Question In Managing Sexual Behaviors in Colonial North America

1 COLONIAL

NORTH AMERICA (1600s–1700s)

Richard Godbeer

How do we write about what today is called lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history when dealing with periods before the fundamental categories of sexual identity that modern westerners now take for granted (such as ‘gay,’ lesbian,’ and ‘homosexual’) came into existence? Some scholars, such as Rictor Norton, argue that men attracted to men and women attracted to women in whatever period can legitimately be described as gay and lesbian because their desires, however labeled at the time, were similar if not identical to those experienced and expressed by people today. Others, most notably David Halperin, have countered that these modern and western categories are freighted with assumptions that simply do not apply in other historical and cultural contexts. Indeed, some have suggested that the actual experience of desire might be shaped at least in part by the categories available to us, so that subjectivity is to some degree contingent upon discourse. This chapter’s approach is closer to the latter position: men and women in the North American colonies who desired intimacy with members of the same sex experienced and expressed those desires in ways that were shaped by the cultural vocabulary available to them. We cannot possibly understand their feelings and experiences without taking seriously the discursive environment in which they moved. That is not to suggest that colonial Americans were entirely passive prisoners of a larger cultural discourse. Even though we are all handed a cultural script with which to articulate our desires, we each pick and choose which parts of the script to adopt and sometimes add our own lines. Early Americans sometimes tried to find words that would describe feelings and behavior that official language failed to encapsulate. But until very recently men-loving men and women-loving women did not think in terms of sexual orientation or identity; to impose subjectivities such as these onto their lives is simply to re-invent them as a mirror of ourselves instead of trying to understand them on their own terms.1

Historians investigating same-sex desire and gender diversity in the colonial period face a number of obstacles. Individuals were understandably reluctant to admit sexual behavior that carried the death penalty, while their neighbors were often eager to avoid acknowledging the occurrence of same-sex intimacy in their communities. The vocabulary that colonial Ameri - cans used to describe sexual attraction or activity was sometimes ambiguous; a reference to “unclean” behavior, for example, might indicate something sexual, but quite possibly not, given the Christian position that any sinful action polluted the body and soul of the persons involved.

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Archivists and historians have, furthermore, sometimes ignored, suppressed, or even destroyed evidence of sexual and gender nonconformity that they found perplexing or distasteful.

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Willful silence and suppression played a significant role in the manufacturing of Virginia’s early history. Jamestown was initially an all-male colony; though women did migrate to the Chesapeake in subsequent years, they remained relatively few in number for several decades. The Chesapeake’s skewed sex ratio made it extremely difficult for men to establish conven - tional family households or to find female sexual partners; there seems, furthermore, to have been little sexual contact with Indians during those years. Early settlers often paired off to form all-male households, living and working together. As historian Mary Beth Norton has remarked, “it would be truly remarkable if all the male-only partnerships lacked a sexual ingredient.”2

Some men may have engaged in sexual relations with each other out of desperation; others may have taken advantage of an unusual situation to form relationships that would have been stigmatized under normal circumstances.

Just as householders elsewhere on both sides of the Atlantic sometimes assumed that they had a right to the bodies as well as labor of their servants, so early seventeenth-century Virginians who had male indentured servants working for them may well have pressured or forced their dependants into having sex with them. One male servant was found dead with his thighs badly bruised; another who had been working for an all-male household hanged himself for no apparent reason. We can only wonder if these deaths were prompted, at least in part, by sexual coercion. One servant did formally accuse his master of raping him. As a result of that servant’s testimony, Captain Richard Cornish was convicted of sodomy and hanged in 1625. In this case, the only trial for sodomy known to have taken place in the early Chesapeake, Cornish’s execution aroused heated controversy. The death sentence was certainly open to question, given the lack of cor - roborative testimony: no one had witnessed the captain’s alleged assault of his servant. Edward Nevell, for example, declared that the captain had been hanged “for a rascally boy wrongfully.” The government was clearly determined to silence those who criticized its handling of the case. Nevell was arrested for his criticism of the court and sentenced “to stand on the pillory with a paper on his head showing the cause of his offense in the market place, and to lose both his ears, and to serve the colony for a year.”3 As women were now arriving in greater numbers, enabling the formation of more conventional households and marriages, the author - ities may have wanted to make an example of Cornish. Critics of the court may have been anxious about the vulnerability of other men, perhaps including themselves, especially if they were to be convicted as a result of uncorroborated accusations. It is striking that none of the reported conversations about this case suggested any revulsion toward sodomy itself. Some Virginians may have feared that a veil of silence regarding sexual activity between men in the colony was being ripped away. That veil of silence was soon back in place and would remain there, lifted only recently by a few scholars who have begun to ask questions about fragmentary evidence that survives about male liaisons in the early Chesapeake.

