Question In Managing Sexual Behaviors in Colonial North America

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xx Introduction

entity that existed centuries before the political entity of the United

States was conceived and that continues today independent of the

Republic. "America" is a mythical entity that has no boundaries.

"America" is what people imagine it to be, as well as what people

have made it.

Gertrude Stein, the mother of all queer wit, begins her novel The

Making of Americans with the epigram, "Let me recite what history

teaches. History teaches." Stein's recitation speaks to the intrinsic

nature of my project. History teaches something new every time it is

rewritten or interpreted. Pedagogy, like history, will never be able to

contain all of America-a great country, an evil country, a place of

tremendous generosity and welcome as well as pronounced disdain

for foreigners and outsiders. America is not one thing or another.

America is queer. A Queer History of the United States is one expla-

nation of how it got that way. To become American, to benefit from

the contributions of LGBT people to this fabulous, horrible, scary,

and wonderful country we call America, is to be a little queer. As

history teaches, America only gets queerer.

ONE

THE PERSECUTING SOCIETY

If you were to ask average Americans when lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history started in this nation, some would cite the

Stonewall "riots" that took place in New York's Greenwich Village

in I969. Others might go back to 1950, when Harry Hay founded

the Mattachine Society, the first public gay group in the United

States. Some may reach back even further in th~ previous century

to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, his homoerotic poetry of

male love-what he called "male adhesiveness"-or Emily Dickin-

son's love poems to her sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert. The well-informed

might mention Deborah Sampson, an impoverished indentured ser-

vant who, as Robert Shurtliff, fought for the colonists during the

Revolutionary War.

These examples highlight some of the problems that arise in writ-

ing a queer history of the United States. What do we consider to be

gay history? How is it defined? In order to grapple with these issues

in all their complexity, I begin this history in the late fifteenth cen-

tury. The United States as a political entity will not exist for another

2 70 years. The word, and social identity, "homosexual" will not

come into being for 350 years. Yet we know there were women and

men who engaged in sexual activity with their own sex, as well those

who resisted following the accepted, enforced gender roles of their

time.

Understanding these people's lives requires understanding basic

social, political, intellectual, and psychological frameworks. To un-

derstand North America in the sixteenth century, we need to look

Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011

2 A Queer History of the United States

at the lives and cultures of the people who were here before the Eu-

ropean colonists arrived and how the clash between indigenous cul-

tures and European cultures set the stage for the next five hundred

years of United States history. Europeans came to the Americas with an extraordinarily rigorous

sense of how gender and sexuality should be organized. These strict

ideas were bulwarked by rigid civil and religious statutes. The Euro-

peans attempted to eradicate many non-European gender-normative

customs, traditions, and behaviors. They often did this through ac-

cepted practices of violence, such as capturing and enslaving non-

Christians and forced conversion. This legal and religious repression

and violence provided a template for how mainstream European

culture would treat LGBT people throughout much of U.S. history.

STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND

Numerous Europeans who journeyed to the "new" continent of

America did so for the political and economic advantage of newly

emerging and quickly growing European nation-states. Beginning

with Columbus in 1492 and continuing for over a century, Italian,

Spanish, Dutch, and British soldiers, sailors, merchants, and ad-

venturers sailed to the New World on business ventures. While this

century-long project was entrepreneurial, what continues to influ-

ence our culture today is the religious and sexual attitudes of the

Europeans. They saw the gender norms and behaviors of indigenous

peoples as markedly different from their own, even as the cultures

of individual tribes were completely different from one another.

These startling gender differences took many forms. The presence

of female divinities who were responsible for creation, or the fact

that in many nations, women were the house builders, was anti-

thetical to European theology and practice. Europeans found the

native peoples alarmingly innocent and dangerously sexual. They

were shocked that some tribes lived naked or wore few clothes, that

they engaged in a wide variety of "immoral" sexual practices-not

predicated on reproduction-and that marriage laws and traditional

European mating conventions were unknown. Particularly disturb-

The Persecuting Society 3

ing was that some cultures allowed women various degrees of sex-

ual equality. For the Europeans, the most extreme examples were

the women and men who dressed and behaved as, in their eyes, the

other sex. 1

Often referred to by French explorers as berdache-an incorrect name, implying a catamite or young male sodomite-these women

and men took on the dress and the tribal duties of the other sex.

Their roles in each culture differed. Sometimes they were placed in

socially elevated positions as religious figures, shamans, or artisans.

