week 4
62 A Queer Hxstory of the United States
writing sexually tinged material, or reader's expectations that sub-
ject matter concern the domestic rather than exulting the natural
wilderness, prevented them from doing so.
Although depictions such as Moby-Dick and South-Sea Idyls
modeled a progressive view of sex and race relationships, they also
carried mixed messages. They were implicitly racist in "othering"
men of color, routinely described as savages and barbarians. But
they also value and praise these men for being "natural," untainted
by the social and sexual repression that was embedded in American
culture. Melville and Stoddard, because they were writing about
same-sex couples, actively blurred these boundaries. Kooloo is both
a "primitive" and a churchgoer; Queequeg's "savage" tattooed arm
b ecomes the New England quilt; Kffina-an,i must be "civilized,"
but civilization is hypocritical, not natural. The same-sex-desiring
American man feels the pull of freedom and persecution most keenly
and is a ripe figure for exploring and understanding that dynamic.
Whatever problems Melville and Stoddard betray in how they treat
race, their work is clearly more complicated and nuanced than most
of the contemporary political, public discussions about race in a
country split by the fight over slavery.
FOUR
A DEMOCRACY OF DEATH AND ART
THE CML WAR
The Civil War is literally and metaphorically at the center of
nineteenth-century American life. In this war the remaining United
States fought the Confederacy, states that had seceded from the
Union over economic issues closely related to the rights of states
to sanction slavery. Even in a century riddled with violence, the
amount of death wrought by the conflict was extraordinary.
The death tolls from the century5s earlier two wars were 45,z7o; the
Spanish-American War of h85)8 would bring II,570 deaths in battle, another z,o45 wounded, and I5,565 dead from disease. The Civil War eclipsed them all; it claimed 6zo,ooo lives, or Z percent of the
American population at the time. Calculated for the U.S. population
today, this number would be six million. Battles were often horrific,
combining traditional forms of hand-to-hand combat with newly
invented, more impersonal technologies such as the Gatling gun.
The Civil War is the defining moment of the nineteenth century, and
indeed of America. It staged on a national scale the ongoing conflict between freedom and enslavement that had wracked individuals,
communities, colonies, and states for over three hundred years. It
also exposed the underlying racial and gender-related violence that had been intrinsic to those everyday conflicts since the arrival of the first Europeans.
America was already a devout country-religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, ending in z84o, had won 4o percent of
from A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski Boston: Beacon Press, 2011
64 A Queer History of the United States
the population over to some form of Christian evangelicalism-and the horrors of the war moved many to embrace their beliefs more deeply. Other Americans began to' question traditional ideas about
providence, the belief that life is guided by God. This questioning
stance, reminiscent of the Deism the founders and European Enlightenment, as well as the transcendentalists, was reinforced by advances in the sciences-Charles Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species is the most notable-that were at odds with traditional
religious beliefs. Defenders of slavery and abolitionists both quoted Bible verses to
make their arguments. As early as 1787, British politician and aboli- tionist William Wilberforce used the Bible to justify his cause. Both
sides held considerable sway in a country still in the wave of massive conversions. Beneath the debate lurked the more substantial issue of
biblical inerrancy, the belief that the Bible is literally true in every detail. The use of biblical texts to justify the persecution of a c'lass of people within a secular democracy is still with us today, including the justification for legal prohibitions against same-sex sexual be- havior, because scriptural rationales and the rhetoric of persecution
continually set the terms of national discussions. An immediate effect of the Civil War on LGBT lives and history
was how it shaped ideas about gender; specifically, what it meant to "be a man." Historian Drew Faust notes that during the Civil War,
manhood was "defined and achieved by killing." W. E. B. Du Bois
noted in his 1935 Black Reconsit."ft.'~tion in America:
How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and re- ligious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most peo- ple, even those of liberals, only murder makes men. The slave pleaded; he was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and
behold, he was a man!1
The war was a rite of passage for young white men. Data for the Confederate army are sketchy, but many scholars claim that two mil-
lion soldiers in the Union army were twenty-one or younger, and one
A Democracy of Death and Art 65
million were eighteen or younger. The intense patriotism on both sides ensured that full gendered citizenship was measured by being
an effective soldier, which meant being a ruthless killer. Violence by Confederate soldiers against captured "colored" Union troops was prevalent, as was mutilating the bodies of those who had been
killed in action or executed. Brutality was also present in the Union army. On June 21, 1864, General William Sherman wrote to Edwin McMasters Stanton, Lincoln's secretary of war: "There is a class of
people [in the South] ... men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order."