In sharp contrast, sodomy would figure as a regular topic of public discourse further north in seventeenth-century New England, where Puritan leaders were eager to protect their New Israel from pollution, sexual or otherwise, through vehement denunciation of sin in all its manifestations. Though officials there were exceptionally energetic and vigilant in their campaigns against illicit sex, the assumptions that underlay those efforts were not unusual. In common with settlers in other British American colonies, New Englanders made a number of assumptions about what we would call sexuality that differed radically from our own.

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Perhaps most fundamentally, Puritans did not think about sexual impulses in terms of a distinct sexuality or sexual orientation that impels men and women toward members of the same or opposite sex. They thought in terms of specific sexual acts that were divided into two fundamental categories: sex between a husband and wife, and all other sex (including premarital sex, casual sex between a man and a woman, masturbation, sex between two men or between two women, and bestiality). They explained all non-marital sex just as they did any other sin, such as drunkenness or falling asleep during a sermon: they were all caused by innate moral corruption which every human being inherited from Adam and Eve. Ministers held that sodomy and bestiality were “unnatural” and so more sinful than illicit sex between a man and a woman. But official teaching did not conceive of sodomy as fundamentally distinct from any other manifestation of human sin. Nor did it see particular men or women as constitutionally inclined or limited to any one form of sexual offense. In other words, the fundamental issue was not sexual orientation, but moral orientation.

Anglo-American laws against sodomy reflected this official preoccupation with particular acts rather than sexual identity or orientation, so that courts were interested primarily in finding out whether a specific act of sexual intercourse had occurred. Neither intent nor an attempt could justify conviction, which carried the death penalty. Because most people committing illicit sexual acts had the common sense not to do so in a public place, conviction rates were remarkably low: it was rare that witnesses came forward with unequivocal statements that they had seen sexual intercourse taking place; and liaisons involving members of the same sex could not be exposed through a resulting pregnancy. This was, of course, good news for individuals who might otherwise have been convicted and hanged.4

Not only were executions for sodomy rare, but prosecutions were also remarkably sparse, even in the bracing moral climate of New England. Local communities preferred to handle problematic behavior through informal channels. They resorted to ecclesiastical discipline or the legal system only when private exhortation or informal arbitration failed to resolve the situation. The narrow framing of the laws against sodomy and the rigorous demands of the legal system, which required two independent witnesses for a conviction, may well have deterred some New Englanders from initiating formal action against offenders. Addressing the situation through non-juridical channels was, moreover, less dire than invoking capital law and so would have appealed to those who disapproved of sodomy but did not want the accused to hang. In several cases of sodomy that came before courts or church congregations, it emerged during the proceedings that the accused had long been locally notorious for their sexual interest in men, but that it had taken an extraordinary turn of events to bring about a formal charge. Any number of local incidents and controversies involving sodomy may have escaped record because of this preference for non-institutional forms of social control. When Nicholas Sension, a farmer in Windsor, Connecticut, was brought to trial for his “sodomitical actings” in 1677, it became clear that he had been making sexual advances to local men for over three decades. There had been several informal investigations into his behavior, but his aggressive interest in other men did not become a legal issue until Sension prosecuted one of his own servants for slander. The young man had told neighbors that his employer was making unwanted advances toward him, and when several people came forward to refute Sension’s charge of slander by confirming that he was a serial aggressor, the court initiated a sodomy trial. Had Sension not made this disastrous tactical error, we would most likely know nothing about his reputation or behavior.5

