Question In Managing Sexual Behaviors in Colonial North America

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IN THE BEGINNING : 3AMB--SEX

SEXUALITY IN EARL Y AMERICA

While I was in the midst of writing this chapter, I read a book that profoundly unsettled me. I had finished the _ section on Native American societies when I found Richard Trexler's Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas.! The author, a scholar of the Italian Renaissance, had switched his sights to the Americas, and in his deeply researched and provocative study he turned upside down everything I thought I knew about "berdaches," biological males who dressed and lived as women among many of the indigenous societies of the New World. In Trexler's vision the cross-gender berdache is not the honored spiritual figure, living in a society with a more flexible understanding of gender, that most other recent scholars have described. Rather, the berdache stands as an emblem

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of the systematic child abuse and violent domination of the feminine that continues to plague modern society. Indeed, Trexler argues that military power and the very process of state building rest on both the literal and the metaphorical rape of men by other men.

I had no idea what to make of Trexler's book. I partic­ ularly could not imagine how I would incorporate it into this narrative. What kept popping into my mind was another book with an agenda, although an altogether different one. Just a few weeks before, I had picked up transgender activist Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan ofArc to RuPaul, a personal and impassioned account of people in the past, including the berdache, who defied cul­ tural boundaries of sex and gender.2 In writing about "Two­ Spirit" people-a rough translation of the variety of Na­ tive American words for cross-gender individuals-Feinberg emphasizes the spirituality, tolerance, and gender fluidity of native cultures.

There is simply no way to reconcile these two books. Al­ though Feinberg's sweeping assumption that "transgendered people" can be identified across time and space violates my sense of the need to understand vastly different historical contexts, ultimately I found myself less and less convinced by Trexler's overall argument. He too emphasizes sameness across long stretches oftime-in that sense the two authors do share something. It's not that I don't find Trexler persuasive when he says that, at least among some South American cul­ tures, men who dressed as women were despised even before the arrival of the Spanish. I don't doubt his evidence, but I do wonder if it tells the whole story. In his account of same-sex sexuality there's no place for anything but rape and violence and domination. I'm sure that was there. But was it all?

I share my confusion because it illustrates the dilemmas of historical interpretation. History, for most historians in the

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late twentieth century, is not the one "true story." Rather, it is a story as best we can tell it, given the evidence, our own assumptions and values, and the perspective we take from our own place in a particular society at a specific point in time. If this is the case even for a relatively straightforward account of, say, a past presidential election-and I believe it is-then how much more is it true for a loaded subject such as sexuality? With this in mind, let us turn to a history of the momentous encounter among the cultures of America, Europe, and Africa.

The peoples who lived in the land that would come to be called America had diverse understandings of gender (that is, the social roles associated with being male or female) and of appropriate sexual behavior. They were often puz­ zled by the worldview of the first Europeans to traverse the Atlantic. These intruders had definite ideas about the differ­ ences between men and women and about what constituted appropriate sexual behavior for each, and these expectations often clashed with those of the societies they encountered when they set foot ashore. Likewise, Africans who had the misfortune to come into contact with Europeans through the slave trade confronted different concepts of gender and sex­ uality. In other words, competing sexual and gender systems (that is, ways of thinking about and organizing sexuality and gender) came face- to- face through the European invasion and the forced emigration of Africans. The ultimately dominant European system, with its rigorous condemnation of same­ sex sexuality, was not the only vision of the world to have an impact on individuals living in what became the United States. Nor was that system unaffected by contact with Native American and African cultures.

I begin by considering Native American, European, and African sexual systems in order to show the different ways

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the societies the early "Americans" came from conceived of gender and same-sex sexuality. I then turn to colonial le­ gal codes and evidence of same-sex sexual behavior among women and men of the settler colonies. As we shall see, en­ gaging in same-sex sexual acts did not automatically identify a participant as a certain kind of person. Rather, religious and civil authorities focused on the acts, which they condemned as sinful and unnatural-perhaps more dangerous than other nonmarital and nonprocreative sexual behavior, but not qual­ itatively different. Most important, these were acts that any sinner might be tempted to commit. So even the victorious European system differed from modern Western notions of "homosexuality."

A "New World" of Sexuality and Gender

Although it is impossible to generalize about the diverse Native American cultures of North America, accounts of sexual expressiveness are common enough to paint a picture of a world that valued sexual desire and experimentation. Among the Powhatans, men might take multiple wives if they could afford to, and both women and men might end marriages with relative ease. In a rare hint of what Native Americans thought about their cultural clash with white settlers over sexuality, a male European observer in early Virginia reported of the Powhatans that "nothing appears to

them more repugnant to nature and reason than the contrary l' system which prevails among Christians. The Great Spirit, say they, hath created us all to be happy; and we should offend him were we to live in a perpetual state of constraint and uneasiness."3

In the sixteenth century the Pueblo peoples ofwhat would become New Mexico also practiced serial monogamy and valued sexuality as a vital and life-giving naturalforce. In Hopi

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rituals celebrating female sexuality and reproductive abilities, women danced naked in a circle, fondling clay phalluses, taunting the men with lewd songs and exposing their vaginas; they ended the ceremony by having sex with the men. 4

