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CHAPTER 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?P.

WORLDS OF MEN, WORLDS OF WOMEN:

SEX AND ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIP IN AN

INDUSTRIALIZING AND EXPANDING

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

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

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few so incredibly short weeks but surely you do not need words to tell you what you must know. Those two or three days so dark without, so bright with firelight and contentment within I shall always remember as proof that, for a time, at least-I fancy for quite a long time-we might be sufficient for each other .... Imagine yourselfkissed many times by one who loved you so dearly." As their friendship deepened, they made plans to live together. Molly pledged her love: "I wanted so to put my arms round my girl of all the girls in the world and tell her ... I love her as wives do love their husbands, as friends who have taken each other for life." But shortly thereafter Helena decided to marry, and Molly followed suit two years later. In the interval between their marriages, Molly confided, "You know dear Helena, I really was in love with you. It was a passion such as I had never known until I saw you:' And to Helena's fiance, in a letter of congratulations, Molly wrote bluntly, "Do you know sir, that until you came along I believe that she loved me almost as girls love their lovers. I know I loved her so. Don't you wonder that I can stand the sight of you."2

And this was only one of dozens of examples of passion­ ate, intense, loving, physically affectionate relationships­ what have come to be called "romantic friendships"-that Smith-Rosenberg had uncovered in the correspondence of a wide range of American middle-class families between the 1760s and the 1880s. Perhaps most amazing, as Molly's forthrightness in addressing Helena's fiance suggests, such friendships were widely accepted, even admired, and often lasted from adolescence through marriage and into old age. Smith-Rosenberg concluded that the supposedly repressive Victorian sexual system in fact allowed far more latitude in moving along a spectrum ranging from what we would call heterosexuality to homosexuality than does late twentieth­ century American society.

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Now let me try to reconstruct for a moment what this article meant to me. It was not that it was all right to be a lesbian because there had been lesbians in the past. Nor was it that what I was feeling was all right because it was not "homosexuality." Rather, it was that our modern categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality (and even bisexuality) are not complex enough to capture the slippery reality oflove and desire. I seized upon this article because Smith-Rosenberg's vision of a world in which love and sexuality had no easy relation to sexual identity made sense to me, unsure as I was if I yet merited the label "lesbian." And though the woman I fell in love with is now married to a man and I happily identify as a lesbian, I do not take that to mean those were the only possible outcomes.

The historical phenomenon of romantic friendship suggests how different the world of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was from colonial society, where two women might commit "unseemly practices" and engage in "lewd behavior." To say nothing of the late twentieth century! The strangeness of romantic friendship to our modern eyes leads us to pause for a moment to consider why sexuality is so differently un­ derstood at different points in time. The nineteenth century witnessed great commercial and industrial growth in the North, political upheaval and the end of slavery in the South, and the movement of different groups of the population into new territories, all developments that had a profound impact on sexuality. So, after considering the changing sexual system, f I turn to different forms of same-sex love and sexuality. We find both the newer relationship of romantic friendship and the persistence of older patterns of interaction: sexual behav­ ior within sex-segregated subcultures and men and women crossing the gender line. And we see the beginnings of urban worlds in which men who loved men might find each other.

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C HAPTER THR EE

A Transformed Sexual System

What I have been calling the "sexual system" is closely con­ nected to large-scale economic, social, and political develop­ ments. Although in everyday life we tend to think of sexuality as something personal, historians of sexuality see it as a com­ plex product of individual desires, group activities and ideas, and societal forces. As the country grew up, the ways people expressed their love and desire changed.