The transcripts that survive from that case are rich and revealing in a number of respects. Not least, they show just how restrictive and rigorous the courts were in handling cases such as these. Although many men came forward to testify that Sension had made sexual advances

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toward them or other male neighbors, only one witness claimed to have seen Sension penetrate a male partner and so Sension could not be hanged. The Sension transcripts also suggest that incidents of sodomy or attempted sodomy sometimes failed to reach the courts because locals were either less outraged by such behavior than clerical tirades and legal prohibitions might lead us to expect, or weighed their disapproval of sodomy with other considerations. Nicholas Sension was in most respects a popular man. One fellow who was summoned to describe an occasion on which Sension had tried to rape him expressed his reluctance to do Sension any harm because the accused had been so kind to him and his wife when they needed help. In determining an individual’s social worth, most colonists appear to have found nonsexual aspects of that person’s behavior more significant even than an allegedly heinous sin and crime such as sodomy. Risking the loss of a good neighbor struck many practical-minded settlers as too high a price to pay for moral cleansing.

Sension was also a prominent landowner and employer in the community where he lived. When in his twenties, he had made advances to men of roughly the same age as himself. But in later years, most of the men whom he approached were teenagers or young adults and at least two of them were his own servants. In other words, Sension appears to have been interested in men whose age and status placed them in a position subordinate to himself. For most sodomy prosecutions in the colonial period there survives only a brief record of the charge and outcome; in some cases, we do not even know the names of those involved, let alone their age or relative status. Contemporaries often referred to servants as “boys” or “girls” regardless of their age, making it difficult to ascertain how old they really were unless other information survives. (William Couse, the servant who accused Richard Cornish of raping him, was twenty-nine years old, but Edward Nevell described him as “a rascally boy.”) Yet at least in Sension’s case, sexual aggression, hierarchy, and power were closely intertwined. That power dynamic might also help to explain why most of Sension’s neighbors took so long to protest his behavior. Scholars have shown that social status was crucial in determining whether individuals would be held accountable for crimes such as rape. At least some of those who were aware of sexual aggression toward servants understood that behavior in terms of the power dynamic involved: as historian Barbara Lindemann has written, “many instances of coerced sexual relations were probably not perceived as rape, even by the victim, and certainly not by the assailant or the neighbors,” because it was seen instead as “an expression of male control.”6 Sension may have believed that his aggressive behavior was justified by his status as a male householder and em - ployer; others may have felt the same way, even if they did not approve of his behavior.

The Sension case also gives us a tantalizing glimpse of neighbors trying to understand and describe a man’s persistent desire for physical intimacy with other men in a period that had no vocabulary to capture that ongoing attraction. They clearly perceived in Sension’s actions a persistent inclination toward sodomy that was specific and transcended individual incidents or acts. For them the issue was not sinfulness in general, but a specific sin, repeated over and over again. Sension himself apparently characterized his repeated sexual overtures toward other males as a distinct realm of activity. When neighbor William Phelps berated Sension for attempting to seduce various men in the vicinity, Sension reportedly admitted that he had “long” practiced “this trade.” It is not clear from Phelps’s deposition whether he or Sension introduced the word “trade” into their conversation; indeed, Phelps may have used it retroactively. But “trade” implied a specific calling or way of life: use of that word to describe Sension’s behavior, by whomever, indicated a sense of its significance, distinctiveness, and permanence in his life. The designation “trade” went well beyond the act-oriented view of sodomy propounded in official statements and fitted Sension’s own experience much better than did authorized categories. Phelps’s deposition, then, provides a rare glimpse of ordinary people creating their

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own sexual taxonomy. To argue that New England townspeople and villagers identified a distinct sexuality would stretch the evidence too far. But observation of men such as Nicholas Sension does seem to have led neighbors and acquaintances to treat sodomy as a specific and con si - stent impulse: it became in their minds a habitual course of action that characterized some men throughout their lives. When Sension’s neighbors told court officials about his long history of attraction toward young men, their remarks were of little use in proving a legal charge of sodomy, yet relating Sension’s male-oriented sexual appetite made sense to them.