Far east of the Pueblos and north of the Powhatans, the seventeenth-century Hurons, who formed a clan-based society in which descent followed the female line, considered premarital sexual relationships from puberty onward a nor­ mal expression of sexual desire. Girls as well as boys could initiate sexual relations, and if a girl became pregnant she could choose one of her lovers to marry. After a sort of trial marriage, a ceremony would cement the bond, which then became sexually exclusive but easily sundered. Such practices provoked the Jesuits working among the Hurons to condemn sexual freedom, especially among the young. 5 In this they echoed the Spanish in New Mexico and the English in Vir­ ginia, as is clear from a white man's description of a Powhatan ritual he little understood. "Thirty young women came naked out of the woods, only covered behind and before with a few green leaves, their bodies all painted .... These fiends, with most hellish shouts and cries, rushing from among the trees, cast themselves in a ring about the fire, singing and dancing with most excellent ill variety, oft falling into their infernal passions:'6 The nudity, the shouting, the "infernal passions" differentiated these lascivious and promiscuous "fiends" from the familiar "ladies" back home. The invaders had indeed landed in a "new world."

Whether sexual openness extended to same-sex encoun­ ters is more difficult to determine. The French Jesuit Joseph­ Fran<;:ois Lafitau, who lived among the native peoples of Canada, reported the existence of"special friendships" among young men that he compared to the sexual bonds between younger and older men in classical Greece. "These bonds of friendship, among the Savages of North America, admit no

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suspicion of apparent vice, albeit there is, or may be, much real vice."7 Although we know no more about the nature of such friendships, or about sexual relationships between women, cultures that view sexuality in a positive light and permit childhood experimentation tend to be more likely to see adult same-sex sexuality as an acceptable emotional and erotic possibility, as long as individuals meet their reproduc­ tive responsibilities to the group.8

But it was not only nudity and sexual experimentation and same-sex friendship that separated Native American and European sexual systems. Rather, it was that a variety of cultures scattered throughout what would become the United States saw not two genders, but rather men, women, and a third category, what the Navajos called nadle, the Lakotas winkte (for biological males) or koskalaka (for biological females) , and the Omahas mexoga, the terms referring either to transformation, becoming a woman or man, or to a "third gender;' half man/half woman. 9 These were men who took on the dress and social roles of women and engaged in sexual relationships with masculine men, or women who dressed as and did the work of men and married feminine women. Their societies had a social and usually acceptable, sometimes even honored, role for them. Transgender individuals generally fulfilled both spiritual and social purposes in their societies, despite the evident skepticism of the contemporary observer Father Charlevoix, who noted in 1721 that "it was pretended that this custom came from I know not what principle of religion."IO (Richard Trexler also doubts the claim that reli ­ gion served as the source of cross-gender behavior.) Yet the Jesuit Jacques Marquette reported after his trip down the Mississippi in the 1670s that such cross-gender individuals "are summoned to the Councils, and nothing can be decided without their advice .... they pass for ... spirits,-or per­ sons of Consequence." I I

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The cross-gender role institutionalized same-sex sexual relations, even if sexuality was not the reason individuals crossed the gender line. Most men who took on the feminine role had sex with men of masculine gender, and cross-gender females often married and had sex with feminine women. Such sexual activities did not imply anything about the sex­ uality of the non-cross-gender partner. The sexual behavior in such relationships was conceptualized neither as same-sex nor as different-sex, but as something distinct from both. The Mohave language includes a term that refers specifically to the lovemaking of a cross-gender female and her partner, and the Lakotas have a word for male-male intercourse that is derived from the word for a cross-gender biological male. Until contact with Europeans, it seems that many Native American cultures with institutionalized cross-gender roles saw nothing deviant about sexual relations in this context. European censure changed some of that.

These "persons of Consequence" struck the Europeans variously as "men in womens apparell:' "hermaphrodites:' symbols of "effeminacy and lewdness," or "a devilish thing." Spanish explorer .Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a captive among the Native Americans of Florida from 1528 to 1533, observed: "I saw one man married to another, and these are impotent, effeminate men and they go about dressed as women, and do women's tasks." 12 Getting right to what they found the most horrifying, the European settlers called a man in women's clothes a "berdache," a French version of Persian and Arabic words meaning a young male slave kept for sexual purposes. Father Charlevoix denounced the Iroquois for "an excess of effeminacy and lewdness. There are:' he reported, "men unashamed to wear women's clothing and to practice all the occupations of women, from which follows corruption that I cannot express .... These effeminates never marry and abandon themselves to the most infamous passions:'13

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Hernando de Alarcon, observing the Pueblo Indians in 1540, noted that berdaches "could not have carnal relations with women at all, but they themselves could be used by all mar­ riageable youths." 14

So when Spanish soldiers and explorers, French fur traders and Jesuits, and English religious dissidents and set­ tlers crossed the Atlantic and stepped ashore, they truly en­ tered a different world of gender and sexuality. Although many of the European invaders did their best to exterminate offending Native American gender orders and sexual systems, along with Native American peoples themselves, they did not entirely succeed. And they were undoubtedly affected by what they encountered.