Among the Crows, "men who dressed as women and specialized

in women's work were accepted and sometimes honored; a woman

who led men into battle and had four wives was a respected chief."2

In some cases, these "third sex" figures were integral to traditions

of tribal violence and warfare. In some cultures young boys became

berdache through enforced, institutionalized concubinage. For ex-

ample, the Yuma, who resided in what is now Colorado, "appointed

an infant to fill the post of fourth tribal berdache. Presumably upon

growing up, this boy became a sexual resource or passive ... for the

nubile boys in the tribe." 3

Contemporary LGBT writing on gender roles in indigenous cul-

tures has often oversimplified, even sentimentalized, this history.

The systems of berdache that existed before and after the European

invasions were complicated and served different purposes for each

tribe. More fluid than European gender arrangements, the creation

of nonbinary genders was a different model and not necessarily

more liberatory. Some contemporary writers, including LGBT Na-

tive Americans, interpret the berdache as equivalent to our contem-

porary understanding of "gay." While superficial similarities exist

between behaviors in some berdache cultures and present-day gay

male, lesbian, or transgender cultures, the circumstances separating

the two are radically dissimilar.

Military men, clergy, and explorers repeatedly made connections

between indigenous people's (real and imagined) sexual practices

and their lower place in a European moral and economic hierarchy.

In his journals of I673-77, Jacques Marquette, the French Jesuit

missionary, describes berdache practices among the native peoples

he met on his first voyage down the Mississippi:

4 A Queer History of the United States

I know not through what superstition some Ilinois [sic], as well as some N adouessi, while still young, assume the of women, and retain it throughout their lives. There is some mystery in this, for they never marry and glory . in demean-

themselves to do everything that the women do. They go to war, however, but can use only clubs, and not bows and arrows, which are the weapons proper to men. They are pres- ent at all the juggleries, and at the solemn dances in honor of the Calumet; at these they sing, but must not dance. They are summoned to the Councils, and nothing can be decided with- out their advice. Finally, through their profession of leading an Extraordinary life, they pass for Manitous,-That is to say, for Spirits,-or persons of Consequence. 4

The 1702 "Memoir of Pierre Liette on the Illinois Country" notes that "the sin of sodomy prevails more among [the Miami] than in any other nation, although there are four women to one man. It is true that the women, although debauched, retain some modera- tion, which prevents the young men from satisfying their passions as much as they would like."5 In a diary from his 1775 trip to what is now California, Franciscan Pedro Font provides a lens to the way in which many Christian Europeans viewed indigenous cross-dressing figures, as well as his religious duty to them:

Among the women I saw some men dressed like women, with whom they go about regularly, never joining the men .... From this I inferred they must be hermaphrodites, but from what I learned later I understood that they were sodomites, dedi- cated to nefarious practices. From all the foregoing I conclude that in this matter of incontinence there will be much to do when the Holy Faith and the Christian religion are established among them. 6

In Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expeditions (written between 1804 and l8IO), Nicholas Biddle notes that "Among Mam- itarees if a boy shows any symptoms of effeminacy or girlish inclina- tions he is put among the girls, dressed in their way, brought up with

them, & sometimes married to men." 7 Such reports, which contin- ued to be written into the early years of the twentieth century, were mixtures of journalism and crude anthropology that emphasized the sexual and gender '~foreignness" of native people.

Violence against all native peoples, not just those that violated European gender norms, was widespread. Columbus, in his second expedition in 1495 after his search for gold faltered, invaded the interior of Haiti and abducted fifteen hundred Arawak children, women, and men to be shipped to as slaves. Of the five hun- dred slaves shipped to Spain, only three hundred arrived alive and were put up for sale by an archbishop "who reported that, although the slaves were 'naked as the day they were born/ they showed 'no more embarrassment than animals.' " 8

European religious and social thought held that people who did not adhere to Christian concepts of sexual behavior, gender affect, or modesty were less than human; they were like animals. This qualified them to be deprived of individuality, liberty, and life itself. Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, an Italian historian who documented the military campaigns of Spanish explorers, notes in his 1516 De Orbe Novo that Vasco Nunez de Balboa had vicious mastiffs rip apart forty Panamanian men dressed as women who were engaging in sodomy with other men. This account was the first mention of berdache in European literature.