If official discourse provided no conceptual tools for understanding a man’s lifelong desire for other men, it was even more impoverished in its discussion of women who desired women. Ministers included in their definitions of “unnatural” sex not only the coupling of men with men but also of women with women. Yet they had remarkably little to say about the latter and the laws against sodomy focused much more specifically on male sex. That was due in large part to the legal system’s conception of sex as an act of phallic intercourse. Because law - makers and magistrates understood sex in terms of penetration, they found it difficult to conceive of a sexual scenario that did not involve a penis along with a male to which it was attached. As a result, there was little room for the recognition or prosecution of sex between women. On only two known occasions did women appear before New England courts on charges of “unclean” behavior with a person of the same sex. In one case the magistrates described the behavior under consideration as “unseemly” and in the other as “lewd.” The use of these vague adjectives probably reflected the judges’ uncertainty as to how sexual intimacy between women should be classified, and also, perhaps, a reluctance to describe the acts in particular. Without a penis to hold on to, they were lost.7

Surviving evidence about individuals whom we might characterize today as transgender is also sparse for the colonial period.8 Early reports from the New World had described a category of Native American men who lived as women, dressed in female clothing, and engaged in sexual relations with other men. There were also Indian women who assumed male clothing and roles, though this phenomenon seems to have been less widespread. European observers expressed amazement that Indians apparently revered men who lived as women, especially given that they made themselves sexually available to other men in their communities. Indian accept - ance of and respect for behavior that was criminalized in Europe as whoredom and sodomy exemplified for these writers the immorality and savagery of Indian culture. Europeans used the word ‘berdache’ (an Arabic word meaning male prostitute) to describe such men. Yet Indians often referred to them as “half-man/half-woman.”

The specific characteristics and functions of the “half-man/half-woman” varied from nation to nation, but in general s/he combined male and female attributes, remaining anatomically male and in some nations wearing both male and female articles of clothing. Such individuals could not attain the honor associated with male-identified roles that they had forsaken, but they were esteemed for unique contributions made possible by their gender-mixing. Whereas Europeans saw the “berdache” as an emblem of sin and disorder, from an Indian perspec- tive the “half-man/half-woman” embodied and promoted the harmony that resulted from reconciling opposites within the physical and spiritual realms. Their composite identity as “half- man/half-woman” enabled them to mediate between the polarities of male and female as well as between those of spirit and flesh. Particular boys were prompted by dreams or visions to become “half-man/half-woman,” made the transition through established rituals, and then assumed a prominent role within the ritual life of their communities. Some scholars have suggested that the presence of the “half-man/half-woman” may have worked to the advantage of other men in terms of gender politics within native communities: the incorporation of female qualities into male ceremonies without actually involving women may have appealed to Indian

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men who wished to symbolize the coming together of male and female without sacrificing their monopoly over certain aspects of ceremonial life. The “half-man/half-woman” sometimes married a man, but unless or until he did so he was sexually available to other men within his community, which would have given both married and unmarried men a sexual outlet that avoided potential conflict over access to women.9

Europeans who to sought to convert and “civilize” Indians insisted that setting aside native customs relating to sex and gender should play an important part in that process. Colonial leaders meanwhile sought to prevent European settlers from adopting Indian customs, sexual and otherwise, or from exhibiting any pattern of behavior that challenged official sexual and gender codes, which they saw as crucial to the establishment of an orderly society in the New World.10 One tantalizing court case from Virginia in 1629 focused on a servant known some - times as Thomas and sometimes as Thomasine Hall, who seems to have shifted back and forth between male and female attire. According to Hall’s own testimony, s/he made these shifts so as to obtain access to gendered occupations that ranged from soldiering to sewing, though Hall may also have taken pleasure in adopting both male and female personae. Local curiosity and anxiety about Hall focused on the servant’s genitalia, which neighbors forcibly examined on more than one occasion. Opinion was divided as to whether Hall’s genital organs were male or female; but when asked if s/he was a man or woman, Hall replied that s/he was both. On both sides of the Atlantic, anatomical ambiguity was seen as having worrying implications for sexual relations and gender performance, though in practice few people were identified as such. Hall was rumored to have engaged in unmarried sexual relations with a female servant and so identifying his/her anatomical sex became crucial in determining what kind of offense had been committed. Establishing whether Hall was male or female would also dictate what kinds of labor s/he could be expected to do as a servant.