Libertines, Seafarers, Mollies, and "Roaring Girls"

If the Europeans could not conceive ofa person neither clearly male nor clearly female, and if they vigorously repressed same­ sex sexual experimentation and relationships, that did not mean that gender transgression and same-sex sexuality were unknown in the worlds the explorers and settlers came from. Despite long-standing civil and religious condemnation and the threat of execution, individuals did engage in same-sex sexual behavior in a number of contexts, sometimes without the punishment that the law prescribed or without even the disapproval of their neighbors.

Following an old tradition in European culture, elite men of the nobility or clergy might engage with relative impunity in sexual acts with younger or lower-status men in an atmosphere of privileged sexual license. What was critical here-as in many other contexts-was the sexual role a man took in a particular encounter. To play what is misnamed the "active" role, meaning to make use of one's penis in oral, intercrural ("between the thighs"), or anal sex, did not

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necessarily label a man as deviant. To penetrate another was considered "manly;' which is why the receptive male partner of a man would have to be lesser, either in age or in status. Same-sex acts between individuals not differentiated by age or status seemed to occur mostly among the less privileged. The comment of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester (1647­ 80), "missing my whore, I bugger my page," captures the interchangeability of partners from the perspective of the penetrator. l5

In the casual sexual encounters ofelite men, sexual-object choice, that is, the sex of the "chosen" partner, was not really relevant. In 1663 two friends of the English diarist Samuel Pepys, following a long tradition of blaming deviance on foreigners, commented that "buggery is now almost grown as common among our gallants as in Italy." Noting the power differential common to such sexual activities, they added that "the very pages of the town begin to complain of their masters for it."l6 On the one hand, powerful men clearly had access to particularly vulnerable young servants, and the existence of male same-sex sexual activities was no secret. On the other hand, sodomy, defined narrowly as male-male penetration and ejaculation and broadly as any sexual act other than heterosexual vaginal intercourse, was a capital crime. Those convicted might be burned, hanged, or beheaded. Such trials and executions, as well as widely known incidents like those gossiped about by Pepys's cronies that did not lead to pros­ ecution, meant that Europeans were no strangers to same­ sex sexuality.

Furthermore, all-male subcultures were known to harbor same-sex sexual activity. Priests (much more rarely nuns) were one group traditionally associated with such relations, but more important in the period of European overseas expansion were pirates and sailors. Aboard ships without women passengers, sexual activity could only be solitary or

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same-sex. From sodomy trials we have evidence that same-sex activity did take place among both sailors and pirates. Gen­ erally these followed the land-dwelling pattern of older and more powerful men initiating sexual relations with younger subordinates. Samuel Norman, a ship's captain, reportedly pulled down the breeches of his fourteen-year-old servant and inserted his "Yard or privity into his Backside." The boy's father complained when they returned to England, but Captain Norman was never brought to trial. Suggesting the tolerance of same-sex sexuality on board ship, numerous witnesses testified that they had seen sixteen-year-old John Durrant and Abdul Rhyme, a Hindu, engaging in sexual activity in a 1649 case. What contributed to the convictions of Durrant and Rhyme was that an English boy had consented to penetration by a "heathen."l?

There is a lot we do not know about such sexual ac­ tivities. When were they consensual? It is hard to tell when our primary evidence comes from court trials in which an individual's life might depend on arguing that they were not. Were these simply cases of men, lacking access to women, making do with what they had? Did men inclined to such relations perhaps seek out seafaring occupations?

We know a bit more about those who participated in male urban subcultures that fostered same-sex sexual activity. Such worlds, made possible by concentrations of people, relative anonymity, and independence from the family, began to emerge as early as the fifteenth century in Venice (thus con­ tributing to the notion that sodomy was an "Italian vice"). By the early (~ighkenth century, when European settler colonies were well estaoTishedin America, cities such as London, Paris, and Amsterdam sheltered subcultures of effeminate men who frequented taverns, parks, and public latrines, sought out male sexual partners, shared a style of dress and behavior, and could identify each other and be recognized by others

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outside the subculture. Thus the English Societies for the Reformation of Manners knew where to send their agents in 1707 to entrap men looking for sex, and the patrols of the Parisian police allow us to reconstruct men's cruising routes in the first half of the eighteenth century. Men might signal interest by striking up a conversation or by urinating in front of another man. A French policeman engaged in entrapment reported in 1723 that as he was "about to let flow" in a public park known for cruising, a suspect "asked me what time it was according to my cock and said that according to his it was high noon."18 Men also gathered in taverns or clubs that tolerated male-male sexual activity. An observer who entered a London club in 1714 found men "calling one another my dear, hugging and kissing, tickling and feeling each other, as if they were a mixture of wanton males and females; and as­ suming effeminate voice, female airs." 19 Such "sodomites" or, as they were called in England, "mollies" -a term originally applied to female prostitutes-although subject to arrest and punishment, found sexual partners and company within the subculture. That reformers and police knew where to find such men shows that same-sex sexuality was not fully hidden.

Women were noticeably missing from these worlds, but that does not mean that female same-sex sexuality was en­ tirely unknown in European circles. The law, theology, and literature pretty much ignored the possibility of women's having sex with each other, but this was more the result of intentional disbelief than of ignorance. Premodern European culture conceived of women as inherently lustful, but since sex could barely be imagined without a penis, it was not clear what two women could do together besides become aroused in preparation for a man. Nevertheless, some lawmakers con­ sidered female same-sex sexuality so detestable and horrible that, as a late fifteenth-century expert put it, it "should not be named or written."2o Another jurist in the sixteenth century

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advised the Geneva authorities not to read aloud a description of the crime as was customary in cases of public executions. If word got out, they feared, women, with their weaker natures, might be tempted to seek out such liaisons.