How, exactly, did this happen? One key is that the family became less central as an economic unit. The rise of factory production in the Northeast accelerated the process, already under way with the growth of commercialized agriculture and the expansion of trade, of moving the production of goods and services away from the farmstead. Wage labor made a stark distinction between those who earned money and those who did not. Children not employed as laborers became less of an economic asset and required more of a fi­ nancial investment. So white, American-born, urban middle­ class families began to have fewer children, making use of contraception and abortion as well as abstinence from sexual intercourse to limit family size. In such a context, guardians of sexual morality could less easily proclaim reproduction the sole purpose of sexuality, eliminating one argument against nonreproductive sexual acts, including those engaged in by same-sex partners. Although the birthrate decline was not universal (African American slave women, southern white women, white women on the frontier of white settlement, and immigrant women continued to bear large numbers of children), the trend begun in the middle and upper classes in the urban Northeast spread throughout society.

As productive activities such as weaving cloth and making shoes moved outside the household, some women followed them into the factory while others, whose families could

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afford it, stayed at home. Despite the reality of "factory girls," women engaged in agricultural labor, and women who con­ tinued to do work such as spinning and weaving at home as part of the "putting out" system of production, societal norms increasingly emphasized the domestic roles ofwomen. Associating women with the home and men with the world outside, the dominant ideology posited a fundamental differ­ ence between men and women and between male and female sexuality. The double standard was nothing new, but tradi­ tionally women in Western society had been viewed as just as sexual as men-or even more so. The nineteenth-century sexual system, which continues to undergird our contempo­ rary assumptions that men are more interested in sex than women are, reversed the older ideas about female lascivious­ ness and proclaimed the ideal woman inherently passionless. As a response to the increasing separation of male and female spheres of activity among the urban middle class, the tenet of women's sexual difference from men served to aid middle­ class men's sexual self-control within marriage. Ironically, the ideology of profound sexual difference, in conjunction with economic and social sex segregation, also encouraged same­ sex love and sexuality.

And finally, differences of race and class, as well as gender, intensified in the nineteenth century, with consequences for the history of same-sex sexuality. As the nation expanded in the course of the century, not only did whites and African Americans move west into Indian territory, but Mexicans moved north and Chinese and Japanese immigrants moved east, leading to all sorts of interactions across the lines of ethnicity. Sexuality, and lack of sexual self-control, became increasingly associated, in the eyes of the white middle class, with racial and ethnic minorities and the working class.

This was so partly because not all groups conformed to the dominant sexual system, leading its proponents to label them

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immoral. African American slave communities, for example, maintained their own values with regard to courtship, sex­ uality, marriage, childbearing, and divorce. Mexican women and men on the southwestern frontier, in accordance with a Mexican working-class custom, accepted cohabitation in informal unions as well as marriage. And people in urban working-class neighborhoods, where sex had always been more public than in middle- and upper-class districts, lived among the burgeoning dance halls, taverns, and other institu­ tions that fostered a sexualized commercial culture. As men of all classes moved freely in the booming sexual underworlds, young, single, working-class women in urban areas began to challenge both older conceptions of their depravity and new ones of their asexuality to carve out a culture that had some chance of meeting their own sexual and emotional needs.

An intriguing tidbit in the records of slave owners who claimed compensation for their loss of "property" when slaves ran off to the British in the War of 1812 illustrates the impor­ tance of race in understanding sexuality. In 1828 a witness supporting a white woman's claim for compensation de­ scribed a slave woman, Minty, as having two surnames, Gurry and Caden. The first was that of her husband, from whom she had parted shortly after their marriage. She then "formed an intimacy with a negro woman" and took her name. This tantalizing fragment suggests both the possibility that slave cultures recognized same-sex ties and that slaveowners might matter-of-factly report the existence of such relationships.3

The association of sexuality with race and class both fostered intimate (but presumably nonsexual) same-sex re­ lations among the middle class and eroticized cross-class and interracial relations. Labeling working-class people and people of color as more sexual also justified the existence of prostitution and the sexual exploitation of women of color and working-class women by elite white men.

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The separation of sexuality and reproduction, the as­ sertion of female and male difference, and the increased differentiation of sexuality along lines of gender, race, and class had important consequences for the expression of same­ sex desire. As cities grew, as waves of immigrants landed on American shores, as factories belched their fumes above the landscape, as African Americans celebrated their freedom, as people trekked west, east, and north, the old order gave way.