The court declined to address the issue of fornication or to identify Thomas/ine as male or female, instead announcing that the defendant was both and must henceforth wear a com - bination of male and female clothing. This would prevent Hall from switching back and forth as convenient. The sentence was clearly not designed to legitimize a hybrid gender or sexual identity but branded Hall as a freakish anomaly, reaffirming gendered and sexual order in a fledgling colony that was struggling to establish order of any kind. It is tempting to wonder if an awareness of the “half-man/half-woman” tradition had any impact on this decision. The magistrates made no such reference in their judgment, but if any of them did draw a parallel between the “berdache” figure and the sentence they imposed on Hall, they would doubtless have seen this as a measure of the defendant’s personal degradation.11

Elsewhere in British America, men and women were occasionally presented in court for cross-dressing and in 1696 Massachusetts passed a law criminalizing transvestism, though why the legislative assembly saw fit to do so at this particular time is unclear. In early modern England boys and young men had to dress as women when they played female roles on the stage and some commentators worried that doing so might encourage sodomy in two ways. First, other men might become attracted to them in their feminized guise; and second, cross-dressing actors might become transformed temperamentally in ways that would lead them to think, feel, and desire like women, which might include welcoming or even initiating sexual relations with other men. Yet colonial Americans do not appear to have made any connection between cross- dressing and sodomy. Court cases and occasional scandals involving cross-dressing (as when enemies of Lord Cornbury, governor of New York in the first decade of the eighteenth century, accused him of wearing women’s clothes) did not include any allegations or even insinuations of same-sex intimacy; and none of the defendants in sodomy cases during the colonial period were accused of cross-dressing.

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During the years between Nicholas Sension’s trial in 1677 and the outbreak of the American Revolution, attitudes toward same-sex intimacy across the Atlantic underwent a dramatic transformation. The emergence of “sodomite” as a social category—referring to a specific cadre of men with a consistent sexual interest in other men—represented a significant shift away from earlier typologies. Sodomy was increasingly associated with a particular personality type and also a specific subculture, especially in the metropolis. Male Londoners drawn to members of the same sex could now find partners and social camaraderie in recognized gathering places such as the so-called “molly houses” scattered across the city, where cross-dressing men who also sought sexual intimacy with other men embodied a new sexual and gendered order in which sodomy and effeminacy were now firmly conjoined. Surviving evidence from colonial cities in North America gives no signs of a subculture such as London offered. But new metro - politan conceptions and concerns did establish a foothold in print culture on both sides of the Atlantic alongside older paradigms. Readers of eighteenth-century newspapers encountered items describing police raids on “molly houses” in London and the prosecution of those who were found there. References to such men as “sodomites” amounted, as historian Thomas Foster has pointed out, to the depiction of sodomy as “a character trait” or “marker of personhood,” even though such representations were by no means equivalent to “the modern medicalized and psychologized homosexual subject.” Meanwhile, older religious frameworks that understood sodomy in terms of moral corruption inviting divine retribution still exerted a powerful influence, especially in eighteenth-century New England.12

The mid-eighteenth-century case of Stephen Gorton highlights this blend of perceptions. Gorton, minister at the Baptist church in New London, Connecticut, was suspended from his pastorate in 1756 for “unchaste behavior with his fellow men.” Gorton had apparently ex - hibited an attraction to men for many years. In 1757 the General Meeting of Baptist Churches judged that his behavior indicated “an inward disposition” to this “sin of so black and dark a dye.” The meeting did not explain what it meant by “inward disposition,” but went on to recommend that Gorton absent himself from the Lord’s Supper for several months and then give “effectual evidence” of his repentance and reformation. The assumption that Gorton could overcome his proclivities suggests that the meeting viewed his “sin” in terms consistent with earlier religious formulations, as an expression of moral corruption that sinners could defeat with Christ’s support. Yet the phrase “inward disposition” depicted Gorton’s depravity as expressing itself in a particular and consistent form. The official judgment did not assert a permanent sexual orientation, but it pushed religious categories to their limits in accommodating local impressions of Gorton’s behavior and increasingly widespread representations of sodomy as a persistent, specific impulse.13