Civil War had deeply affected men's relationships to one an- other. Killing now defined a new type of American masculinity, but
it also exposed men's physical and emotional vulnerability. In con- fronting their own mortality, men could explore, often with one an-
other, new expressions of sexuality. This is seen most clearly in the writings of Walt Whitman. Considered by many to be the most no- table nineteenth-century poet of American democracy, Whitman's poems and letters are a perfect example of affectional and sexual behaviors between men in this period.
Historian Charley Shively, among others, has documented Whit-
man's romantic and sexual relationships with numerous young men, and Whitman's work is crucial for understanding the centrality of male homoeroticism in nineteenth-century American culture. 2 Whit- man's wartime writings, influenced by his experiences as a nurse on the battlefield and in hospitals, are vibrant examples of how the harm done to the male body shaped narratives of male same-sex de- sire. His "Hymn of Dead Soldiers" from Leaves of Grass is a prime
example:
Phantoms, welcome, divine and tender! Invisible to rest, henceforth become my companions;
Follow me ever! desert me not, while I live.
Sweet are the blooming cheeks of the living! sweet are the musical
voices sounding! But sweet, ah sweet, are the dead, with their silent eyes.
66 A Queer History of the United States
Dearest comrades! all now is over;
But love is not over-and what love, 0 c~mrades! Perfume from battle-fields rising-up from fcetor arising. 3
This conflation of desire, death, and love epitomizes the horror of
the war as well as new gender roles open to men. The stream
of homoerotic sentiment in transcendentalist thought, along with
the mandate to take the American concept of equality seriously, con-
firmed and sustained these feelings. The American man as capable
killer was augmented by a new type of citizen who could, as part of
his patriotic duty, empathize with and mourn the dead. These senti-
ments are present in many of Whitman's notes of his meetings with
wounded soldiers and other young men:
The Army Hospital Feb 2I, I863 There is enough to repel, but
one soon becomes powerfully attracted also.
Janus Mayfield, (bed 59, Ward 6 Camp[bell] Hosp.) About
IS years old, 7th Virginia Vol. Has three brothers also in the
Union Army. Illiterate, but cute-can neither read nor write.
Has been very sick and low, but now recovering. Have visited
him regularly for two weeks, given him money, fruit, candy
etc.
7 '£c
Albion F. Hubbard-Ward C lied 7 Co F Ist Ma.ss Cavalry/ been in the service one year-has had two carbuncles one
on arm, one on ankle, healing at present yet great holes left,
stuffed with rags-worked on a farm 8 years before enlist-
ing-wrote letter-for him to the man he lived with/ died June
20th '63 4
There can be no doubt of Walt Whitman's intentions when he
wrote Leaves of Grass, first published in I855 and revised in five more editions before Whitman's death in I892. Praised by Emerson
for its echoes of transcendentalism, it is also overtly homoerotic.
Stanza 5 from "Song of Myself" describes an act of oral sex with a
personification of his own soul:
A Democracy of Death and Art 67
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the ,best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd
over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet. 5
The eroticism of Leaves of Grass had far-ranging effects. In I865 Whitman was fired from his job in the Department of the Interior.
Influential anthologist and literary critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold la-
beled the poet a lover of men when, in an I 8 5 5 review, he wrote that
Whitman was guilty of Paccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum ("that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians").
Despite the criticisms-even Emerson found the "Children of
Adam" poems too overtly sexual-Whitman's popularity and rep-
utation grew with each new edition of Leaves, contributing to a social climate that made other expressions of same-sex male desire
permissible. Theodore Winthrop, who died in battle in I86I at the
age of thirty-two and was a direct descendant of Puritan leader John
Winthrop, wrote the posthumously published Cecil Dreeme, a sa- tirical novel that flirted with same-sex relationships and fluid gen-
der roles. Charles Warren Stoddard's South-Sea Idyls found a large readership in I869. Noted poet Bayard Taylor's novel Joseph and His Friend was published a year later, and Frederick W. Loring's Two College Friends in I87i. Each of these authors moved away
from idealizations of romantic friendship and closer to presenting
68 A Queer History of the United States
conjugal love. Taylor wrote of his two protagonists in ] oseph and His Friend:
They took each other's hands. The day was fading, the land- scape was silent, and only the twitter of nesting birds was heard in the boughs above them. Each gave way to the impulse of his manly love, rarer, alas! but as tender and true as the love of woman, and they drew nearer and kissed each other. As they walked back and parted on the highway, each felt that life was not wholly unkind, and that -happiness was not yet
impossible. 6
PERFORMING MANLINESS
New definitions of masculinity were not the only gender issue af-
fected by the war. Many women passing as men fought for both sides in the Civil War. It is impossible to know the exact number- perhaps over a thousand-but we know the names of the most prominent. Some women enlisted with their husbands and fought side by side with them. Satronia Smith joined the Union forces with her husband, and after he died in battle, she continued fighting. Some, like male soldiers, enlisted out of intense patriotism. Loreta
Velazquez, who served the Con~e.~~racy under the name Lt. Harry Buford, had enough money to finance her career as a soldier. She likely deeply believed in the South's political principles. Sarah Emma Edmonds joined the Second Michigan Infantry as Franklin Thomp- son in 186L After fighting in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, she deserted in 1863 when, after coming down with malaria, she refused to be hospitalized and have her secret uncovered.
