week 4
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 every 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 drawing 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 of the descen-
dants of the enslaved Africans-historian Sherrilyn Ifill estimates
that five thousand African Americans were lynched between I890
and :t5)6o, over one lynching a 'm'eek 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
perSeCutlng aS it greW0
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 Wait 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-
from A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski Boston: Beacon Press, 2011
84 A Queer History of the United States
gressive thinkers like Victoria Woodhull, social change movements
of the nineteenth century, such as abolition and suffrage, did not
consider sexual expression integral to their vision. For many women
reformers, male sexuality was the problem, not the solution. The suf-
frage movement was focused not only on gaining women's political
independence, but on reforming an economic system that required
women to have sex with men, in or out of marriage, in exchange for
.financial support. (The struggle for suffrage ended in I920 with the
ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.) Historian Beryl Satter
notes that even progressive women "agreed with more conservative
women activists that male lust damaged society, and that female
virtue would improve it." 1 They saw unrestrained male desire as the
cause and effect of widespread gambling, alcoholism, and prostitu-
tion, all of which threatened women's homes and families, public
decency, and personal freedom. Most women reformers endorsed
accepted ideas about male sexual restraint and female purity as nec-
essary to American social progress, a concept that had roots in the
Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century. _
The social purity groups that formed in response to urban growth
and new ideas of personal freedom were confronting real problems
such as public violence, domestic abuse, and the abandonment of
pregnant women, all of which stemmed largely from alcoholism.
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in
I874, and the Anti-Saloon League, founded in I893, are the most
famous of hundreds of groups whose efforts eventually led to Pro-
hibition, enacted with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in
r9I9. Temperance advocates had long claimed that drinking was intimately linked to prostitution and sexual immorality. They were
correct. Many saloon owners would rent rooms to prostitutes or
keep brothels above their businesses. Organized prostitution was
often a family business, and saloons and brothels were run by
married couples. 2
Other reformers focused more on problems in the private sphere.
Early nineteenth-century diet reformist Sylvester Graham believed
that alcoholism and sexual urges were brought on by unhealthy
food, in particular meat and food additives. He invented healthy,
or "pure," whole-grain breads and crackers designed to curb lust,
A Dange_rous Purity 85
particularly masturbation, which he believed contributed to blind-
ness. At the beginning of the twentieth century, John Harvey Kel-
logg urged sexual abstinence and believed that "neither the plague,
nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results
so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism," by
which he meant masturbation. He advocated whole grains and in- vented the corn flake to grapple with these urges .
These dietary theories seem quaint today. Social purity groups,
however, had a tremendous effect on how America publicly con-
ceptualized and discussed sexuality. Their work stigmatized certain
forms of sexual expression well into the twentieth century. The so-
cial purity movement continued a line of thought that traces back to
the Puritans' entrenchment of individual restraint and persecution
as values fundamental to their vision of a "city upon a hill." Tradi-
tional Christianity taught that reproduction was the only rationale
for sexual activity and that all nonreproductive sexuality was sin-
ful. There was little theoretical difference, in this thinking, between same-sex and different-sex oral and anal intercourse. Separation of
sexuality from reproduction struck at the heart of how society was
organized and threatened social progress.
The tension between securing personal freedom for individu-
als and the social purity movement's desire to protect people was
strongest in urban areas. The economic, religious, and individual
freedoms that many in the United States valued were most often
found in cities. The everyday public life of cities, often rowdy and
unpredictable, created new and conflicting value systems. These of-
ten centered on issues of employment, living arrangements, dining, same-gender and different-gender socializing, entertainment, and
appropriate dress, demeanor, and manners. Women and men who
were concerned about morality increasingly saw cities as centers of
sin, drinking, drug use, sexuality, and general unhealthiness. They
were not necessarily wrong. In the mid to late nineteenth century- when tenements and apartment buildings were rapidly being built
and single-family homes were being converted to rooming houses
to accommodate the mass influx of single women and men-it was
nearly impossible to distinguish brothels from boardinghouses. Even
the New York City census stopped trying; in the 1850s it had listed
86 A Queer History of the United States
the city's most noted brothels, but by the late I87os they were identi-
fied simply as rooming houses. 3
Social reformers wanted to broadly and publicly address what
they saw as dangerous immorality. The best way for them to do that
was through the law. In r873 Anthony Comstock, a member of the National Purity Party and a United States postal inspector, founded
the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which continued
until the r94os. It was the prototype for similar organizations, such as Boston's Watch and Ward Society, founded in I878 (and active
in suppressing books until the r95os). These groups advocated le-
gal censorship to improve public morality. In r874 Comstock suc-
cessfully lobbied for a federal law, the Comstock Act, that banned
from the U.S. mail "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material, which
included some anatomy books as well as all birth control and sex
education material.