PURITANISM: THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COMMUNITY

France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain viewed the Americas as potential financial and political windfalls, and they . embarked on myriad destructive colonization projects. The British, however, had the most influence on what was to become the United States. French and Spanish cultural legacies-especially a tradition of Roman Catholicism-arc integral to American identity, but Eng- lish common law and British Protestantism overwhelmingly shaped American thinking and culture, particularly in relationship to sex- ual behavior and gender.

British colonies grew rapidly: Jamestown, founded in 1607,

6 A Queer History of the United States

quickly began to ship raw materials back to England. In r620 just

over one hundred British "Pilgrims," members of a radical religious

separatist group, landed in what is now Massachusetts and signed

the Mayflower Compact, the template for self-governance in the

newly forming colonies. Ten years later, nearly a thousand Puritans

fled religious persecution in England and, under the leadership of

John Winthrop, formed. a self-ruling community and established

the city of Boston. The growth of the colonies was the beginning of

a distinctly new colonist culture that was intent on defining itself.

The Puritans' view of the world and sexuality-which would have

a tremendous effect on America-was shaped by their experiences

in Great Britain before arriving in the New World. The Reforma-

tion and the founding of the Anglican church by Henry VIII in 1534

brought about the collapse of a cohesive Roman Catholic polity in

Europe. From 1558 to 1649 Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I ruled England and the colonies. During that time English culture accepted

and promoted a wide range of diverse, sometimes conflicting, views

about sexuality and gender. These ideas were intimately connected

with how Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan culture thought about

religion and religious practice. Cross-dressing-which had been

condemned by Catholic theologians such as Augustine and Tertul-

lian since the second century-was a mandated theatrical conven-

tion, since women were not allowed to perform on the stage. There

was an enormous public fascination with female cross-dressing, as

witnessed by several plays. For instance, Thomas Middleton and

Thomas Dekker's popular 1607 play The Roaring Girl dramatized

the life and celebrated cross-dressing criminal career of Mary Frith,

who was also known as Moll Cutpurse. Ben Johnson's 1609 play

Epicoene revolved around cross-dressing and included numerous

allusions to same-sex sexual behavior.

Social and legal prohibitions against same-sex activity in Eliza-

bethan England were applied haphazardly. Same-sex relationships

were illegal, but the culture was accepting enough to allow for pub-

lic representation and discussion of same-sex attraction and sexual

behavior. Christopher Marlow was widely rumored to have sex with

men and was accused, during a trial for heresy, of stating that "all

they that love not tobacco and boys are fools." More shocking, he

The Persecuting Society 7

is alleged to have proclaimed that "St. John the Evangelist was bed-

fellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him

as the sinners of Sodom." Marlow's 1592 play Edward II detailed

the death of an English monarch murdered, in part, because of his

relationship with Piers Gaveston. Shakespeare's sonnets are filled

with gender and sexuality ambiguity that give us a sense of the wide

range of what was culturally permissible during the Elizabethan era.

Furthermore, James I, who reigned from 1603 to 1625, was widely

understood to have had erotic relationships with court "favorites"

such as George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham-even as his

treatise Basilikon Doran lists sodomy among crimes "ye are bound

in conscience never to forgive."

In response to this sexually permissive behavior-as well as the

economic and class dissatisfaction that eventually led to the English

Civil War and the beheading of Charles I in 1649-highly politi-

cized, radical religious groups dissented from the Church of Eng-

land. The theological and political range of these groups, which

included the Levelers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Quakers, and Puri-

tans, was broad, but they all sought radical reorganization of British

society. Ranters and Levelers were utopian and anarchistic, seek-

ing to eliminate class and economic privilege and rejecting norms

around sexual behavior. They rejected so much traditional Christian

doctrine that mainstream social and religious leaders accused them

of licentiousness and were suspicious of their views about gender be-

havior. Quakers were considered particularly dangerous, since they

rejected established government, forbade men to carry arms or fight,

and encouraged women to speak at religious meetings.

The Puritans not only rejected the Church of England, but also

rejected what they saw as the political and social excesses of the

other dissenting groups. They critiqued the Church of England for

veering toward Rome and wanted to return it to a "pure" state. All

of the Protestant sects in England and throughout Europe viewed

the Roman Catholic Church as emblematic of the decadent sensi-

bility, including sexual profligacy, that they witnessed in England.

