 30, 1870, two young men dressed as women were arrested at the Strand Theatre in London. Earnest Boulton, twenty-three, and his companion Frederick Park, twenty-two, had been parading around town in drag for some time, especially at theaters and nightspots, where they always caused a stir. On the evening of their arrest, they were occupying their private box at the theater as usual, nodding and smiling to their admirers. They were apprehended after the show as they got into a cab with a man they had picked up earlier in the evening. The charge was impersonating women “with the intent to commit a felony.” However, the question was “what felony?” Blackmail of their new friend? No: Their companion later told the court that there had been no such impropriety. Sodomy? Perhaps, but wearing women’s clothing does not necessarily mean that one “intends” to have homosexual sex. Their drag display could, as their lawyer argued, signify nothing more than a harmless “lark.” No one was sure, least of all the police.