Romantic Friendship

In the settled Northeast, the ideology of sexual difference between women and men flourished among the urban middle class. If women's and men's polarized natures were, in theory, intended to combine in marriage, they also quite logically led to the glorification of same-sex relations. Marriage might rep­ resent the union of two unlike halves, but intense, passionate relationships between two similar souls thrived in addition to and, for women, alongside marriage.

We have already witnessed the intensity of Molly and Helena's love. Although the fierceness of Molly's attachment and the destructiveness of marriage to their bond might set them apart from other romantic friends, their expressions of love and physical affection did not. Consider the saga of fourteen-year-old Sarah Butler Wister and sixteen-year­ old Jeannie Field Musgrove, who met in the summer of 1849. Their friendship deepened during two years together in boarding school, where Sarah adorned Jeannie's portrait with a bouquet of flowers and took on a male nom de plume. Their relationship continued right through marriage and into old age. As a twenty-nine-year-old mother, Sarah wrote to her beloved Jeannie, "I can give you no idea how desperately I shall want you." After visits together, Jeannie wrote, "Dear darling Sarah! How I love you & how happy I have been! You are

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the joy of my life." And "I want you to tell me in your next letter, to assure me, that I am your dearest .... So just fill a quarter page with caresses & expressions of endearment." Jeannie addressed Sarah as "my dearest, dearest lover" and sent "a thousand kisses." When Jeannie married at the ripe old age of thirty-seven, Sarah wrote from afar, "I have thought & thought & yearned over you these two days .... My dearest love to you wherever and whoever you are."4

What is remarkable in this relationship-the intensity and the longevity-is typical of romantic friendships among women. The poet Emily Dickinson fell in love with her friend Sue Gilbert, who later married Dickinson's brother. In 1852 Dickinson wrote to Gilbert: "Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to? ... I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait, feel that now I must have you-that the expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fas1."5 In 1808 Sarah Foulke wrote in her diary, "I laid with my dear R[ ebecca] and a glorious good talk we had until about 4 [A.M.]-O how hard I do love her." Eunice Callender carved her and Sarah Ripley's initials into a tree, with a pledge of eternal love. Eliza Schlatter wrote to her friend Sophie DuPont in 1834, "I wish I could be with you present in the body as well as the mind & heart-I would turn your good husband out of bed-and snuggle into you and we would have a long talk like old times."6

Surviving letters between two white Georgia women, Alice Baldy and Josie Varner, suggest that southern women too formed romantic friendships, although these likely differed from those of women in the more urban and industrial region of the country. 7 Like many of their northern counterparts, Baldy and Varner met in college in the 1850s. Baldy, from a once-wealthy family that had run into hard times in the 1860s, scraped out a living as a teacher. She dreamed of running a

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school with Varner, who worked in her family's hotel, but Ihis was never to be. Baldy wrote Varner in 1870: "I am only a woman like yourself, yet you never had, & never can have a more devoted, sincere & constant lover than you have in me; and mine, my dear, is a love that will never tire."8 And later that same year:

Do you know that if you only touch me, or speak to me there

is not a nerve or fibre in my body that does not respond with a

thrill of delight? .. . You remember the morning you came in the

parlor . .. and, taking my head in your arms, you bent down with

such a smile & such a look! and gave me the sweetest kiss any body

could imagine .. . I was quite happy.9

But perhaps because Varner did not reciprocate Baldy's love with the same intensity, the two women lived out their lives apart, Baldy struggling to make ends meet.