They commonly referred to the Papacy as "the painted whore of

Babylon" and viewed Italian culture itself as promoting sexually de-

viant, same-sex acts. Daniel Defoe, in his I703 poem "A True Born

a A History of the United States

Englishman," opined "Lust chose the Torrid Zone of Italy I Where Blood ferments Rapes and Sodomy.,,

Not accepted by others, and not accepting of them back, the Puri- tans fled England. They explicitly understood their emigration as an exodus, a direct analogy to the Jews leaving for Israel, seeking a promised land and freedom. John Winthrop, in his famous 1630 sermon "A Model of Christian Charity," likened the new colony to

old Jerusalem: a "city upon a hill." When the Puritans established a religious society in the colonies,

they were determined to ensure that its members did not fall prey to the temptations and errors they had left behind in England. There- fore they enacted strict legal sanctions against deviance from sexual and gender norms. Many of these norms directly impacted people who sexually desired members of their own sex or who challenged traditional gender roles. Sodomy laws in Europe and America were not specifically aimed at same-sex activity; they were intended to punish all nonreproductive sexual activity. Laws passed in the colo- nies to instill personal and social sexual morality were most often an amalgam of preexisting British law, such as Henry VIII's Buggery Act of i533, and biblical injunctions, in particular Leviticus 20:13. Dozens of these laws existed in the new colonies. They varied widely in specifics-some laws targeted public masturbation rather than anal sex-but they all had two commonalities: they used phrases such as "abomination" and "the unspeakable crime and they considered such crimes capital offenses.9

nature,"

Whatever the law, Puritans were having sex. Historian Rich- ard Godbeer notes that more than one hundred women were con- victed of having children out of wedlock in Essex County (in the Bay Colony) between 1640 and 1685, and that the Suffolk County Court adjudicated over two hundred of cases of illicit sex during the r67os. 10 Clearly, as indicated by the ever-increasing birthrate in the second half of the seventeenth century, husbands and wives were actively procreating. 11 And other forms of sexual activity were not unknown. The Problems of Aristotle, a late seventeenth-century sex manual read in the colonies, discussed oral sex in the question of whether "carnal copulation [can] be done by the mouth." Although such nonreproductive sexual information may have met with some

The Persecuting Society 9

disapproval, it was nevertheless available and part of public dis- course.12

There were, without a doubt, women and men who desired and interacted sexually with members of their own sex. Over time, sod- omy laws were used more often against same-sex coupling than opposite-sex coupling, and some men, and occasionally women, were punished for their sexual actions. Because most sexual behav- ior is private, much of the information we have about same-sex ac- tivity is from court cases or other public records, which provide a vivid but incomplete sense of the time.

Historian Jonathan Ned Katz charts numerous incidents of men being punished, sometimes by death, for sodomy. In I624 the Vir- ginia colony hanged Richard Cornish, a ship's master, for sexually assaulting a younger shipmate. 13 In 1629 Rev. Francis Higginson noted in his diary that during his trip to the Massachusetts colony, five "beastly Sodomiticall boyes" were caught engaging in sexual activity and sent to be punished, potentially by death, in England. 14

In his midcentury journals, John Winthrop wrote of Plaine of Guil- ford "being discovered to have used some unclean practices .... He had committed sodomy with two persons in England. And had cor- rupted a great part of the youth of Guilford by masturbations, which he had committed, and provoked others to the like above a hundred times.''15 We can assume that there was public concern about sex between women, or that it was occurring, since Rhode Island's 1647 law and New Haven's 1655 law both explicitly prohibit sexual activ- ity between women.

It is misleading, however, to think that Puritan legal culture lantly sought out and punished all sexual transgressions immedi- ately and with the same ferocity. The case of Nicholas Sension of Windsor, Connecticut, is a good example. Sension was married and childless. From the 1640s to I677, when Sension was brought be- fore the colony's General Court for sodomy charges, he had a long and fairly well-known history of propositioning men for sex, offer-

to pay for sex, and sexually assaulting male servants. Although town elders had admonished Sension in the late 1640s and again in the late 1660s, he was not formally charged for another decade. While some of his neighbors disapproved of his behavior, there was

10 A Queer History of the United States

a general consensus not to bring formal legal charges. Historians

speculate that some of Sension's activity was with willing partners

and was viewed, by enough people, as moderately acceptable. Per-

haps Sension's status in the community protected him, or the fact

that many of his partners were men of lesser social rank may have

lent his crimes a lower profile. Sension's trial in 1677 resulted in his

being convicted of attempted sodomy. He was whipped, publicly shamed on a gallows with a rope around his neck, and "his entire

estate was placed in bond for his good behavior."16

Windsor's laxness in prosecuting Sension may have been because

his sexual activity took place in private. While his actions were cer-

tainly considered grievously illegal and immoral, as private acts they

had less impact on the community than, say, an act of adultery,

which might result in pregnancy or the dissolution of a marriage.