Despite this transformation in perceptions, there were even fewer prosecutions for sodomy in the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth century. In addition to the factors that had worked against formal censure of even those notorious for “sodomitical actings” in earlier decades, three additional developments now militated against prosecution. First, the courts paid less attention to moral regulation in general as financial and commercial issues dominated their caseloads. That redirection of legal energies did not mean that local communities had lost interest in addressing problematic behavior informally, but it did represent a significant change in the tone of public life. At the same time a growing preoccupation with privacy and increased aversion to the public exposure of malefactors made New Englanders eager to avoid formal proceedings. A third development involved the linkage of sodomy to commercial corruption, urban development, and foreign vice. Descriptions of English sodomy cases in eighteenth-century

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newspapers often linked sodomites to the seamier aspects of commercial enterprise. Concern about the potentially corrupting impact of economic development and specifically urban life was not new, but it took on additional significance in the late colonial and revolutionary periods as Americans sought to distance themselves from what they depicted as a decadent metropolitan culture across the Atlantic.

Eighteenth-century Philadelphians, for example, were well aware of the new models for understanding same-sex intimacy that had emerged across the Atlantic. Through a painstaking examination of printed matter that circulated in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, historian Clare Lyons has demonstrated that a wide social spectrum of city-dwellers were exposed to imported images of the sodomite through accounts of police raids and prosecutions in London as well as through fictional works. Yet there is no sign of these models being incorporated into Phila - delphians’ understanding of their own sexual culture or of any efforts to police same-sex relations in the city. Indeed, the local historical record is almost completely silent on the subject of sex between men. Lyons suggests that Philadelphians may have been making a deliberate choice not to acknowledge or police such behavior in their midst as “a way of not integrating the social type of the sodomite into colonial and early national society.” Because sodomy served as a handy measure of British corruption, Americans were reluctant to acknowledge its pre - sence in their own communities. The silence of the eighteenth-century historical record thus points not to the absence of sodomy but to its implication in American assertions of cultural as well as political independence.14

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Because sodomy trials focused on specific physical acts and not desire or emotion, we rarely glimpse in the surviving court records any feelings that defendants may have had for one another. But other sources from the colonial era such as letters and diaries reveal that men often expressed affection and love for each other in ways that would become suspect and even dangerous in later periods. Following the late-nineteenth-century fusion of romantic and erotic attraction into new concepts of sexual orientation, love and sexual desire became closely entwined in the minds of Americans, making expressions of intense affection for members of the same sex problematic and perilous because they were now linked to same-sex eroticism; but earlier Americans felt much more comfortable declaring same-sex love because it was not yet tainted by such associations. In September 1763, to give just one example, Joseph Hooper, a recent graduate from Harvard College, sat down in Marblehead, Massachusetts, to compose a letter, addressed to his former classmate, Benjamin Dolbeare. He wrote as follows:

The sun never rose and set upon me since I parted from you, but he brought to my longing imagination the idea of my bosom friend; my faithful memory daily represents him in all the endearing forms that in his presence ever rose in my mind. My fancy paints him in the most beautiful colours, and my soul is absorbed in contemplating the past, wishing for a reiteration and longing to pour forth the expressions of friendship, and receiving those that would calm the gloom, soften the horrors, and wholly extirpate the distractions that your absence creates—but I must have done and have scarce time to tell you how much I am your friend.15

Declarations such as this would not automatically have suggested to relatives or neighbors that Hooper desired Dolbeare sexually, let alone that sexual relations might be taking place. Indeed, most Anglo-Americans living in the colonial period treated emotional ties between male or

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female friends as quite distinct from sexual desire. Whereas sodomy was illegal and denounced by religious leaders as an abominable sin, non-erotic love between men or women was seen as decent, honorable, and praiseworthy. Acceptable expressions of love included not only words, either written or spoken, but also physical affection. Friends often referred to the pleasure that they took in touching and holding one another. There may well have been cases in which this validation of same-sex affection and love provided a cover for erotic intimacies, but we cannot simply assume that people who said they loved one another must have wanted to have sex, or that they actually did so. From a modern perspective, it might seem that these men and women were in denial about the true nature of their feelings for one another, but such a response is anachronistic: instead of imposing our own assumptions and sexual categories onto such relationships, we need to recognize that sexualized love was just one possibility in a rich repertoire of possibilities open to pre-modern men and women as they explored their feelings for friends of the same sex. That much broader range of licit possibilities for relating to one another included intensely loving and even physical yet non-sexual relationships.16