Over the next three decades, hundreds of similar social pu-
rity groups formed, including the Union for Concerted Moral Ef-
fort (founded in r891), the National Union for Practical Progress
(founded in r894), the American Purity Alliance (founded in r895),
and the National Congress of Mothers (founded in r897). Although
these groups were concerned with a wide range of topics, their most
vocal pronouncements were often on issues of "dangerous" sexual-
ity, such as prostitution, nonmarital sex, and masturbation. The
statement of principles for the Union for Concerted Moral Effort
argued that "recognizing the n:lJ~l law as the supreme law of the universe, we believe that its supremacy should be enforced in all of
the affairs of life."4 Mrs. Anna Rice Powell of the American Purity
Alliance wrote in I 8 9 6:
While our first active efforts were directed against the legal-
ization of vice, it soon became apparent that this was but a
symptom of a deep seated disease in the body politic, which
could not be cured without constitutional treatment; and that
the people must be made to feel the need for it. 5
Along with banning gambling and lotteries as harmful to the
home, these groups lobbied to criminalize prostitution, remove
A Danger__ous Purity 87
paintings of nudes from saloons, ban books with immoral content,
and censor objectionable material in stage plays, music halls, and
the newly emerging motion pictures. Satter points out that members
of social purity groups were deeply suspicious of most new forms of
communication technology, even newspapers, which would "'daily
enter the home' [and] would plant the 'first seeds of morbid desire
and impure sentiment' in innocent minds."6 They argued that chil-
dren were at great risk and required proper moral guidance and
protection from harm, including being shielded from harmful im-
ages and suggestions that would stunt their growth into mature,
moral, heterosexual adults. Charles Loring Brace, who founded the
Children's Aid Society in r853 to help place abandoned and vagrant
youth in new families, did so because he worried that "homeless
boys and newsboys waste their time going to theaters." 7
The protection of the home was paramount for the social purity
reformers. The home and motherhood were sacred and profoundly
necessary for the construction of a pure society. Lucinda Banister
Chandler, founder of the Moral Education Society of Boston, was
a popular thinker and writer whose pamphlets "A Mother's Aid"
and "The Divineness of Marriage" were significant in shaping social
purity thought. In "Motherhood, Its Power over Human Destiny" she writes, concerned about expectant women reading debased lit-
erature, that moral and physical "deformities" of children were the
result of the pregnant mother experiencing "polluting intrusions." 8
Social purity groups' history and philosophy linked them to other reform movements. Almost all supported women's suffrage, and
many were part of the abolition movement. Yet each of these move-
ments was different, and eventually they had conflicting goals. The
social purity groups, for example, were predicated on social control,
while the abolition and women's suffrage movements were overtly
liberatory. Many women and men lived with contradictions be-
tween the ideas and goals of the multiple movements to which they belonged.
As misguided as many of the social purity groups' actions seem to
us now, they-as much as the abolitionists-were trying to create a
just society. Unfortunately, their basic assumptions about desire and
gender, as well as their actions, did more harm than good.
88 A Queer History of the United States
CONCEPTUALIZING RESISTANCE: LABOR, RACE, AND SEX
As new social opportunities opened up in America in the decades af-
ter the Civil War, women and men had access to new pleasures. New
ways of thinking about sexuality and gender informed all parts of
their lives. Their political thinking shaped their discussions and ap-
proaches to sexuality. In the Gilded Age of urban influx, newly freed African Americans, and a growing middle class, social and sexual
beliefs were tied to socioeconomic status. While the social purity
reformers were battling what they saw as a crisis in public morality,
the last two decades of the nineteenth century also witnessed the
rise of labor organizing to combat the horrific conditions in factories
and mines.
Beginning in the I89os, labor organizer Mary Harris Jones,
known as Mother Jones, fought for workplace safety, a fair wage,
and humane working hours. She did not support suffrage, since she
saw it as an upper-class women's concern and thought more atten-
tion should be paid to the lives of poor women. The labor move-
ment, less concerned about a woman's proper place in society, was
deeply committed to gender issues in the workplace. Famous for her
fiery speaking, Mother Jones raged in a I9IO speech about the treat-
ment of young women who worked as "slaves" in the Milwaukee
breweries:
> ·;,r,
The foreman on those breweries regulates the time, even, that the girls may stay in the toilet room, and in the event of over-
staying it gives him the opportunity he seems to be looking
for, to indulge in indecent and foul language ....