Undoubtedly, some women, bored and trapped by gender restric- tions, may have enlisted to experience a more exciting life. Mary Ann Clark, as Henry Clark, joined the Confederate forces in I86I after being abandoned by her husband. She fought for a year, then came home, only to join again after placing her children in a con- vent. She was captured a year later and returned home in a prisoner
exchange. V.A. White, a well-to-do prostitute in Nashville, Tennes-
A Democracy of Death and Art 69
see, joined the Union army around I862 as penance for her profes- sional life, which she chose after having a child as an unmarried woman.
Still other women, most probably a ~mall percentage, spent ™t of their liyes passing as men. Enlisting was simply the logi- cal course of action for them. Albert Cashier was a Union soldier who fought in over forty battles. Not until years later did anyone
discover that he was biologically a woman, having been born Jennie
Irene Rodgers in Ir~land around I844. Rodgers immigrated to the United States as a child, and after passing as a man for some time, joined the Union army in I862 as Albert Cashier. After the war Ca- shier continued living as a man.
It is impossible to apply any single description to these women. Were some of them transgender? Albert Cashier may have been, but the women who cross-dressed and fought had a wide variety of reasons for doing so-. Most apparently came from poor rural or urban backgrounds that prepared them for the excruciating life of a soldier. Without doubt, their "passing" was facilitated by the pres- ence of so many young male soldiers, which allowed them, without beards and deep voices, to be seen as boys. If they took up gambling, chewing tobacco, swearing, and drinking, their passing was made easier. We know almost nothing about their time in the army, except that by necessity, they performed as well as any male soldier.7 It would be naive to think that their fighting was not as brutally mur- derous as that of their compatriots. It would also be naive to believe that the women who fought for the Confederacy did not hold·abhor- rent views about race or did not partake in the savageries again~t captured black Union soldiers.
America was fascinated with these passing women. Women of the War: Their Heroism and Self-Sacrifice, a popular 1866 history written by Frank Moore, contained a full chapter on cross-dressing women soldiers. Loreta Velazquez published her memoirs in 1876. Satronia Smith married veteran John Hunt after the war, and her obituary mentioned her military service. Sarah Emma Edmonds Seelye, along with other women, received government pensions. Al-
bert Cashier lived as a man until I913, when at the age of 69 and
failing mentally, he was admitted to Illinois's Waterville State Hos-
70 A Queer History of the United States
pital for the Insane. When it was discovered that he was biologically
a woman, he was forced to wear a dress until his death in I9I5· Even
though his secret was made public, his tombstone described him as
"Albert D.J. Cashier, Co. G, 95 Ill. Inf."
ACTING FREE
Women who fought for equal rights and social change during this
time sought justice with soldier-like conviction. Women in the
United States had greater mobility than those in some European
societies; after the Civil War, as a result of their involvement with
the suffrage and abolition movements, they had greater access to
public space than before. In I848 the first national suffrage gather-
ing was held in Seneca Falls, New York, igniting vigorous public
discussion about women's rights. The struggle for suffrage became
more organized after the war and gave women an institutionalized
public voice. In addition, new printing technologies increased the number
of national newspapers and magazines. While there were already
women editors (in I828 six women began editing national and lo-
cal periodicals), their numbers increased dramatically in the I86os.