Early Americans used biblical and classical models to provide a worthy lineage for loving same-sex friendships. Ministers invoked the relationship between David and Jonathan as well as that between Ruth and Naomi as inspiring examples of men’s and women’s capacity for loving and virtuous same-sex friendship; they accorded such friendships a central place in their vision for the creation and sustenance of godly communities. Loving friendships also acquired legitimacy through their characterization as a form of kinship. Family incorporated not only biological kin and conjugal relatives but also friends with whom one felt a sense of kinship. Friendship and family membership overlapped as categories of association: people often referred to blood relatives as friends and addressed friends to whom they had no biological relation- ship as if they were kinfolk. The characterization of friends as family members was neither perfunctory nor merely honorary: it indicated a very real and meaningful connection between individuals. The love and loyalty associated with friendship seem for the most part to have complemented rather than clashed with those of blood and marriage. Early Americans took it for granted that loving relationships between men and between women could coexist with heartfelt love for a person of the opposite sex.

As men and women developed loving friendships with members of the same sex, they did so with the active approval and encouragement of their biological families and of society as a whole. Early Americans believed that friendship not only made people happy but also nurtured qualities that would radiate outward and transform society as a whole, encouraging those involved to look beyond their own selfish interests so as to empathize with the interests and feelings of others. Early Americans routinely asserted that ties between friends had a broad public sig - nificance. They believed that personal friendships informed and enriched social and public interactions, creating affective bonds between individuals that would then serve as the emotional sinews of a larger identity. They envisaged society not as an abstract entity but as the sum of individual and intensely personalized relationships, including loving friendships between men and between women.

That legitimization and celebration of loving friendship would acquire a particular and explicitly political significance for North Americans during the revolutionary period, when the encouragement of intense and loving friendships came to be seen as crucial to the nation-building project and its creation of worthy republican citizens. As Americans grappled with the challenge of translating republican principles into practice, male friendship became doubly significant: first, as a way of encouraging empathy between citizens in a society that no longer cohered through shared loyalty to a monarch; and second, as part of a larger project to re-imagine the family in ways appropriate to a new and somewhat democratized era. Republican thinkers

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crafted a blueprint for nationhood that shifted attention away from patriarchal authority toward fraternal collaboration and called for the active encouragement of brotherly love between friends. Such friendships would nurture social and moral instincts crucial to the well-being of a post- revolutionary society.17

Much of that post-revolutionary conversation about state-building focused on male friendship as a foundation for enlightened male citizenship. Yet printed discussions of same-sex friend - ship often depicted the nurturing of affection and love as a duty and pleasure that men and women shared in common. Literate women wrote of their feelings for one another in letters that bore a remarkable resemblance to those passing back and forth between male friends. Indeed, some men were eager to learn about the experience and expression of sympathetic friendship from female relatives and neighbors. Male friends developed relationships that quite self- consciously paralleled female friendships and used a similar language to express their devotion to each other. Because women living in the seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century colonies left behind them far fewer letters and diaries than did men, and because male diarists and letter-writers were for the most part from the upper ranks of colonial society, we know much more about elite male friendships in the colonial period than about those of women and less privileged men. Yet we can be confident that a broad range of Americans were exposed to a public conversation about friendship that celebrated same-sex love: many colonists would have heard sermons lauding friendship and encountered the hundreds of articles on male friendship and love that were printed in eighteenth-century newspapers, either because they read these publications themselves or because they heard them being read aloud in taverns or at home. From the perspective of early Americans, same-sex intimacy was multi-potential: depending on the mode of its expression, it could nurture and reinforce or corrupt and undermine authorized cultural endeavors. Early Americans denounced sex between men or between women as sinful and dangerous, but actively encouraged same-sex love as a personal, social, and political good.