While the wage paid is 75 and 85 cents a day, the poor
slaves are not permitted to work more than three or four days
a week, and the continual threat of idle days makes the slaves
much more tractable and submissive. 9
Jones and other labor organizers, many of whom were women, were
interested in empowering women, not protecting them-a position
that struck at the heart of the_ social purity movement's ideas about
womanhood and domesticity.
A Dangerous Purity 89
While both the labor and social purity groups were abolition-
. ist, there were disagreements on race politics. Many people in the
social purity movement were wedded to a model of racial purity that
placed the "white race" above all others. They imagined the dangers
of race and sex to be strikingly similar. Often they linked nonwhite
races to sexual impurity and immoral sexual behaviors, including
unrestrained sexual desire, rape, and "unspeakable acts" (a euphe-
mism for same-sex sexual activity). Racial purity was intrinsic to
their quest for purifying American culture and ensuring their class
status.
M. Carey Thomas-who was passionately involved with women
her entire adult life and who, as president of Hryn Mawr, profoundly
shaped women's education in the United States-believed in white
racial superiority. She refused to allow any Jewish faculty mem-
bers at the school and frequently questioned the ability of nonwhite
people to be educated. Frances Willard, also involved in passionate
female-female relationships, voiced sentiments indicative of social
purity politics in an I890 newspaper column about temperance,
Northern immigration, and race in the South:
I think we have wronged the South, though we did not mean
to do so. The reason was, in part, that we had irreparably
wronged ourselves by putting no safeguard on the ballot-box
at the North that would sift out alien illiterates. They rule
our cities to-day; the saloon is their palace, and the toddy
stick their sceptre. It is not fair that they should vote, nor is it fair that a plantation negro, who can neither read nor write,
whose ideas are bounded by the fence of his own field and the
price of his own mule, should be entrusted with the ballot ....
The Anglo-Saxon race will never submit to be dominated
by the negro so long as his altitude reaches no higher than the
personal liberty of the saloon. 10
Willard's words did not go uncontested. Ida B. Wells, the African
American activist who was a central leader in antilynching cam-
paigns of the time, accused the temperance leader of "condoning
fraud, violence, murder, at the ballot box; rapine, shooting, hang-
90 A Queer History of the United States
ing, and burning; for all these things are done and being done now
by the Southern white people." 11
Wells was decisive in exposing the murderous physical reality
that logically resulted from Willard's political principles. Her words
also highlight how the tension between progressive reform and the
social purity movement continued to yoke together race and sex as
the battlefield on which an American sexuality was defined. In The Souls of Black Folk (I903), his defining look at race relations in the United States, W. E. B. Du Bois stated that "the problem of the
Twentieth Century is the problem of color line." The problem of
the color line had always been intertwined with the problems
of sexuality and gender.
The African American and newly identified "homosexual" com-
munities were shaped, in part, in reaction to mainstream oppressive
ideologies predicated on ideas about social purity. The terms "ho-
mosexual" and "heterosexual," which emerged from the European
medical-legal discourse, had a firmer claim on the public discourse
and imagination than did Whitman's "comrade." They fit perfectly
into the social purity movement's increasingly pseudo-scientific
thinking that negatively categorized groups and behavior. Jona-
than Ned Katz documents how the American medical establishment
quickly used these new ideas to pathologize and further criminalize
women and men who engaged in same-sex sexual activity.
The word "homosexual" was first used in the United States in an , ·je,
I892 article by Dr. James G. Kiernan, a noted Chicago neurologist,
in which he stated that homosexuals were persons whose "general
mental state is that of the opposite sex." Later in the article he dis-
cussed two cases of women murdering their lovers:
Sexual pervert crimes of all types are likely to increase, be-
cause of newspaper agitation of the subject, among hysteri-
cal females, from a desire to secure the notoriety dear to the
hysteric heart. All such cases should be carefully scrutinized,
and the mere existence of the alleged perversion should never
be admitted as proof of irresponsibility .... Each case should
be tried on its own merits, and the exact mental state of the
accused determined. 12
A Dangerous Purity 91
Kiernan's article was followed by many others on the subject of ho-
mosexuality. Kiernan's messages are mixed: homosexuality is linked
to crime, but it may not be the cause of the crime. Cultural historian
Lisa Duggan analyzes the racializing of sexuality in one of the cases
Kiernan discussed. She traces the practice of lynching to institution-
alized violence against perceived deviance from traditional gender
and sexual roles.