As these stories make clear, romantic friendships among women grew out of a female world of kin and friends bound together by female-controlled rituals, such as birth, mar­ riage , and death, and institutions such as boarding schools or colleges and the custom of "visiting." Women met their lifelong friends through their families or at school, and they often maintained an intimate friendship into marriage. Until the opening of employment, especially in the professions, provided the prospect of economic independence for middle­ class women, marriage seemed the only possibility. Unmar­ ried daughters had little choice except to remain within the family, moving to the household of a brother or sister after their parents' deaths. By the second half ofthe nineteenth cen­ tury, however, the expansion of employment opportunities meant that romantic friends might decide to forgo marriage and make a life together. These partnerships between ro­ mantic friends, which became known as "Boston marriages" because of their prevalence in the older cities, substituted

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for heterosexual marriage in a way that ultimately proved threatening to the social order.

But until the late nineteenth century, romantic friend­ ships among women could meet with not just toleration but approbation, as long as they did not in some way cross the lines of respectability. Prescriptive literature advocated such bonds as particularly appropriate for women, who were thought to be emotional, spiritual creatures with little to do in the world. Assumptions about women's asexuality help explain society's acceptance of what might look to modern eyes like lesbian relationships. If women and men (or at least white middle-class women and men) were conceptualized as polar opposites-men represented by the head and hand and women by the heart, men inherently lustful and women naturally pure and without desire-then what could be more natural than that women would find their soulmates among each other and that society would condone this?

What is harder to understand is society's acceptance of a more limited form of romantic friendship among young men. Listen to the story of Albert Dodd and Anthony Halsey, college students in the 1830s, who loved each other and slept together in the same bed. Albert, in his journal, referred to his "adored Anthony," "my most beloved of all:' and described his friend as "so handsome." "Often too:' he wrote, Anthony "shared my pillow-or I his, and then how sweet to sleep with him, to hold his beloved form in my embrace, to have his arms about my neck, to imprint upon his face sweet kisses."IO

Or what about Daniel Webster and James Hervey Bing­ ham, who formed a warm friendship at Dartmouth, then studied law, taught school, and served as law clerks together? In letters they addressed each other as "Lovely Boy" or "Dearly Beloved." Daniel described "dear Hervey" as "the only friend of my heart, the partner of my joys, griefs, and affections, the only participator of my most secret thoughts." "I don't see

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how I can live any longer without having a friend near me, I mean a male friend, just such a friend as one J. H. B.:' he lamented. Then he announced that he would move in: "Yes, James, I must come; we will yoke together again; your little bed is just wide enough; we will practise at the same bar, and be as friendly a pair of single fellows as ever cracked a nue'll

In the years before the Civil War, intellectuals and artists associated with the transcendentalist movement spread word of romantic friendships among men as well as women. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay titled "On Friendship," and Herman Melville, whose Mohr Dick explores the intense rela­ tionships of men at sea, dedicated his masterpiece to his friend and fellow artist Nathaniel Hawthorne. 12 In the novel, when the hero Ishmael first meets Queequeg, the harpooner from the South Seas, it is as his unknown bedmate in an inn. "Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife." And the next night, having gotten to know Queequeg and having "felt a melting in me: ' Ishmael comments: "How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg-a cosy, loving pair."13

This sounds, of course, a great deal like the romantic friendship that flourished among women. But there was one big difference: however much these young men might long to live together, society expected their friendships to change with adulthood and marriage, because success in the middle-class male professional and business worlds called for a competitive spirit quite at odds with such youthful devotion. Although male romantic friends shared the female ones' sense that

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only same-sex friends could truly understand one another, they differed in the loosening of these bonds after the period of youth, at least if they married. Like women, young men formed ardent and romantic attachments and engaged in touching, kissing, and caressing. But they were expected to move beyond such intense attachment when they became adults and married.