Magazines aimed at women often had large audiences-Sarah
J. Hale's Godey's Lady's Boq~~,had a readership of I5o,ooo in I86o-and were culturally and."politically influential. 8 These maga-.
zines' messages were often sharply dichotomized. They promoted
the joys of the domestic sphere as assertively as they insisted on the
cultural and moral importance of women to the nation. Women's new visibility as citizens and intellectuals was rein-
forced by the increased growth of women's colleges. Frequently
called "female semi~aries," these institutions were predicated on women being as intelligent as men. Their all-female environments
were havens for romantic female friendships as well as female men-
toring. These relationships did not happen without criticism. Lillian
Faderman notes that in I838, journalist Harry F. Harrington wrote
in The Ladies' Companion that women who wanted a serious edu- . 1 h h d' " d " . "9 cat10n were "menta ermap ro ites an semi women.
A Democracy of Death and Art 71
This public discussion of women as disenfranchised citizens was
an important step in creating the idea of women as a community.
Implicit in this idea was the potential of same-sex desire to bind that
community together. In the years after the war, there were many
ways in which women who loved women were visible and had a de-
cisive impact on society.
Charlotte Cushman, one of the most famous Shakespearian ac-
tors of the nineteenth century, was unabashedly open about her inti-
mate relationships with women. She became famous at a time when
the connection between gender and citizenship in America was be-
coming more complicated. Born in Boston in I8I6, she was raised as
a Unitarian; Ralph Waldo Emerson was the pastor of her church. By
age twenty, she was acclaimed for playing vivid character parts and
male roles. Cushman's Romeo (her sister Susan played Juliet) was so
famous that a figurine of the balcony scene was manufactured by the
noted British pottery company Staffordshire.
Cushman had a huge following and led a very public life. Be-
ginning in I848, she and writer Matilda Hays were publicly ac-
knowledged as a couple. In I852 they moved to Rome, where they
were part of a loosely connected colony of artists, including Harriet
Hosmer, Emma Stebbins, Edmonia Lewis, George Sand, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Over the
next few years, Cushman and Hays were involved in a series of af-
fairs with other women. The affairs culminated in Hays's threaten-
ing to sue Cushman for the income she lost after giving up her own career to support her lover emotionally. Cushman then partnered
with Stebbins (with whom she had been having an affair). That re-
lationship lasted until Cushman's death in I876. During this time
she had other lovers, including Emma Crow, who was twenty-three
years younger.
Cushman's fame allowed her social freedoms unknown to most
women of the time. After her I874 farewell performance in New
York, twenty-five thousand people gathered outside her hotel and
gave her a prolonged ovation. She was able to dress in a masculine
fashion and be remarkably pubic with her affections. Elizabeth Bar-
rett Browning noted in a letter that "I understand that [Cushman]
and Miss Hays have niade vows of celibacy and of eternal attach-
72 A Queer History of the United States
ment to each other-they live together, dress alike ... it is a female
marriage." 10 In 1860 Cushman wrote to Crow, "Ah what delirium is
in the memory. Every nerve in me thrills as I look back & feel you in
my arms, held to my breast so closely, so entirely mine in every sense
.as I was yours. Ah, my very sweet, very precious, full, full of ex-
tasy."11 Most important, having her own income allowed Cushman
to travel, support other women artists, and create her own com-
munity. Cushman's determination to build a tight-knit friendship
network-what artist and critic William Wetmore Story called "a
Harem (Scarem) of emancipated females" -attests to the indepen-
dence that women gained by earning an income and living outside of
a heterosexual marriage.
In this context, Cushman's persona manifested the idea that
women could be powerful, charismatic, and independent as well as
womanly, charming, and idolized. Cushman's penchant for male at-
tire, as well as her ability to convincingly play a man (and in the case
of Romeo, a sexualized romantic young man) added to her ability to
embody what was becoming a new prototype of American women.
Theater historian Faye E. Dudden suggests that Cushman's Romeo
"undermined the assumption that gender was natural, inborn, un-
deniable, and suggested instead that it was something assumed,
learned, performed." 12 Cushman's visibility as a female performer
of international renown also viscerally appealed to women. In 1858,
at age twenty-six, Louisa May Alc.ott, author of Little Women, was T -£--...
so struck by Cushman that she n'~ted in her diary she "had a stage struck fit"; later she based Miss Cameron, a character in Jo's Boys, on Cushman. Kate Field, later a noted actor and journalist, wrote at
age twenty, "The other day upon returning from Boston after hav-
ing been excited by Miss Cushman, I shut myself up and wrote some
verses to her." 13 These young women, both unmarried and at the
beginning of their careers, found inspiration in Cushman, as well as
a clear vision of what was possible for them to achieve.
There are numerous documented instances of women living to-
gether as domestic partners and being socially accepted as a couple.