In I893 Dr. F. E. Daniel, editor of The Texas Medical Journal, gave a speech, later reprinted multiple times, titled "Should Insane
Criminals or Sex Perverts Be Permitted to Procreate?" He argued
that it is more humane to castrate sex criminals than to execute
them or spend public money on imprisonment. 13 This reasoning is
a logical outcome of the social purity movement's desire to curb
all forms of lust and restructure society on an ideal of sexual and
reproductive purity. Daniel explicitly placed his arguments in the
context of creating a "sanitary utopia" based on both purity and ap-
plied eugenics, a theory and practice of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries designed to improve society through elective
human reproduction.
The "sanitary utopia" of the social purists was the nightmarish
opposite of the utopian visions of the more radical strands of the la-
bor movement and the African American civil rights movement. All
three emerged in response to the circumstances of mid-nineteenth-
century America. The latter two embraced two different political
languages, both of which stood in stark opposition to the ideol- ogy of social purity. Some labor organizers embraced anarchism, a
wide-ranging political philosophy that espoused, as an alternative to
government, the option of self-regulation by citizens. Most African
Americans, however, sought more protection from the state against
lynching and other forms of racial violence. They also looked for
more inclusion in the state to attain equal status with white people.
A similar divide can be seen in the struggle of same-sex-desiring
people: the broad project of sexual liberation (which would free peo-
ple from the bonds of sexual repression) and the legal reform move-
ments (which would fight to change laws that prohibit or repress
certain sexual acts, behaviors, or identities). The decisive difference
between the two political philosophies affected how Americans con-
92 A Queer History of the United States
structed political movements concerning sexuality, especially homo-
sexuality. The stark difference between them is evident in two major
political events that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century:
the I886 Haymarket riot and the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Fer-
guson. Each event would have political reverberations throughout
the twentieth century.
In May I886, labor organizers planned a week of national ral-
lies in major cities to support the eight-hour work day. (At the time,
workers were expected to be on the job a minimum of twelve hours
a day.) At least 400,000 women, men, and children went on strike
or marched. Most of the rallies were peaceful, but in Chicago, police
shot and killed two workers at a local factory. The next day, labor
supporters met in Chicago's Haymarket Square to protest police
violence. During the rally, a pipe bomb was thrown at police of-
ficers, who then shot into the crowd. Chaos ensued, leaving eight
dead. Eight anarchists were arrested for murder; four were hanged.
The case, now considered a miscarriage of justice, created an inter-
national furor. It became a symbol of state suppression of legitimate
political activism and a rallying cry for grassroots organizing.
In I892 Homer Plessy, with the support of the Committee of Citi-
zens, an all-black New Orleans group that promoted racial justice,
refused to sit in the "colored" car of the East Louisiana Railroad.
In a 7-I decision handed down in Plessy v. Ferguson on May I8, I896, the Supreme Court affirmed racial segregation in the United '., States through the concept of.}'separate but equal." This decision
reaffirmed the concept, embedded in slavery, that certain classes
of individuals did not have complete equality under the rule of law.
Plessy's actions and the ensuing court case were a harbinger of the
future use of civil disobedience to resist unlawful authority, as well
as of the limits of the legal system.
The Haymarket incident and the Plessy case illustrate two fun-
damental American models for organized political resistance. The
labor movement's model of organizing is grassroots based and relies
on challenging state authority with demands for justice. (The vio-
lence at the Chicago rally was not part of this model; it was initiated
by the police.) This model functions outside of the accepted, legally
sanctioned social and judicial system; it claims its authority in a
A Dangerous Purity 93
code of ethics based on human dignity and the innate worth of the
individual. In I984 Audre Lorde, a black lesbian feminist theorist and poet, would state this idea as "the master's tools will never dis-
mantle the master's house." The second model of resistance, as seen
in Plessy v. Ferguson, is predicated in the belief that the existing sys- tem can fix itself when challenged through proper channels of social
or legal appeal. It acknowledges, however, that the existing system
is often constructed to avoid such appeals, and allows for breaking
the law-Henry David Thoreau's concept of civil disobedience-in
order to correct the injustices. Although Plessey's civil disobedience
was effective in bringing the case to court, it would not be until
I954, in Brown v. Board of Education, that the Supreme Court outlawed segregation.
These alternative models have been the bedrock for the LGBT
liberation and equal rights movements that began to come into ex-
istence in I950. The structures of racial prejudice and resistance to
racism have profoundly shaped how Americans have conceptualized
and responded to most problems of social inequality. In this context, questions of sexuality and gender inequality have been fitted into
paradigms created to understand racial prejudice. The movement
to free homosexuals from oppression has become predominantly a
legal, rights-based movement. This approach has largely eclipsed the
idea of a sexual liberation movement and narrowed its vision to a
simple struggle for legal equality.