Puritans in the colonies viewed marriage as a civil contract, not a sacrament, and were concerned about the impact of divorce on the

community, generally permitting it only for abandonment. Non-

marital sexuality was immoral because it did not contribute to the

family on which society organized. The Puritans had fled Great Britain to secure religious freedom

for themselves, not others; they never intended to found a democ-

racy. John Winthrop was clear: "If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy, first we should have no warrant

in scripture for it: for there was no such government in Israel. ...

A democracy is, amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and

worst of all forms of government. [To allow it would be] a manifest

breach of the 5th Commandment" (honor your father and mother). 17

For the Puritans, the family was central to religious and civil society;

immoral and illegal acts that, by taking place in private, did not

directly threaten it may have been viewed with some leniency. We have a few clues about how men like Sension related (likely in

private) to others who engaged in similar behavior, or what kind of

nonfamilial community they formed. The Boston Gay History Proj-

ect examined court records between 1636 and 1641 of men accused of sodomy, "lude behaviour and unclean carriage" and charted what

appears to be a series of relationships among a number of men, in-

cluding Thomas Roberts, John Alexander, Abraham Pottle, and

The Persecuting Society 11

George Morrey. In 1640, when the court ordered Thomas Roberts to no longer live with George Morrey, it is possible to infer that what

was worrisome to the judiciary was not a personal and possibly sex-

ual relationship, but the publicness of men with such reputations

living together. 18 Did these men, who may all have been involved in

sexual relationships with one another, see themselves as part of a

minority community? Did their sexual activity give them a specific

personal or social identity, or sense of a sexual self, even if the con-

cept of "gay" did not exist?

Personal diaries and letters must be interpreted in historical con-

text. When a letter writer uses elaborately passionate language, as

Susanna Anthony did when writing to Sarah Osborn in the early

eighteenth century-"my bosom friend, I feel my love to you to be

without dissimulation, therefore wish you the same strength and consolation, with my own soul"-can we presume an erotic intent? 19

Conversely, there is a long history of interpreters of historical mate-

rial who refuse to see any same-sex desire in letters and diaries. If we acknowledge that some personal writings attest to the presence

of same-sex desire, we then must discern what these erotic feelings

meant to the writer.

The diaries of Michael Wigglesworth exemplify this point. As a

tutor at Harvard College in 1653, the distraught, twenty-three-year- old Wigglesworth wrote in his diary, "Such filthy lust flowing from

my fond affection to my pupils whiles in their presence on the third

day after noon that I confess myself an object of God's loathing as

my sin is my own; and pray God make it no more to me." Is this

passage proof that Wigglesworth experienced same-sex desires, and

given Puritan culture, he felt guilt? Historian Alan Bray notes that

a close reading of the diary also indicates that while Wigglesworth

may have understood his sexual thoughts as incongruent with his

morality, they were, because they were involuntary, less of a prob-

lem than the intense emotion that accompanied them. These intense

feelings were a sin, because they were dangerously discordant with

the Puritan concept of individualism that demanded, especially for

men, emotional control. According to Bray, Wigglesworth's "sin"

was feeling emotions too strongly, not necessarily the content of the

feelings. 20

12 A Queer History of the United States

After considering the place of privacy, family, and community in understanding same-sex activity in early colonial culture, it is also important to examine this culture's relationship to the body. The Puritans in the colonies were on a distinct social and religious mission. While they were reacting against what they perceived as the sexual excesses of Elizabethan culture-they would have disap- proved of Shakespeare's overt sexual puns as being immodest-this was not because they thought pleasure inherently bad. Rather, Puri- tan theology promoted the intrinsic worth and holiness of the body. This is one of the central reasons the Puritans called for the indi- vidual to have a personal, direct relationship with God. As authority in England was being deeply questioned, Puritans were attempting to "find a new master in themselves, a rigid self-control shaping a new personality. Conversion, sainthood, repression, collective disci- pline, were the answer to the unsettled conditions of society, the way to creating a new order through creating new men." 21 The Puritans readily acknowledged sexual desire and pleasure but insisted that it needed to be expressed within the sanctity of marriage, for the sake

of the family, community, and individual. "Society," claims Alan Bray, "is a process," and nowhere is this