The common term for this arrangement was "Boston marriage,"
suggested by the title of Henry James's 1886 novel The Bostonians. Such relationships were found throughout society. However, little
A Democracy of Death and Art 73
documentation of working-class women who lived as couples exists,
because there are fewer records of the lives of less-affluent people.
The letters of Rebecca Primus, who lived in Maryland, to her
intimate friend Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, written be-
tween 1854 and 1868, give us a sense of how a middle-class African American wrote:
My Cherish Friend,
My head is better today Last night it pain me very hard O
My Dear dear Rebecca when you press me to your Dear Bos-
om ... happy I was, last night I gave anything if I could only
layed my poor aching head on your bosom 0 Dear how soon will it be I will be able to do it I suppose you think me very
foolish if you do tis all the same to me. Dear Rebecca when I
am away from you I feel so unhappy it seems to me the hours and days are like weeks and months. 14
Even women who did leave a detailed record of their lives, such
as Louisa May Alcott, were often not forthcoming about their
erotic desires, or may have foregone romantic relationships to pur-
sue their work. Alcott, who published twenty-nine books and story
collections in forty-four years, told poet Louise Chandler Moulton
in 1873 that she had remained a spinster "because I have fallen in
love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with
any man." A bold statement that gives few details. Like most of the
reform-minded women in her circle, Alcott was an ardent feminist
and questioned how women's relationships with men affected their
place in society. In the 1870s she and friends, including Julia Ward Howe, recommended that women not use "Mrs." or "Miss" to avoid
discrimination. 15
Many women found, along with their affectional and sexual
desires, that female partners were more conducive to their lives as
educators and reformers. Boston marriages were prominent at wom-
en's colleges, where professors and administrators such as Jeannette
Marks and Mary Woolley at Mount Holyoke, and M. Cary Thomas
and Mary Garrett at Bryn Mawr, were famously coupled. These ar-
rangements were instrumental in promoting women's higher educa-
74 A Queer History of the United States
tion and mentoring female students. Other noted Boston marriages_
included upper-middle-class couples such as_ Annie Fields and writer
Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice James (the sister of Henry and William
James) and Katherine Loring, sculptor Anne Whitney and painter
Abby Adelaide Manning, poet Amy Lowell (of the Boston Lowells)
and actor Ada Dwyer Russell. These couples, all based in or around
Boston, were only the most public in their time. Their visibility in
a society that primarily values opposite-sex relationships is impor-
tant. These women had, through social position, inherited wealth
and access to powerful male figures, giving them substantial politi-
cal and social clout in shaping discussions and public opinions. Peo-
ple with economic advantages were often social and cultural leaders,
but never before were women, unattached to men, able to be this
independent or so prominently involved with other women. 16
It is impossible to ascertain whether women in Boston marriages,
or any romantic friendships, engaged in sexual activity with one
another. No direct documentation exists to prove that they did, just
as such no documentation, except for the birth of children, exists for
heterosexual relationships. There is no reason to presume that these
women did not engage in any number of forms of sexual play, from
caressing and fondling to genital orgasm. Some of their letters and
journals certainly indicate that their passions were physical as well
as emotional. It is clear that the tenderness and love these women
had for one another was publicly_ accepted, even valorized, and that -~---
these relationships were integral:,i~ many social institutions.
NEW BODIES FOR THE BODY POLITIC
In the years after the Civil War, American artists, in direct response
to so many war deaths, began representing the male body in new
ways. The need to promote a single national identity after the war
led to a plethora of patriotic artwork, much of which glorified poli-
ticians and soldiers and valorized the male body as heroic. Many
of these works were sculpted by women-such as Harriet Hosmer,
Edmonia Lewis, and Anne Whitney-who made their lives with
other women. (Some other sculptors, such as Vinnie Ream Hoxie
A Democracy of Death and Art 75
and Adelaide Johnston, were married, outspoken feminists.) Hos-
mer's colossal bronze statue of Senator Thomas Hart Benton; Anne
Whitney's larger-than-life recreations of Charles Sumner, Samuel
Adams, and Lief Erickson; Emma Stebbins's imposing statue of
Horace Mann; Edmonia Lewis's marble sculptures of Colonel Rob-
ert Gould Shaw, John Brown, Ulysses S. Grant, and Abraham Lin-
coln-all glorified the patriotic American male body.
Viscerally, these imposing works of public art represented the
gender of a new body politic: the strong, indomitable, progressive
American man who symbolized freedom and resilience in the face
of injustice-and who, if Whitman was correct, contained within
himself the potential for an expansive same-sex desire. In the public discussion over the changing nature of American masculinity, these
statues represent the antithesis of the persecuting society. That these
representations were being created by women who were outside of
traditional gender or sexual roles indicates that significant shifts had
occurred in who had permission to represent American patriotism.