Many American anarchist theorists, including Emma Goldman,
Alexander Berkman, Ben Reitman, Benjamin Tucker, and Leonard
Abbott-all of whom drew inspiration from Whitman-were in the
forefront of addressing the role of sexuality in U.S. society as a po-
litical issue. They believed that it was unethical for the state to have
any role in personal affairs. Benjamin Tucker wrote in his I895 State
Socialism and Anarchism that anarchists "acknowledge and defend the right of any man and woman, or men and women, to love each
other for as long or as short a time as they can, will, or may. To them
legal marriage and legal divorce are equal absurdities." 14 Tucker's
ideas dovetail with those of Victoria Woodhull. According to Ter-
ence Kissack, Tucker believed that "anarchists look upon attempts
to arbitrarily suppress vice as themselves cr_imes." 15
94 A Queer History of the United States
Emma Goldman wrote several times about homosexuality. Here
she describes a conversation with Dr. Eugene Schmidt in Paris in
I900:
I told the doctor of the indignation I had felt at the [I895] con-
viction of Oscar Wilde. I had pleaded his case against the mis-
erable hypocrites who had sent him to his doom. "You!" the
doctor exclaimed in astonishment, "why, you must have been
a mere youngster then. How did you dare come out in public
for Oscar Wilde in puritan America?" "Nonsense!" I replied;
"no daring is required to protest against a great injustice." 16
Margaret Anderson, who with her lover Jane Heap edited the ex-
perimental literary journal The Little Review, was a close friend of Goldman's in the mid-teens. Anderson suggested that, as historian
Margaret Marsh puts it, "homosexuality might be a more normal
form of sexual behavior than heterosexuality" and that "she and her
friends represented the link between the anarchist-feminist idea of
sexual liberation as one component ... of a society of freely cooper- ating individuals." 17
These anarchist writings about homosexuality are a radical break
from most thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries. They argue that sexuality is natural and positive, that sex can
be solely about pleasure and, if consensual, should not be the subject
of any laws. These basic precepi; about sexuality, and homosexual-
ity, that are present today in the LGBT movement-both its libera-
tory and civil rights sides-find their roots in anarchist thinking.
The labor movement profoundly influenced the LGBT move-
ment by conceptualizing workers not as individuals, but as a class of
people who are treated unjustly. The early labor organizations-in
particular the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the
Wobblies, which had over one million members in I923-concep-
tualized a worldwide movement based on identity and group status.
This concept is the historical basis for the thinking of Harry Hay
(whose membership in the Wobblies was formative to his political
education) when he founded the Mattachine Society, an early homo-
sexual rights group, in I950.
A Dangerous Purity 95
Comparisons of other political movements to the LGBT move-
ment are always inexact. Homosexuals are not a specific racial or
ethnic group. They are not a class bound by a type of employment
or harmed by a similar economic injustice. In organizing politically,
homosexuals predicate their group status on a presumption of shared
injustice. As individuals, their experiences are so varied that any all-
encompassing type of organizing is difficult or inapplicable. In many
ways the LGBT movement is unique; it is able to draw upon, but not
totally conform to, other forms of political organizing.
THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE
If the nascent LGBT movement was to organize itself and be taken seriously by the law, it needed language with authority. An-
archists understood the power of words. In the I88os Angela and
Ezra Heywood, who published the free love journal the Word, argued that the use of plain Anglo-Saxon words such as "cock,"
"cunt," and "fuck" would demystify sexuality, reduce individual
shame, and liberate women. (In I873 Ezra Haywood had been sen-
tenced to prison for using the U.S. Postal Service to mail copies of
his free love pamphlet Cupid's Yokes.) 18 This political position was antithetical to the social purity movement, which sought to suppress
sexual speech. In the midst of these extremes, the new discipline of sexology
gained authority through language. (Sexology was, to some degree,
an extension of the Enlightenment's desire to prove everything ra-
tionally.) The scientific discovery of "homosexuality" generated
language that promoted more open discussion about the subject.
Ironically, it immediately led to a clear articulation of negative ste-
reotypes about homosexuals. For the first time in U.S. history, same-
sex-desiring people could now feel diseased. The most common sexological theory of same-sex desire was that
it was the result of physical, emotional, or psychological "inver-
sion." In other words, the gender of persons who desired their own sex was somehow reversed. When a man desired a man, it was actu-
ally a woman-presumably existing within the man's body-who
96 A Queer History of the United States
was desiring a man. When a woman desired a woman, it was actu-
ally a male essence within the woman's body who felt that desire.