more evident than in Puritan life in the American colonies. 22 The "process" of Puritan society was found in the need to constantly re- focus on theological "purity" -the essence of holiness and social or- der. However, the exigencies of surviving in this new land presented situations that led even the strictest Puritans to compromise some principles. Also, as exemplified by Wigglesworth, strictly articulated sexual mores were often not followed in the letter or even the spirit

of the law. Puritanism was an experiment of a particular form of social and

religious organization, not an arbitrarily repressive system. Puri- tanism was not, as twentieth-century social critic and wit H. L. Mencken famously defined it, "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy." Puritan children were permitted simple toys and games when they were not doing chores or studying the Bible. Puritans allowed moderate drinking. While not sartorially ex- travagant, they did not adopt the plain dress of Quakers, but allowed color and some ornamentation. (All the colonies had laws regulating

The Persecuting Society 13

dress, usually with the intent of maintaining class distinctions, but in I696 Massachusetts passed a law that explicitly forbade cross- dressing. Some historians argue that this law was intended to curb the possibility of same-sex sexual encounters.) 23 While procreative sex between a husband and wife was the only officially acceptable mode of sexual activity, some statistics show that at least IO percent of Puritan marriage occurred after a pregnancy, and premarital sex generally went unpunished if it resulted in a stable marriage.

The individual soul was the life of the Puritan community and, conversely, the community was an embodiment of the soul. The con~ cept of the individual was inseparable from the concept of com- munity. It was vital, then, that the structures of this community be stable.

As a theologically based society, Puritans acted harshly toward religious diversity. In I634, when Salem, Massachusetts, pastor Roger Williams was accused of spreading "diverse, new, and danger- ous opinions"~advocating more religious freedom and toleration of native peoples-he was exiled. (The commonwealth law under which Williams was exiled was not repealed until I936.) Upon leav- ing the Bay Colony, he founded Providence Plantations, now Rhode Island. Three years later Anne Hutchinson was imprisoned, then exiled from Massachusetts Bay Colony, for dissenting from Puri- tan doctrine, freely interpreting the Bible, preaching as a woman, and running Bible study groups for women. She and her followers settled in Providence Plantations. Massachusetts Bay Colony minis- ters labeled Hutchinson a "Jezebel" -the implication being that she, like the figure from the Book of Judges, was a sexually dangerous woman. Hutchinson's theological boldness caused others to view her behavior as gender deviance. "You have stepped out of your place," noted one minister. "You have rather been a husband than a wife, a preacher than a hearer, and a magistrate than a subject." Over the decades, Providence Plantations became, for its time, a progressive colony. Capital punishment was rare, and debtors' pris- ons and trials for witchcraft were abolished. In I652 it was the first colony to ban all slavery, regardless of color.

In 1624 Thomas Morton and others, including thirty male inden- tured servants, founded a decidedly non-Puritan colony in Wollas-

14 A History of the United States

ton, now the township of Quincy outside of Boston. They named the colony Merrymount, punning on Mare-Mount and Mary-Mount, direct references to bestial sodomy and Roman Catholicism. Morton befriended the local Algonquian tribe, whose culture he admired, and urged intermarriage between native women and male colonists. He also released the indentured servants and made them equal "con- sociates." In 1627 he erected an eighty-foot-tall maypole with buck's horns attached to the top (indicative of the sexualized god Pan or, from a Puritan view, Satan) and held, as was customary in medieval England, revels. Morton declared himself a Lord of Misrule.

Morton understood the sexual implications of his permissive agenda. In one of his writings about Merrymount, he noted that "there was likewise a merry song made, which [to make their rev- els more fashionable] was sung with a corus, every man bearing his part; which they performed in a dance, hand in hand about the May-pole, whilst one of the company sung, and filled out the good liquor like Gammedes and Jupiter." 24 His invoking Gammedes (Ganymede) and Jupiter (the Roman name for Zeus) in Elizabethan culture was a clear reference to the archetypical male lovers in Greek mythology.

The reaction of the Puritans was immediate. William Bradford wrote in Of Plimoth Plantation, "They ... set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the In- dian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians." While Morton and his rapidly growing small colony posed no direct threat to Plymouth Colony, Bradford felt challenged enough to attack Merrymount and arrest its leader. In 1629 Morton was sent back to England. Mer- rymount was dismantled and its community dispersed. In London, Morton wrote political tracts that accused the Puritans of many crimes, including a fear of the native peoples that manifested itself in near-genocidal behaviors.