Since women did not have the same possibilities for meeting in public places, it is not surprising that most of the evidence we have comes from cases in which women secretly crossed the gender divide, successfully living as men and marrying women. Whether they did so solely for the economic and social freedom that male dress and employ­ ment provided, whether sexual motivation figured into their decisions, or whether they conceived of themselves as trans­ gender people we may never know. In any case, such women fought as soldiers, learned male occupations, met and married women, and came to light only when someone exposed them. Punishment could be swift and severe for the usurpation of male privilege, particularly if it involved the use of what were called "material instruments" to "counterfeit the office of a husband;' as a 1566 case put it. 21 In early eighteenth­ century Germany, a woman named Catharine Margaretha Linck dressed as a man, served in the army, and, after dis­ charge, went to work as a cotton dyer. He married a woman who, after a quarrel, confessed to her mother that Linck was not what he appeared, prompting the outraged mother to take Linck to court. When the mother produced what another trial transcript in a similar case described as "the illicit inventions she used to supplement the shortcomings of her sex" (in this case fashioned ofleather and pigs' bladders), Linck's fate was sealed. She/he was executed in 1721.22

Not all women who dressed as men met their doom in this way. Elite women (Queen Christina of Sweden comes to mind), actresses who played "breeches parts," and gangs of women in the underworld sometimes crossed the gender line in relative safety. These last, the "roaring girls" of London or

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"randy women" of Amsterdam, moved in a world of poverty, petty crime, prostitution, and sexual adventuring. Mary Frith, aka Moll Cutpurse, the model for a "roaring girl" in a number of early seventeenth-century English accounts, struck one fictional observer as "both man and woman;' giving her the opportunity to "first cuckold the husband and then make him do as much for the wife."23 Although we know little about this underworld subculture, the traces it has left in the historical record affirm public knowledge of women's same­ sex sexuality.

Accounts oflibertines, seafarers, mollies, and roaring girls confirm that the Europeans so shocked by Native American "men/women" in the first century of contact knew more than they let on about same-sex sexuality and the possibility of crossing the gender line.

Out of Africa

Africans, like Europeans, brought complex ideas about sexu­ ality to the New World. And like Native American societies, the West African cultures from which most Africans came exhibited a wide range of sexual practices and attitudes. What is important here is that some fostered greater sexual expres­ siveness than was characteristic of the dominant European societies, and some institutionalized transgenerational and cross-gender sexuality.

That said, it is true that the sources are relatively silent about same-sex sexuality in Africa. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts by Europeans mention men dressed as women engaging in sex with other men in Ethiopia, Angola, Madagascar, and elsewhere. Such descriptions echo those of white men in the New World. A history of Ethiopia originally published in 1558 described "passive" men.24 Anto­ nio Oliveria de Cardonega wrote in his 1681 history ofAngola

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that "there is much sodomy among men, who pursue their dirty practices dressed like women .. .. Some among them are wizzards, who control everything, and are esteemed by most of the people ."25 A 1658 history of Madagascar noted young men who assumed a female role. 26

In addition, a few societies at different points of Afri­ can history fostered or tolerated same-.sex relations between younger and older partners as part ofthe socialization process, between adolescent boys in the years before marriage, or between cowives in households where one man married many women. Among the Nzemas of Ghana, "friendship marriage" between a man and a male teenager, and sometimes between two women of different generations, served as a means of transmitting social and spiritual guidance. Among the Azan­ des of the southern Sudan, chiefs sometimes provided slave girls for their daughters, who would "anoint and paint the girl to make her attractive and then lie with her." Yet Azande men feared sexual relations among their wives, thinking that, as an anthropologist reported, "once a woman has started homosexual intercourse she is likely to continue it because she is then her own master and may have gratification when she pleases and not just when a man cares to give it to her."27

What all this meant in the New World remains shrouded in mystery. For most Africans who ended up enslaved, de­ liberate attempts by white society to break cultural bonds, as well as the conditions of slavery, had an impact on African American sexuality. Not only were Africans torn from their cultures and communities and sometimes deliberately mixed with people from other societies to hinder communication and bonding, but the abolition of the slave trade fostered an emphasis on reproduction and on African American women's sexual availability to men. In the early decades of slavery, the preponderance of male slaves may have fostered same-sex

relationships.