This metaphysical explanation, accepted as scientific (at this
point of the emergence of psychology as a science), had a substantial
effect on the public imagination for the next fifty years. It became
how many people understood the phenomenon of same-sex desire.
Theories of inversion were published widely, and sexologists were
understood by the average person to be the experts on a "new sci-
ence." The idea of the "invert," or "third sex," also quickly and
profoundly informed two popular and lasting stereotypes: the man-
nish lesbian and the effeminate homosexual man. (Although there
were preexisting stereotypes of the effeminate male, sexological tax-
onomy invented him as a homosexual man.) Anthropologist Esther Newton notes that the concept of the mas-
culine woman who loves other women made emotional sense to both
homosexuals and heterosexuals, because it played into the popular
idea that if sexual desire is masculine, then a woman who desires a
woman must be mannish. 19 Lillian Faderman argues that the man-
nish lesbian was a break from the concept of romantic friendship,
because her masculinity gave her access to sexuality. This new step
in how mainstream culture understood sexual attraction between
women made the concept of the romantic friendship-so integral
to personal and social acceptance of both female and male same-
sex relationships-impossible: 2~, The mannish lesbian was also used in the popular imagination t&,_"explain," as well as demonize, the
new twenti;th-century woman who was active in the public sphere,
including the suffragette. The mannish lesbian was not, however,
conflated with the well-known concept of the "passing woman"-a
woman who dressed to pass as a man, like the Civil War soldiers-
which was understood as a masquerade, not an identity.
The early sexologists created a space for homosexuals to tell
their stories. This new form of "scientific" autobiography allowed
women and men to clearly describe their sexual histories. The fol-
lowing autobiography of a patient was included in "Sexual Crimes,"
an 1894 article by Charles Gilbert Chaddock, a leading American
neurologist:
A Dangerous Purity 97
The knowledge that I am so unlike others makes me very
miserable. I form no acquaintances outside of business, keep
~ostly to myself, and ... do not indulge my sexual feelings
.... I do not want to create the impression that my feel-
ings for my own sex are weak, for they are strong; but I have
heretofore had sufficient will-power to restrain them .... My
desire ... has always been to handle the genitals of those for
whom I feel affection and to have them do the same to me. 21
The existence of forthright personal narratives that overtly ad-
mitted to same-sex desire was a major advance toward a public ho-
mosexual identity. The link between medical discourse and openly
pro-homosexual literature is clear in this excerpt from Edward
Prime-Stevenson's 1906 Imre: A Memorandum. Prime-Stevenson wrote the novel under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne and had it pri-
vately printed in Naples. Here Oswald, the main character, tells his life story to his lover:
From the time when I was lad ... I felt myself unlike other
boys in one element of my nature. That one matter was my
special sense, my passion for the beauty, ·the dignity, the
charm, the-what shall I say-the loveableness of my own
sex. I hid it, at least so far as, little by little, I came to realize its
force. For, I soon perceived that most other lads had no such
passional sentiments. 22
In his widely read 1912 Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist~ Alexan- der Berkman, who was Emma Goldman's lover, offers an example
of how same-sex desire need not be explained through sexological
language. In the book, he wrote at length about male homosexuality
in prison. His series of portraits of intensely emotional male-male
relationships, some of which include sexual intimacy, are extraor-
dinary for the time. In the chapter "Passing the Love of Woman"
(the title is a common literary reference to the relationship between
the biblical David and Jonathan and to male homosexuality), af-
ter Berkman relates his own experience of a passionate male-male
98 A Queer History of the United States
friendship, a friend and fellow prisoner named George tells Berk-
man about his relationship with a younger man:
For two years I loved him without the least taint of sex desire.
It was the purest affection I ever felt in my life. It was all-
absorbing, and I would have sacrificed my life for him if he
had asked it. But by degrees the psychic stage began to mani-
fest all the expressions of love between the opposite sexes. I
remember the first time he kissed me .... Never in my life had
I experienced such bliss as at that moment. It's five years ago,
but it thrills me every time I think of it .... From then on we
became lovers. 23
Berkman's Memoirs brought anarchist theories, as well as radical
sexual ideas, to ""a wide range of readers. Unlike others who wrote
about sexuality at the time, Berkman explicitly discussed the reality
and importance of masturbation. His was also one of the first books
to discuss the homosexual behavior of young men, who as a g.roup
would not be acknowledged until later in the century. True-life accounts could easily reinforce ideas about gender and
defined categories of sexual orientation. Autobiography of an An-
drogyne was a I9I9 memoir by Earl Lind, who also called himself Ralph Werther and went by the name Jennie June when dressed as a
woman. In this remarkable book, the author understands his condi- ~ "!§•.