Notes 1 Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity

(London: Cassell, 1997); David M. Halperin, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,” in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 15–40.

2 Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1996), 354.

3 H.R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 1622–1632, 1670–1676 (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1924), 34, 78, 81, 83, 85, 93; John M. Murrin, “Things Fearful to Name,” Pennsylvania History 65 (1998): 12.

4 For a detailed discussion of criminalization of gender and sexual diversity from the colonial period to the present, see in this volume, Andrea J. Ritchie and Kay Whitlock, “Criminalization and Legalization.”

5 For the surviving transcripts from Sension’s trial, see Richard Godbeer and Douglas Winiarski, eds., “The Sodomy Trial of Nicholas Sension”, Early American Studies 12 (2014): 402–457.

6 Barbara S. Lindemann, “ ‘To Ravish and Carnally Know’: Rape in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” Signs 10 (1984–1985), 79, 81. Alan Bray contends that sex between men in early modern England often expressed the “prevailing distribution” of economic and social power and that this contributed to “a sluggishness in accepting that what was being seen was indeed the fearful sin of sodomy,” which in turn would have protected perpetrators from social or official retribution as well as from condemnation by their own consciences. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), 49–51, 56, 76.

7 See Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 363n42.

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8 For a discussion of trans history from the colonial era to the present, and the challenges of marking the past as transgender, see in this volume, Finn Enke, “Transgender History (and Otherwise Approaches to Queer Embodiment).”

9 See Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds., Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), and Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).

10 For discussion of Anglo-American attitudes toward gender, which were in some respects extremely rigid and in others remarkably fluid, see Richard Godbeer, “Performing Patriarchy: Gendered Roles and Hierarchies in Early Modern England and Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Francis J. Bremer and Lynn Botelho, eds. The Worlds of John Winthrop: England and New England, 1588–1649 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2005), 290–333.

11 This case is discussed in Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 75–80; Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1996), 183–197; and Elizabeth Reis, Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 10–14, 16.

12 Thomas A. Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 163, 165, 174. 13 The surviving documentation for this case can be found in the Backus Papers (Andover-Newton

Theological School, Newton Center, Mass.), box 7. 14 Clare A. Lyons, “Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 121,

137–138, 152. 15 Joseph Hooper to Benjamin Dolbeare, 4 September 1763, Dolbeare Family Papers, Massachusetts

Historical Society. 16 For an alternative perspective, see William Benemann, Male–Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond

Romantic Friendships (New York: Haworth Press, 2006). 17 In the following chapter, “Revolutionary Sexualities and Early National Genders (1770s–1840s), Rachel

Hope Cleves describes in more detail the dynamics of sexual and gender diversity in the new nation.

Further Reading Foster, Thomas A. Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America.

Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Foster, Thomas A., ed. Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America. New York:

New York University Press, 2007. Godbeer, Richard. “ ‘The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England,

William and Mary Quarterly 52 (1995): 259–286. Godbeer, Richard. Sexual Revolution in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Godbeer, Richard. The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Godbeer, Richard, and Douglas L. Winiarski, eds. “The Sodomy Trial of Nicholas Sension, 1677:

Documents and Teaching Guide.” Early American Studies 12 (2014): 402–457. Halperin, David M. “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,” in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and

Other Essays on Greek Love, 15–40. New York: Routledge, 1990. Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity,

Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Lyons, Clare A. “Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Phila -

delphia.” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 119–154. Myles, Anne G. “Queering the Study of Early American Sexuality.” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003):

199–202. Norton, Rictor. The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity. London:

Cassell, 1997. Reis, Elizabeth. Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2009. Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: St. Martin’s

Press, 1998.

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Smithers, Gregory D. “Cherokee ‘Two Spirits’: Gender, Ritual, and Spirituality in the Native South.” Early American Studies 12 (2014): 626–651.

Talley, Colin L. “Gender and Male Same-Sex Erotic Behavior in British North America in the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (1996): 385–408.

Thompson, Roger. “Attitudes towards Homosexuality in the Seventeenth-Century New England Colonies.” Journal of American Studies 23 (1989): 27–40.

Warner, Michael. “New English Sodom,” in Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

Williams, Walter L. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

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