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That some African Americans engaged in same-sex sexual relations is clear. Jan Creoli, a "negro:' was choked to death and his body burned in New Amsterdam in 1646 for com­ mitting a second offense of sodomy. The ten-year-old boy, Manuel Congo, "on whom the above abominable crime was committed" was flogged at the place of execution. 28 Some black male slaves in colonial Brazil engaged in sex with each other and with men ofIndian and European origins. 29 In both Portugal and Brazil, other African men cross-dressed and probably took a receptive role in sexual encounters with other men. 30 Esteban Montejo, a nineteenth-century Cuban slave who escaped, told in his autobiography of sodomy among plantation slaves that he attributed in part to a shortage of women, but he also noted that some men "did not want to know anything of women." In some cases an effeminate man might take the role of wife to another man, cooking for him and washing the clothes.3l Although Montejo described the hatred of older slaves for such effeminate men, at the time no pejorative terms existed for same-sex relations. 32

As the institution of slavery developed, justified by ideas of racial hierarchy, whites' assumptions of sexual excess among black people took root. At the same time, the plan­ tation system promoted sexual violence against both female and male slaves, and sometimes such sexual violence took on a homoerotic tinge. At least since the Crusaders launched their war against Islam and encountered same-sex sexual practices within the Arab and Persian worlds, Europeans had associated sodomy with otherness. So European accounts of same-sex sexuality in Africa, as among the native peoples of the Americas, served as confirmation of the savagery and immorality that justified domination.

As sparse as the evidence is, we know that African Amer­ icans came to the New World and survived there with their own sexual systems, based on understandings different from

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those of their white masters. As both free blacks and enslaved African Americans interacted with their white and some­ times Native American neighbors, a new sexual system came into being.

Sodomiticall Boyes and Lewd Maids

It was of course no equal contest among Native American, European, and African ideas about sexuality. Those who ex­ terminated and enslaved with abandon grabbed the right to decree what was and was not acceptable and "natural" in the realm of sexual behavior. So it comes as no surprise that the colonial societies established in the New World adopted European legal and religious sanctions. Yet America was not Europe. The primitive conditions of the early settlements, the utter lack of anonymity and of urban institutions such as parks and other cruising grounds, the emphasis, especially in New England, on the family, and the necessity for a belea­ guered population to reproduce-all ofthese factors militated against toleration of men with men or women with women.

Yet that did not mean the elimination of all love, desire, and sex between same-sex individuals, as the very prohibi­ tions suggest. Before even touching ground after the ardu­ ous trip across the Atlantic, the Reverend Francis Higgeson recorded in 1629 the discovery of "5 beastly Sodomiticall boyes, which confessed their wickedness not to bee named."33 In the 1650s the Reverend Michael Wigglesworth, a Puri­ tan divine, found himself tormented by "too much doting affection," love, and lust for his Harvard students. 34 In the only known cases concerning women, courts in the Mas­ sachusetts Bay Colony found Elizabeth Johnson, a female servant, guilty of "unseemly practices betwixt her and another maid" in 1642. Another court considered the case of two mar­ ried women, fifteen-year-old Mary Hammon and an older

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woman, Sara Norman, who engaged in "lewd behavior each

with [the) other upon a bed" in 1649. Johnson suffered a se­ vere whipping and paid a fine. Hammon was cleared (perhaps because of her age), and Norman, later accused of "unclean practices" with a man, was let offwith a warning. 35 In addition to such acts, we have evidence of at least one woman who crossed the line of gender. During the Revolution, Deborah

Sampson disguised herself as a man, joined the Continental army, and romanced other women.

Colonial laws, which singled out male acts, reflected the European condemnation of same-sex sexual relations. Statutes in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire cited as their basis the biblical prohibitions in Leviticus: "If any man lyeth with mankind, as he lyeth with a woman, both of them have committed abomination; they

both shall surely be put to death." The Rhode Island law followed the Book of Romans in defining sodomy as "a vile affection, whereby men given up thereto leave the natural use of woman and burn in their lusts one toward another, and so men with men work that which is unseemly." Departing from

the general pattern, New Haven outlawed a broad range of sexual acts, including sex between women, anal intercourse between men and women, and sex with children. 36 Jamestown

and the other southern colonies adopted the English "bug­ gery" statute of 1533, which called for death for "the horrible, detestable sins of Sodomie."37

As the biblical wording ofthe laws suggests, particularly in New England, religious condemnation of same-sex sexuality thundered from the pulpit. All sex outside marriage mer­ ited denunciation. Puritans especially, but most seventeenth­ century English Protestants as well, believed that temptation and sin were omnipresent. Faced with so many ways they

might depart from the path of the righteous, for them all sexual transgressions, from adultery to sodomy, fell more

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Joseph Stone, Deborah Sampson, 1797. Oil on panel. RHi(X3) 2513. Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society.

CHAPTER TWO

or less in the same category. Yet there were distinctions. Samuel Danforth, in 1673, differentiated "fornication," which included "whoredom:' adultery, incest, and "self-pollution:' from "going after strange flesh:' meaning "filthiness commit­ ted by parties of the same sex" and bestiality, or sexual contact with animals.38 Sodomy and bestiality differed from the other sins because they were unnatural, but like the other sins, they might tempt any individual to commit them. The important point is that engaging in sodomy did not place one in a special category; one was simply a sinner.

Despite the passage of sodomy laws throughout the colonies, regional differences created varying environments for same-sex desire and acts. In the New England colonies, attempts to build model religious communities led to the close supervision of morality in a family-centered world. In the Chesapeake region, in contrast, Europeans came originally to exploit rather than settle, and until the end of the seventeenth century the area contained more men than women, scattered settlements rather than concentrations of population, and more diverse inhabitants, including large numbers of inden­ tured servants and slaves. The sex ratio and the preponderance ofyoung single migrants may have led to more premarital and extramarital sexuality, perhaps including same-sex contacts.