tion as being congenital: ·?Jo·
As to my own feminine characteristics, I have been told by
my intimate associates from boyhood down to my middle for-
ties-when this book goes to press-that I markedly resemble
a female physically, besides having instinctive gestures, poses,
and habits that are characteristically feminine. ~y school-
mates said that I would make a good-looking girl and that
kissing me was "as good as kissing a girl.." 24
Lind identifies himself as a "fairie," an "invert," a "homosexual,"
and an "androgyne" and compares himself to the Sleeping Her-
maphrodite, the famous Greek sculpture that inspired Julia Ward
A Dangerous Purity 99
Howe's The Hermaphrodite. But in contrast to Howe's use of the image, which opened up an imaginative and expansive space for
being sexual, Lind's use was based in a scientific typology that medi-
calized his sexuality. For the time, Lind's medicalization of himself
was extreme: in his early thirties he had his testes removed because
he feared that his "emissions" were causing him health problems.
Sexology generated a broad-based public discussion about the
need for sex education and legal birth control, both of which helped
bring reproductive choices to women. It is not a coincidence that
the emergence of an affirming, clearly defined homosexual iden-
tity coincided with social changes that gave women freedom over
their bodies. The connection between the advance of widespread sex
education and birth control and the acceptance of homosexuality
was clear to Mary Casal. Her I930 autobiography (which describes • events three decades earlier), The Stone Wall, is one of the few writ-
ten accounts by a lesbian in the early twentieth century:
People are now daring to talk about birth control, and im-
portant provisions are being made for the execution of such
methods .... There is no suffering comparable to unsatisfied
sex desire, not any condition that brings about such dire re-
sults .... The time is coming when a man's love for a man and
a woman's love for a woman will be studied and understood
as it never has been in the past. 25
The dissemination of information about sexuality and reproduc-
tion, almost all of which was in a heterosexual context, was an im-
portant development in a culture in which sexuality had not been
discussed openly. The emergence of a homosexual identity that in-
creasingly refused criminalization and discrimination-what Prime-
Stevenson called "any intelligent civilization's disrespect" -related
directly to the newly emerging reproductive rights movement. Both
embodied a social ideal that reflected the integrity of the human
body and the integral importance of sexuality to the citizen. Most
important was the radical idea, literally embodied in homosexual
activity, that sex and reproduction can be completely separate, that
sex can be enjoyed without the fear of pregnancy.
100 A Queer History of the United States
This distinction between sexual activity, pleasure, and reproduc-
tion threatened the social purity advocates, who prized motherhood
and the family. Ironically, even those who advocated sexual free-
dom were often not immune to social purity ideology. Margaret
Sanger, for instance, who was highly influential in forging a national
movement for birth control and family planning, held racist, eu-
genicist views about nonwhite people. And while a firm believer in
women controlling their bodies, she was not a sexual liberationist.
She believed that "every normal man and woman has the power to
control and direct his sexual impulse. Men and woman who have
it in control and constantly use their brain cells thinking deeply,
are never sensual."26 Like the staunchest advocates of the social pu-
rity movement, she was against masturbation, which she saw as a
"revolting disease." And physical masturbation was not the only
menace:
In the boy or girl past puberty we find one of the most danger-
ous forms of masturbation, i.e., mental masturbation, which
consists of forming mental pictures, or thinking of obscene or
voluptuous pictures. This form is considered especially harm-
ful to the brain, for the habit becomes so fixed that it is almost
impossible to free the thoughts from lustful pictures. 27
Sanger's views on masturbation, seemingly at odds with her more 1" ~-
progressive stands on sexu~lity, were intimately connected with the gradual formation of a "pure" race through eugenic practices.
Sanger's objection arose from her claim that masturbation can, es-
pecially for women, be physically addictive and replace sexual in-
tercourse, thus harming the chances of genitally sound and racially
pure reproduction.
The emergence of sexology as a public way of discussing sexu-
ality increased the anxiety abo~t the rise of urban culture. Moral
guides for young women and men were increasingly popular at the
turn of the century, when many youths were moving to cities. Such
guides were often published by church groups, with a religious mes-
sage complementing the sex advice. They turned sex education into
sex regulation. Their messages echoed social purity ideologies about
A Dangerous Purity 101
what made sexuality dangerous: women were susceptible to it, and
men were irresponsible with it. (Implicit in these warnings was that
sex was dangerous for women because it "ruined" them for mar-
riage, which was the only condition within which they could survive
economically.) These books, while concerned with the dangers of
intemperate drinking, gambling, public dancing, and music halls,
were often obsessed with sex.