Expulsion from the Bay Colony was a mild punishment com- pared to death. The Puritans did execute women and men who they believed posed a danger to the community's spiritual and political

The Persecuting Society 15

life. In 16 5 8 the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill banning all Quakers from the colony under pain of death. Under this law, Mary Dyer and four other Quakers, known as the Boston Martyrs, were hanged on the Boston Common.

Unrepentant Quakers were jailed, as were others who contested Puritan doctrine. Ann Glover, for example, was an elderly Irish woman sold into slavery by Oliver Cromwell in 1650. She was a practicing Catholic who also spoke Gaelic. She was accused of be- ing a witch-historically, in Europe, an accusation primarily aimed at women-and hanged on the Boston Common in 1688. Cotton Mather noted that she was ''a scandalous old Irishwoman, very poor, a Roman Catholic and obstinate in idolatry." Within the gendered, parental hierarchy of the family in Puritan society, hus- bands and fathers were heads of households, and wives and children were beholden to them. This is why Puritans disapproved of Anne Hutchinson's preaching and were quick to accuse nontraditional women of witchcraft.

The strict laws of the Puritans regarding sexual and gender be-

havior described a "gold standard" of human behavior, the goal to which all women and men should aspire. Puritan theology under- stood that since humans were imperfect, no one could live up to this ideal. It was also unrealistic to punish everyone for every infraction. Common sense dictated that laws were enforced for the good of the community as it was understood at the moment. But the importance of striving for an ideal way of life applied equally to the communi- ties formed by Puritan dissenters, such as Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and Thomas Morton. Although Morton returned to the colonies and died there in 1647, he could never realize his vision of a more open, even utopian, society, because the constant tension between control and liberation, the state and personal liberty, could not fully accommodate "extremes."

In understanding the historical ramifications of laws that control sexual behavior, it is useful to remember that no universal baseline of appropriate sexual or gender behavior exists. "Sexual deviance" is often the cultural and political wild card used to demonize people who do not conform to certain sexual norms. Its accusation can be used by mainstream culture against marginalized groups or between

14 A History of the United States

Expulsion from the Bay Colony was a mild punishment com- pared to death. The Puritans did execute women and men who they believed posed a danger to the community's spiritual and political

The Persecuting Society 15

The strict laws of the Puritans regarding sexual and gender be-

16 A Queer History of the United States

marginalized groups themselves. We see throughout American his-

tory that restrictions LGBT people are enforced "as needed"

to maintain the contemporary status quo-a clear example of Alan

concept of society as a process. Regardless of the status quo,

process denotes adjustment, change, experiment, all in the name of

an ideal way of life that is different for everyone. The Puritans, like

most English dissenter groups, had been accused of envisioning "the

world upside down." Puritanism was, in this sense, a revolutionary

movement.

PURITY AND DANGER

Bradford's intense antagonism to Merrymount cannot be explained

simply by his disapproval of the maypole and Morton's sexual be-

haviors. It was Morton's social egalitarianism, his openness to treat-

ing the Algonquians as relative equals, and his theological liberality

that set him decisively apart from the Puritans. Bradford's actions

are understandable placed in a broader, historically complex tap-

estry of European and British history and the emergence of what

British historian R. I. Moore calls the "persecuting society." Moore

argues that during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, European so-

ciety underwent a profound and powerful transformation in which

certain minorities, such as Jews, heretics, witches, "sod-

omites," and prostitutes, were stigmatized and persecuted as groups

and often physically separated from society. This physical isolation,

which took the form of ghettos for Jews and social banishment of

lepers, was often the precondition for a wide range of harsh punish-

ments, including death. 25

Moore argues that a series of fundamental social changes-

including the rapid growth of towns and cities, broad changes in

agricultural distribution networks, and a radical shift in how hi-

erarchical power was distributed-created this new set of social

classifications. Its purpose was to create clear social and cultural

boundaries that would stabilize society by safely containing groups

designated as dangerous pollutants. This fear of pollution was less

about sex or death than about power and social standing. As Moore

The Persecuting Society 17

notes, "Pollution fear ... is the fear that the privileged feel of those

at whose expense their privilege is enjoyed."26 The colonists' seizing

of native peoples' lands was not in self-defense, but for economic

gain, resulting in the fairly rapid development of colonial capitalism.