What the legal codes specified and what the ministers preached did not entirely shape people's attitudes toward their neighbors caught in the act. Records document nineteen legal cases involving the charge of sodomy and five executions from 1607 to 1740, although this is no doubt just the tip of the iceberg of actual incidents. Even the minimal evidence we do have suggests that ordinary people, in contrast to the ministers and legislators, did not always harshly judge people accused of same-sex sexuality. Nor did they totally adopt the official perspective on sodomy as an act with no defining

IN THE BEGINNING

Consider, for instance, the cas'e of Nicholas Sension. A married and prosperous resident of Windsor, Connecticut, in 1677 Sension came before the General Court charged with sodomy. It was not the first complaint against him. Thirty years earlier, and then again in the 1660s, relatives of young men whom he had accosted had complained to the authorities, who merely reprimanded him. In the 1677 trial, witness after witness testified to Sension's often violent sexual advances: "He took me and threw me on the chest, and took hold of my privy parts . .. . the said Sension came to me with his yard or member erected in his hands, and desired me to lie on my belly, and strove with me."39 Over the years, Sension had sought sex from a number of young men, many of them servants, but he had most recently fixed his attention on a young retainer in his household, Nathaniel Pond. Pond had confided in his brother about his master's "grossly lascivious carriages toward him;' complaining that he "did often in an unseemly manner make attempts tending to sodomy." Witnesses told of seeing Sension in the servants' sleeping quarters at night, on one occasion trying to fondle the slumbering Pond. Sension desisted only when Pond's bed partner awoke-people at this time routinely slept with others without any sexual connotations. Because only one witness claimed that Sension had succeeded in committing sodomy and the law required two, the court found Sension guilty of attempted sodomy, placing his estate in bond for his good behavior but ordering no other financial or corporal penalty.

What does it mean that the good citizens of Windsor tolerated Sension's behavior for decades and the court, when called to judge him, merely slapped him on the wrist? Reac­ tions to Sension give no indication of the horror and disgust reflected in the legal and religious pronouncements. It is true that not all accused men escaped so lightly. William Plaine of

consequences for the people involved. New Haven was put to death in 1646 for committing "sodomy

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with two persons in England" and for having "corrupted a great part of the youth of Guilford by masturbations, which he had committed, and provoked others to the like above a hundred times." And the same court sentenced John Knight to death in 1655 for attempting sodomy on a teenage boy after he had already been convicted for sexually abusing a child.

But even ifSension's case is unusual because of his stand­ ing in the community, the glimpse it affords us of popular responses and one man's self-perception is invaluable. That Sension's pursuit of young men was widely known and lit­ tle acted on suggests some ambivalence about the "crime" of sodomy. Nathaniel Pond himself, toward whom Sension expressed "fond affection," refused Sension's offer of a release from his indenture, saying he was "loathe to leave him who had the trouble of his education in his minority." Although Sension's pursuit of younger and subordinate men fit the tra­ ditional European pattern, a neighbor testified that Sension admitted that he had "long" practiced "this trade," the very term suggesting a preference and a way of life.

I

The same understanding emerges from the trial of Stephen Gorton, a married Baptist minister in New London, also accused over a thirty-year period of "unchaste behaviour with his fellow men when in bed with them." In 1757 the church decreed that his "offensive and unchaste behaviour, frequently repeated for a long space of time," gave evidence of "an inward disposition ... towards the actual commission of a sin of so black and dark a dye:' Despite this judgment, Gorton won reinstatement to his position after confessing his sins. Gorton's "inward disposition," like Sension's "trade," hints at a concept that sat uneasily with the official definition of sodomy as a horrific act that any sinner might commit, but not one that defined the sinner as a special kind of person.

A very different kind of case, played out in Warrosquyo­ acke, Virginia, in 1629, supports the notion that ordinary

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IN THE BEGINNING

people might hold different views than the religious and legal authorities.4o Here the issue was not sodomy but gender transgression. A servant, sometimes known as Thomas and other times as Thomasine Hall, raised such confusion in the minds of the community that groups of both women and men felt compelled to find out the nature ofhis/her genitalia. Hall had been raised in England as a girl but at the age of twenty-four "Cut off£] his heire and Changed his apparell into the fashion of man" and joined the army.41 Upon returning from service in France, Hall changed back into a woman and worked as a seamstress. Deciding to emigrate to Virginia in 1627, he boarded ship as a man. Apparently once settled in Virginia as a servant, Hall sometimes dressed as a woman and employed "feminine" skills in needlework. Hall claimed to be both a man and a woman.