As these commanding masculine statues of politicians and gener-
als were erected across the United States, other artists, almost all of
whom were men who desired men, were creating a different image
of American masculinity: the male nude. Classical Greek and Ro-
man statuary had depicted the male nude, but until the Italian Re-
naissance, Anglo-European sensibilities had discouraged displays of
the male body and genitals. Although this attitude was due in part
to the Christian church's stigmatization of sexuality, it also stemmed
from the fact that such representations often implied physical, psy-
chological, and emotional vulnerability, which was viewed as un-
masculine. But after the Civil War highlighted the vulnerability of
the male body, and as public discussion of same-sex male desire
became more common, images of male nudity were considered in-
creasingly acceptable. In the 1870s, English art critic John Add- ington Symonds wrote about Michelangelo's and da Vinci's nudes,
explicitly associating them with contemporary male-male desire.
At the same time, in Sicily, German photographer Wilhelm von
Gloeden began taking photographs of local young male peasants in
"classical" poses. His work with clothed models garnered popular
attention in Europe and America.
76 A Queer History of the United States
Von Gloeden's more explicitly erotic photos of nude males, many
of them in sexually suggestive poses, also gained attention among
American and European men who identified as lovers of men. In
the l88os, Philadelphia painter and photographer Thomas Eakins
did extensive work with the male nude, including a series of pho-
tographs of a probably eighteen-year-old Billy Duckett, who was
intimately involved, and lived for five years, with Walt Whitman.
(Eakins also took formal photographs of Whitman, including a tra-
ditional "wedding portrait" of Whitman and Duckett.) 17 The Swim- ming Hole, Eakins's famous 1885 painting of five youths bathing nude on a lake, echoes Whitman's images of an eroticized pastoral
scene from "Song of Myself":
An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to
the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and
bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray. 18
Boston-based photographer F. Holland Day, considered by art
historians to be one of the founders of American photography, also
worked with the male nude at tlit'ftime. Day's publishing company,
Copeland and Day, printed workS by the English Decadents, includ-
ing works by same-sex-loving Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.
Day, like von Gloeden, was interested in men of color. One of his
most noted works was of J. Alexander Skeete as an Ethiopian chief that combined a forthright sexuality with dignity. 19 -
Renowned society painter John Singer Sargent, also in Boston at
this time, was exploring the male nude in his public art and private
albums. His use of Thomas E. McKeller, an African American eleva-
tor operator he befriended, as the model for many of his black-and-
white nudes speaks to Sargent's impulse to rethink racial paradigms,
even as he is caught in them. Day, von Gloeden, and Sargent are part
of a tradition of negotiating sexuality and race through art, one that
A Democracy of Death and Art 77
stretches back to Thoreau, Melville, and Stoddard. Art historian
Trevor Fairbrother points out that Sargent's male nudes have a sen-
suous quality, often reclining in positions associated with the female
nude. 20 This pose is in direct contrast to patriotic statuary.
Technology and consumer capitalism helped bring some of these
artists' images to a broader public. Inexpensive and easily avail-
able photographic prints-called studio cards-were now available
through mass reproduction, and copies of artworks could be eas-
ily obtained by middle-class and even working-class people. This
meant that art, once owned only by the wealthy, was becoming de-
mocratized and democratizing in a new way.
Most art historians agree that von Gloeden had sexual relation-
ships with men and that Day, Eakins, and Sargent had romantic,
if not physical, relationships with men. Women and men who de-
sired their own sex had not found a significant level of freedom, in
America. But these female and male artists were able to live with a
certain amount of visibility, with privileges the ordinary person did
not have.
POLITICS AND POETICS
Walt Whitman, now internationally famous, had become the most
visible advocate of "manly attachment" or "adhesiveness," two of
the words he used to describe male same-sex desire. As such, he was a
focal point for other men who felt similar desires. Whitman received
many letters from the common man, as well as from noted American
figures such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Charles Warren Stoddard;
English writers such as Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and John Add-
ington Symonds; and Edward Carpenter, a socialist and political
organizer who, in an interview much later in his life, claimed to have
had sex with the poet. The connections between the intellectually
and artistically adventurous Whitman and his British counterparts,
Symonds and Carpenter, are a vital link in LGBT history.