In the European mind, the non-gender-normative and non-

sexually-normative body-however defined in each period and cir-

cumstance-was the dangerous body, the less-than-human body,

even the disposable body. This wedding of draconian moral judg-

ment to the need to separate and punish led to violence, particu-

larly sexual violence, that was to shape attitudes in future centuries.

Throughout history, sexual and gender deviance have always been

used as reasons for almost all cultures, no matter how progressive,

to deny certain people full rights as citizens.

In this view, the founding of modern society was predkated on

the creation of minority groups whose only purpose was to be vili-

fied as unclean and persecuted for the illusion of a comprehensive

sense of societal safety. This idea, based on anthropologist Mary

Douglas's widely accepted theory of purity and is helpful in

explaining broad trends in European and American culture. 27 The

idea of purifying religious and secular thought and society was at

the heart of Puritan identity. These ideas were continuous with the

long European tradition of a persecuting society and emerged at a

time of grave political and religious disruption that neatly dovetailed

with the impulse to stabilize through persecution. Through-

out American history there is a pattern of persecuted groups, like the

Puritans, treating other outsider groups in a similar manner.

Sodomy laws play a key element in structuring ideas about ac-

ceptable and unacceptable behavior in U.S. culture, and in structur-

ing society itself, because gender and sexuality are often the prime

axis by which society distinguishes between "purity" and "danger.''

These statutes are a legal device regulating all sexuality, not just

same-sex activity. Their norms include not just sexual behavior but

gender expectations as well. It is not acceptable, therefore, for a bio-

logical male to be penetrated by another male, nor is it acceptable

for women to engage in anything other than reproductive sexual

activity. This is why the legal act of "sodomy" has no articulated,

stable meaning-why in some laws it is labeled "unmentionable."

18 A Queer History of the United States

Early colonial life in the northern continent was a mass of con- tradictions. It was extraordinarily intolerant, yet often surprisingly lax. The European settlers' relations to the native peoples ranged from murderous genocide to a complex series of eroticized relation- ships. While Europeans brought with them a persecuting society, the manifestations of that society took many forms. One of the

lasting legacies of colonial social and .legal culture was the appli- cation of laws prohibiting and punishing sexual activity between people of the same sex. Treating some sexual behaviors differently because potentially they had less impact on the community had a twin effect on future American culture. It gave rise to the social (and eventual legal) concept of "consenting adults" and to a domestic-

based idea of privacy that offered protections to some people at certain points in history.

This concept of privacy, however, had another, damaging, im- pact on future social convention and law. By assigning sexuality to a private sphere, it prevented any public acknowledgment or dis- cussion of almost all sexual activity. Thus it laid the groundwork

for same-sex sexual behaviors and identities to be hidden and even considered shameful. While the Puritans rejected what they saw as sexual license or overt licentiousness in British culture, they fully ac- cepted the role of sexuality and sexual desire in everyday life. This sharp divide-not exactly a contradiction, although it may have ap- peared so later, as sexual mores in American culture became more

lenient-has remained a basic tenet of America's cultural life. The tension between the needs and demands of society and the decisions of an individual to live her or his life as part of, yet separate from, the community informed the four centuries that followed Europeans arriving in this foreign land.

TWO

SEXUALLY AMBIGUOUS REVOLUTIONS

The transition from the colonial period to the Revolutionary era,

during which a daring political experiment took root, led to the emergence of a new nation. Fundamental to this new nation was

the reshaping of ideas about gender and sexual behavior as they re- lated to the political concept of the citizen.

The period from the Pilgrims' landing to the early eighteenth

century was a time of enormous population growth. In 1700 the Anglo-European population in the Northeast was 250,000. By 1720 that number had almost doubled to 475,000. This surge in popula- tion was accompanied by the rapid growth of cities-by 1725 the population of Boston was over 12,000, nearly doubled from 6,700 in 1700; Philadelphia was home to rn,ooo people. New York, al- though growing rapidly, had just 7,000 residents (by 1800 it would have 60,000). In 1760, colonists numbered I.5 million-six times the population at the turn of the century.

This expansion of colonies and people meant that the influence of Puritanism was waning. Many of the newer colonies were founded on non-Puritan beliefs.

In 1682 Charles II granted wealthy English Quaker William Penn a large tract of land west of what is now New Jersey. Penn nallled it Sylvania for its densely wooded terrain, and then renamed it Penn- sylvania after his father. (Like many of the colonies, Pennsylvania was a commercial venture that was intended to turn a profit for its investors, in this case through the trading of furs and lumber.)