The I929 Helps to Purity: A Frank~ Yet Reverent Introduction
on the Intimate Matters of Personal Life for Adolescent Girls by
Rev. Fulgence Meyer, OFM, was explicit in its warnings against
masturbation. Meyer noted that "this unnatural and abominable
sin of self-abuse is committed by a girl when she voluntarily excites
and stimulates her sexual nature in a degree to bring on complete
sexual satisfaction." He we·nt on to note that "sexual gratification
is allowed only in the virtuous sexual conduct between husband
and wife" and that "sinful lovemaking, or ... immodest touches by
oneself or another, of the same of the opposite sex, or even of ani-
mals, or by some other unjustified method, is always a mortal sin."28
Meyer was careful to stipulate that immodest actions are possible
with either the same or the opposite sex, indicating that the possibil-
ity of homosexual behavior was commonplace and easily articulated
by religious instructors.
Medically based marriage guides of the early twentieth century,
such as the I926 best seller The Doctor Looks at Love and Life by Joseph Collins, MD, gave similar messages. Collins was in favor
of less sexual repression and rejected religious morality in favor of
scientific fact. He was sympathetic to the struggles women faced,
arguing that the "problem" of frigidity may well be caused by male
selfishness. He also viewed "natural homosexuals" -those born
that way-as "victims of fate," but his arguments were complicated:
There are many persons who indulge in unnatural sexual re-
lations who are not homosexuals. They are the real degen-
erates. There are many potential and actual homosexuals
whose intercourse with persons of their own sex is confined to
emotional and intellectual contacts .... They are not degener-
ates .... They are victims of Fate, the only ones who do not
102 A Queer History of the United States
excite our compassion; and all because we cannot distinguish
between the work of God and Satan. 29
In contrast to men, women, in Collins's view, more often fell into homosexuality through "bad habits, kisses, embraces, tender inti-
macies, feeblemindedness and evil companionship." 30 Echoing the
earlier religious instruction books and their concerns about leisure
time, Collins believed that homosexuality in women "flows from
idleness, boredom and loneliness, a~d its victims are as a rule un- der- or oversexed."31 Despite his relative (for the time) tolerance,
he ultimately believed that "we should rid ourselves of the notion
that we are the keepers of the natural homosexual, but we should
hearten ourselves to prevent and cure those who accidentally or
deliberately acquire vicious sexual habits." 32 Collins devoted forty
pages to discussing homosexuality, an indication of its importance
in 1920s culture.
Marriage manuals were best sellers because the average Ameri-
can wanted to read and think about sexuality. Americans discovered
that the changes wrought by the sexology movements allowed them
to have discussions not possible before. Changes in book distribu-
tion, the low cost of mass book production, and increasing literacy
rates made this information easily accessible to a huge, diverse read-
ership. Not all Americans could agree on the specifics of sex educa-
tion, but most agreed that !?$ topic should be discussed. As Estelle Freedman and John D'Emiho point out, "[B]y the 1920s circum-
stances were present to encourage acceptance of the modern idea
that sexual expression was of overarching importance to individual
happiness."33
This "modern idea" was antithetical to the social purity move-
ment, since one person's sexual expression was another's mortal sin.
The vision of social purity was fueled mainly by women and men
who were attempting to gain full citizenship for women through
suffrage and other reforms. Some, such as Frances Willard, had lives
centered on other women. Unfortunately, this vision was essentially
denying full citizenship to others, especially racial minorities. The
social purity movement also reinforced social standards that were
directly antithetical to sexual freedom and directly harmful to many
A Dangerous Purity 103
women and men who desired their own sex. These standards, predi-
cated on traditional heterosexual ideals of gender, were written into
laws clearly delineating what was legally pure and impure. That
was the language of politics. The politics of language, in contrast,
allowed for an individual interpretation that was not based on abso-
lutes. People wanted to read about sex so that they could imagine, in
private, their sexual lives. This was the underlying fear about mas-
turbation and its connection to sexual fantasies.
The articulation of sexual desire was the first step in building
a consciously constructed community of individuals who desired
others of their own sex. The hope for this community is expressed
implicitly in the patient's story from Chaddock's "Sexual Crimes"
article and explicitly in Prime'.""Stevenson's novel Imre. In both in- stances, the narrator's identity radically changes when he realizes
that he is not alone in the world. The attraction of reading such
material in private was similar to the attraction single people had
to cities in which they could find freedom. Aided by cities and the
imagination, this sense of individual freedom would complicate
the divide between public and private and blur the line between
purity and danger.