In attempting to determine Hall's "true" gender, com­ munity matrons, Hall's master, and the authorities all took different approaches. Several times groups ofwomen-as was customary in cases of witchcraft or premarital pregnancy­ searched Hall's body to see what they would find. That they did so suggests they must have assumed she was female, for they would not have presumed to examine a male body. In the women's eyes Hall's anatomy clinched it-he had what he himself described as "a peece of flesh growing at the ... belly as bigg as the topp of his little finger [an] inch long," although "hee had not the use of the man's p[ar]te."42 With such a penis, if ever so small and nonfunctional, he must be a man. Yet Hall's original Virginia master and the first local authority to undertake an examination of Hall both concluded she was a woman. Likewise, Hall's second master at first insisted that an individual without male sexual functions who sometimes dressed as a woman had to be female. He changed his mind only when, called by the female searchers to witness what they had found, he looked in vain for the "peece of an hole"

«33 »

- -

CHAPTER TWO

Hall claimed to have. 43 Without a vagina, he could not be a woman, so the master decided that Hall should dress as a man after all. A while later, dressed in male clothing, Hall met two men who threw him down to see whether he was male or female; Hall "pulled out his members whereby it appeared:' according to the men who later testified about the event, "that hee was a p [ er Jfect man."44

Given such uncertainty about Hall's sex and gender and the nature ofhis/her transgression, the community passed the case to the Jamestown General Court, where Hall told her/his story. Given the conflicting testimony and the history of changeability, the court ordered Hall to wear men's breeches but a woman's apron and cap.

The community seemed most concerned about deciding what clothes Hall should wear to inform others of his/her gender. Yet gender confusion always carried the possibility of inappropriate same-sex sexual acts. In Hall's case, the question of sexuality arose only when a rumor spread that he/she had engaged in a tryst with a maidservant. But another exchange reported in court is intriguing. A witness testified that a man had asked Hall why he wore women's clothing, and Hall had replied, "I goe in weomans aparell to gett a bitt for my Catt."45 What did this mean? There's no way to know for sure, but it might have been a sly English translation of a then current French slang expression (remember Thomas's military service in France), "pour avoir une bit pour mon chat" or "to get a prick for my cunt."46 In other words, she wanted to appear as a woman in order to attract a male sexual partner.

Whatever Hall's sexual desires, the case reveals conflicting understandings of gender and the lack of a distinct category for transgendered individuals such as existed in Native Ameri­ can and some African societies. Hall him/herself preferred the freedom to switch between male and female; the women and

«34»

IN THE BEGINNING

Hall's master sought to fix his/her gender based on bodily characteristics; others involved in the case accepted Hall as a woman because of her feminine skills and mannerisms; the court ordered a mixed presentation that shamed Hall as a man and limited her/his ability to move across the boundaries of gender.

What the cases of Nicholas Sension and Thomas/Thoma­ sine Hall show is that colonial attitudes toward gender and sexual transgression were complex, shaped not only by Euro­ pean law, custom, and religious dictates but also by the active participation of the community. Religious and civil authori­ ties focused on the sinful unnatural acts, which they placed in the same category as other deviant sexual behavior. There was"no permanent cultural category or identity for those who engaged in same-sex sexual relations or for those who could not easily be labeled male or female. Nevertheless, evidence does suggest a popular perception that some individuals regu­ larly engaged in-and preferred-same-sex sexual behavior, and that some individuals bridged the cultural categories of man and woman. Law, religion, and the everyday perspectives of ordinary people-as well as the alternative possibilities for sexuality and gender embodied in Native American and African sexual systems-all went into the fashioning of a New World sexuality.

By the time of the Revolution, the new Americans who made the laws had hammered out understandings of gender and sexual morality that contrasted markedly with those of Native American and African societies. But despite European blind­ ness to anything other than a two-category system of "men" and "women," a case such as that of Thomas/Thomasine Hall forced them to confront a murkier reality. Likewise Deborah Sampson's excursions across the gender line, in the tradition of cross-dressing women in the European past, showed that

(U5»

C HAPTER TWO

"female men" were found not only in Native American and African cultures.

In the same way, the story ofNicholas Sension's neighbors and the Reverend Mr. Gorton's parishioners reveals that the windows of tolerance for same-sex sexuality that we find in some African and Native American societies might have also existed, albeit in different form, among the Europeans in America. Perhaps the libertine tradition accustomed them to accept Sension's assaults as long as he adhered to the status hierarchy. Certainly their not fully articulated notion of Sension's "trade" and Gorton's "disposition" reminds us that we need to know more than what the legal and religious authorities said about same-sex sexuality. What people de­ sired, what they did, and what they thought were part of the complex process of building a sexual system.

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_7l. N?~

WORLDS OF MEN, WORLDS OF WOMEN:

SE X AND ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIP IN AN

INDUSTRIALIZING AND E X PANDING

NATION

In 1975, while married to a man, I fell in love with a woman. In the early stages my new relationship was purely romantic. I thought about her all the time, we talked endlessly on the telephone, I gave her presents, I longed to be with her. The way the three of us understood what was going on was that she was "really" heterosexual and had just happened to fall in love with me, while I was "really" a lesbian and in the process of coming out. And then I read Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's eye-opening article titled "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America."]

I devoured the story ofMolly Hallock Foote and her friend Helena, who met in school in New York in 1868. In an early letter to Helena, Molly wrote, "I have not said to you in so many or so few words that I was happy with you during those

«37»

nfe1 Chapter One

1. Huussen 1989, 146. 2. Cook 1992,479,15. 3. Freedman 1998; see also Freedman 1996. 4. Duberman 1989. 5. Vance 1989 raises this last question, attributing it to one of her

students, in an extremely thoughtful article. On New Guinea, see Herdt 1981.