Carpenter and Symonds were politically and socially animated
by developments in Germany. There, some thinkers were articulat-
ing a new way to think, legally and socially, about women and men
78 A Queer History of the United States
who desired their own sex. In 1862, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who
had trained as a lawyer and a theologian, published (under a pseud-
onym) Forschungen uber das Ratsel der mannmannlichen Liebe (Researches on the Riddle of Male-Male Love), a collection of es-
says that explained same-sex attraction through the lens of philoso-
phy and medicine. In these essays Ulrichs coined the term "urning" to describe a man who is attracted to other men. By 1867 he was
boldly arguing in the German courts to abolish laws that forbade
consensual same-sex activity.
In 1869, Karl-Maria Kertbeny argued in a series of pamphlets
that Prussian laws punishing same-sex sexual activity contradicted
the "rights of man" and a natural human desire. In these pamphlets he coined the word "homosexual." The invention of this word-
which quickly gained currency in European legal, cultural, and
medical circles-was a turning point in American LGBT history;
but it was a turning in a particular direction. "That horrible sin not
to be mentioned among Christians" was given a "scientific" name
that grew out of a legal reform movement. The new name emerged
as the primary tool through which homosexuals in Europe would
try to alleviate many of the social problems they faced.
Sexology, which emerged from the writings of Ulrichs and Kert-
beny, was one of the main impetuses of the legal reform movement
addressing homosexuality. This nonjudgmental science was a new
way of understanding sexual desire and activity. It attempted to ex-
plain sexual desire in a variety ci£~ays, largely as a science of taxon- omy. Viewing different forms of sexuality as scientific classifications
allowed reformers to claim that homosexuals must be treated as full
citizens, since they were born that way.
In 1870, Ulrichs published Araxes: A Call to Free the Nature of the Urning from Penal Law. Using Enlightenment language, he
mixes legal rhetoric about natural rights with moral arguments
about the responsibilities of the state:
The Urning, too, is a person. He, too, therefore, has inalien-
able rights. His sexual orientation is a right established by
nature. Legislators have no right to veto nature; no right to
A Democracy of Death and Art 79
persecute nature in the course of its work; no right to torture
living creatures who are subject to those drives nature gave them.
The Urning is also a citizen. He, too, has civil rights; and
according to these rights, the state has certain duties to fulfill
as well. The state does not have the right to act on whimsy or
for the sheer love of persecution. The state is not authorized,
as in the past, to treat Urnings as outside the pale of the law. 21
The rhetoric of Ulrichs and Kertbeny is antithetical to the univer-
sality of Whitman's concept of emotional and romantic wholeness.
Whitman's vision included female and male desire, but he emblem-
atically wrote about male-male relationships as being at the core of sexualized citizenship:
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon;
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of
America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies;
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other's necks;
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these, from me, 0 Democracy, to serve you, ma femme!
For you! for you, I am trilling these songs,
In the love of comrades,
In the high-towering love of comrades. 22
Whitman's inclusive, utopian vision was more liberating from
political and legal st~uctures and understandings than the views
80 A Queer History of the United States
of Ulrich or Kertbeny, who argued for explicit legal changes. It is
notable that Whitman wrote extensively about same-sex desire and
garnered only a modicum of criticism. Perhaps this is because he did
not use scientific terms such as "homosexual." Whitman's vision of
erotic justice depended on ideas of sexual and legal equality as much
as Ulrich's and Kertbeny's did, but Whitman's term "comrade," like
"manly attachment" and "adhesiveness," drew on the American
transcendentalist strain of individualism and freedom.
Carpenter and Symonds were also influenced by Whitman's con-
flation of sexual freedom and citizenship. Symonds's :first major
work, privately printed in I883, was a historical analysis of same-
sex male love titled A Problem in Greek Ethics. It was followed by
a contemporary political analysis, A Problem in Modern Ethics,
in I89I. As a critic, Symonds was interested in manifestations of
same-sex desire in classical art and literature and how they could
be used to argue for personal freedom under the law. Along with
Symonds's work, Edward Carpenter's I894 pamphlet Homogenic
Love and Its Place in a Free Society and his I908 book-length The
Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and
Women were fundamental in constructing a language and a mode
of political thinking that would eventually form the modern LGBT
movement.
Carpenter, a committed socialist, saw sex-law reform as part of a
much larger project to address the social and legal inequalities faced
by women, nonwhite people, th~poor, prisoners, and anyone denied full citizenship. He conceptualized sexuality as a powerful, pro-
gressive political force and argued-in a clear articulation of what
Melville and Stoddard demonstrated in their fiction-that same-sex
desire, because of its outsider status, could help facilitate solutions
for social problems. Carpenter writes in The Intermediate Sex: A
Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women:
Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more
firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes
the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest af-
fection the most estranged ranks of society. It is noticeable
how often Uranians of good position and breeding are drawn
A Democracy of Death and Art 81
to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very
permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not
publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social in-
stitutions, customs and political tendencies. 23
Carpenter's political theory of same-sex eros as a force for social
equality was informed by both Whitman's poetic vision of sexual
liberation and Ulrich's legal arguments. Whitman's profound impact
on Carpenter and Symonds is a prime example of how American
thinking about sexual freedom, intimately connected to uniquely
American concepts of democracy and citizenship, influenced Euro-
pean political thought.
Whitman greatly influenced Carpenter and Symonds, but as fa-·
mous as he was, his views on sexuality did not change America. Per-
haps Whitman's liberatory philosophy was so expansive and radical
that it was difficult for large numbers of people in America to accept
it on its own terms. It might have been, in a counterintuitive sense,
too deeply American in its view of citizenship and sexuality. Whit-
man himself was purposefully ambivalent. In I889, Symonds finally, after hinting at it for years, forthrightly asked Whitman whether
"comradeship" actually referred to the love between men. Whitman
dodged the answer with a near-hysterical retort, claiming that such
an interpretation was "terrible," "morbid," and "damnable." He
went on to state, highly implausibly, that "tho' always unmarried I
have had six children." While same-sex desire is articulated beauti-
fully in his verse, Whitman could not vocalize about his own life.
Perhaps he felt that his grand ideas about sexuality, citizenship, and
democracy could not actually exist in an America that, even with
the progress it had made, was still splintered by deep social divisions
and violence.
But his ideas had other champions, such as free love advocate
Victoria Woodhull, who in I872 was the :first Women to run for
president of the United States. Her arguments are sustained philo-
sophical attacks against the state's regulation of sexuality and af-
fection. In an I87I speech cowritten with anarchist Stephen Pearl
Andrews, "And the Truth Shall Make You Free: A Speech on the
Principles of Social Freedom," she states:
82 A Queer History of the United States
Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as
short a period as I can; to change that. love ~very day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can
frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but as a community, to see I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing else. 24
The free love movement in America tried to realize these ideas about individual freedom and freedom from the state, but could do so only
within small utopian communities. As the century was drawi~g to a close, tensions surrounding the
question of what it meant to be an American dominated the political
sphere. The devastation and trauma of the Civil War had profoundly
shaped the social and political issues of the century. Ironically, the war both codified and reshaped existing gender roles, and both heightened and lessened the role of religion in public life. It made
possible the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves, but also set the stage for new manifestations of the persecuting society.
They would include the continued violent persecution the descen- dants of the enslaved Africans-historian Sherrilyn Ifill estimates that five thousand African Americans were lynched between 1890
-~-
and 1960, over one lynching a ~e-ek for sixty years-as well as a new wave of attacks on European· and Asian immigrants. 25
In the end, the Civil War maintained the Union-uniting, to use Lincoln's domestic metaphor, a "house divided against itself." But it was difficult in this context to realize a larger sense of equality, let alone liberation. America was about to enter the Progressive Era, yet in many ways its culture was to become even more divided and more persecuting as it grew.
FIVE
A DANGEROUS PURITY
THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICS
In the second half of the nineteenth century, with rapid expansion and a constant influx of immigrants, the United States was in a state of volatile change. The country was expanding, but also growing internally as people began to move to cities. The second Industrial Revolution, spurred on by enormous technological innovations- advances in the uses of electricity, the internal combustion engine, the mass manufacturing of steel, new chemical substances used to mass-produce consumer goods-created a need for a large labor force. Ten million immigrants came to America to work in factories. The wealth generated by this economic and social revolution helped create a class structure dominated by a new upper class defined by capitalist, not inherited, wealth. Its excesses and social profligacy were disparagingly labeled "the Gilded Age" by Mark Twain and
Charles Dudley Warner. The nation was now composed of people who varied in race,
ethnicity, class, and identities. The making of a strong middle class allowed some economic and class mobility. This expansiveness re- flected Walt Whitman's vision, posing a challenge and an opportu- nity for conceptualizing a similarly inclusive and American idea of
sexuality. Whitman's utopian sexual democracy was not in sync with the
reform politics of late nineteenth-century America, nor was it useful for political organizing at the time. With the exception of a few pro-