6. Katz 1995,20. Katz cites Dr. James G. Kiernan, "Responsibility in Sexual Perversion," Chicago Medical Recorder 3 (May 1892): 185-210.

7. This is the historical position known as "essentialism," most closely associated with the late John Boswell. See Boswell 1980, 1994. His theoretical position is perhaps best laid out in Boswell 1989. Another historical work emphasizing similarities rather than differ­ ences across time is Norton 1992. It is important to emphasize here that the issue for historians is less the biological or social origin of same-sex desire than the similarity of its manifestations in different cultures.

8. Most historians of sexuality are "social constructionists," that is, they focus on understanding the ways social forces have shaped sexuality differently in different cultures. Stein 1990 collects many of the classic articles on social constructionism.

9. See Halperin 1989; Padgug 1989. 10. Lister 1988, 1992.

Chapter Two 1. Trexler 1995. 2. Feinberg 1996. 3. Sams 1916, 80-81. 4. Gutierrez 1991, 12, 19. 5. Delage 1993, 57-59, 201-4. 6. Sams 1916,65. 7. Quoted in Katz 1976, 289. 8. Greenberg 1988. 9. See Williams 1986; Allen 1986; Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang 1997.

({20ll>

NOTES TO PAGES 1 7 -34

10. Quoted in Katz 1976, 290. 11. Quoted in Katz 1976, 287. 12. Quoted in Katz 1976,285-90. 13. Quoted in Greenberg 1988,40-41. 14. Quoted in Gutierrez 1991, 35. 15. Quoted in Saslow 1989, 92. 16. Quoted in Trumbach 1989, 131. 17. Burg 1984, 147, 146. See also, for a slightly later period,

Gilbert 1976. 18. Quoted in Rey 1985,181. 19. Quoted in Trumbach 1989, 13 7. 20 . Quoted in Brown 1989. 21. Quoted in Faderman 1981, 51.

/'12.);aderman 1981,51-52. As suggested by Joanne Meyerowitz, I ~here the practice of the transgender movement in using pro­ nouns according to the gender of presentation.

23. Quoted in Faderman 1981, 57. "Randy women" is a rough translation of lollepotten, a term analyzed in Everard 1994.

24 . See Bleys 1995,33. 25. Quoted in Bleys 1995, 33. 26. Bleys 1995,33. 27. Quoted in Baum 1993,25. All information in this paragraph

is from Baum. 28. Katz 1976, 22-23. 29. Bleys 1995,34. 30. Bleys 1995,34. 31. Quoted in Bleys 1995, 34. 32. Bleys 1995,34. 33. Quoted in Katz 1976, 19-20. 34. Quoted in Katz 1983,94-100. 35. Quoted in Katz 1983,85-86, 92- 93 . 36. Godbeer 1995, 266- 67. 37. Katz 1983 , 68. 38. Quoted in Godbeer 1995,263. 39. All quotations in this and the similar cases come from God-

beer 1995 . 40. This discussion is based on Brown 1995 and Norton 1997. 41. Quoted in Norton 1997,42. 42. Quoted in Brown 1995, 182. 43. Quoted in Brown 1995, 183. 44. Norton 1997,41. 45. Quoted in Norton 1997,44.

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NOTES TO PAGE S 34 - 5 7

46. This is the fascinating interpretation developed by Norton 1997, 59.

Chapter Three 1. Smith-Rosenberg 1975 . 2. Quoted in Smith-Rosenberg 1975,5-7. 3. Quoted in an e-mail communication from John Weiss, 2 April

1998; Weiss found this reference in the course of his research on African Americans who took their freedom in the course of the War of 1812. I am grateful for his permission to cite this document. See Weiss 1996.

4. Quoted in Smith-Rosenberg 1975,4-5 . 5. Quoted in D'Emilio and Freedman 1988, 126. 6. Quoted in Smith-Rosenberg 1975,24-26. 7. See Holloway 1997. 8. Quoted in Knowlton 1997,45. 9. Quoted in Knowlton 1997,48. 10. Quoted in Rotundo 1989,7. 11. Quoted in Rotundo 1989, 4. 12. D'Emilio and Freedman 1988, 127. 13 . Quoted in Katz 1976,472-73. 14. See Donald 1995 and Chauncey 1998. 15 . Quoted in Duberman 1991 , 63. 16. Quoted in Duberman 1989, 155. 17. Quoted in Hansen 1995, 159, 160. 18 . Quoted in Hansen 1995 , 160. 19. Quoted in Hansen 1995, 162. 20. Quoted in Hansen 1995, 164. 21. Quoted in Hansen 1995, 168. 22. Quoted in Hansen 1995, 170. 23. Both quoted in Smith-Rosenberg 1985, 106. 24. Allmendinger 1992,6. Allmendinger sees this as symbolic of

the cowboys' own "castration" in being isolated from women; I see it, rather, as potentially homoerotic.

25. Clarence Ulford, Tex (New York: Burt, 1922),212; quoted in Katz 1976, 510.

26. Quoted in Williams 1986,158. 27 . Quoted in Perry 1997, 516. 28 . Quoted in Williams 1986, 159. 29. Williams 1986, 159-60. 30. Quoted in Westermeier 1974, 101. 31. N g 1989; Hinsch 1990.

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