Kissing, hugging, even sharing a bed, which was com­ monplace, as we have seen, could be done openly, with no self-consciousness, because these were expressions of emo­ tional intimacy, not sexuality. The revelation that Abraham Lincoln shared a double bed (and his most private thoughts) for almost four years with general store proprietor Joshua Speed as he started out on his illustrious career in Springfield, Illinois, has attracted a great deal of attention, leading on the one hand to claims that this means he was "gay" and on the other to attempts to use this piece of history to raise awareness of the different ways that male intimacy could be expressed in the past. 14

By the end of the nineteenth century, physical affec­ tion between men began to take on a different coloration. Frederick S. Ryman, a New Yorker who in 1886 recorded in his diary his fondness for "the Oriental custom of men embracing & kissing each other" and described sleeping with his friend Rob's arms around him, drew a clear line between such cuddling and heterosexual intercourse. "I am certain there was no sexual sentiment on the part of either of us. We both have our mistresses ... & I am certain that the thought of the least demonstration of unmanly & abnormal passion would have been as revolting to him as it is & ever has been to me."IS If perhaps he protested too much for us to believe that he experienced no "abnormal passions," he had certainly learned his lines. If not all men in fact forgot their male friends in the interests of marriage and manhood (the poet Walt

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Male friends relax together, a turn-of-the-century cabinet card. Courtesy of Seekers Antiques, Columbus, Ohio.

CHAPTER THREE

Whitman and Mormon luminary Evan Stephens, as we shall see, maintained their passionate male friendships into old age) the persistence of such attachments began to shade into more questionable behavior.

For both women and men of the middle class, romantic friendship represented an emotional and sensual option. So­ ciety's acceptance of such bonds, and their compatibility with cross-sex relationships, reveals a conception of the nature of sexuality that differs from what had gone before and what would come after. Acts that would later be construed as sexual could be engaged in unself-consciously, not only by women assumed to be passionless but also by young men. This was to some extent (though not entirely) a class-bound form of relationship. The extended youth of middle-class men and the leisure of middle-class women played a central role in shaping romantic friendship, while the association of sexual­ ity with the working class preserved the presumed asexuality of these relations.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the social acceptance of romantic friendship means that sexual acts never occurred between romantic friends. The 1826 letters of Thomas Jefferson Withers to James H. Hammond-who both went on to become southern pro-slavery and states' rights advocates-reveal a forthright eroticism that seems at odds with the chaste youthful bed sharing associated with male romantic friendship. "I feel some inclination to learn whether yo u yet sleep in yo ur Shirt-tail," the twenty- two-year­ old Withers wrote, "and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long flesh en pole-the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling? ... Sir, you roughen the downy Slumbers of your Bedfellow-by such hostile­ furious lunges as you are in the habit of making at him-when he is least prepared for defence against the crushing force of

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a Battering Ram." 16 Perhaps such a nonfurtive and playful description of male same-sex sexuality reflects the lingering influence of the male libertine tradition in the United States South. Perhaps in the tradition of boys' boarding schools, same-sex sexuality was a common but little-discussed part of adolescence. Or perhaps the letters expose an elaborate jest. In any case, the Withers-Hammond letters throw into question the innocence of male love in the ninetenth century.

What about women? It perhaps comes as no surprise that some men might have engaged in sexual acts, for men's lusts were legendary. Quite a different example shows that women might have engaged in, and interpreted in different ways, acts that seem quite sexual to modern eyes. Two African American women, freeborn domestic servant Addie Brown and schoolteacher Rebecca Primus, forged a passionate re­ lationship in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1860s. Across the chasm of class, eighteen-year-old Addie somehow met Rebecca, five years older, well-respected, and politically com­ mitted, as evinced by her journey south to teach freed slaves in Maryland. That they identified with the model of white women's romantic friendship is suggested by Addie's com­ mentary on Grace Aguilar's 1850 book Wom en's Friendships, the tale of a friendship between an aristocratic and a middle­ class British woman. Yet as Addie put it, "You have been more to me then a fri end or sister." When apart, Addie brooded. "Rebecca, when I bid you good by it's seem to me that my very heart broke .. . . My Darling Friend I shall never be happy again unless I am near you eather here on earth or in heaven ... . I will always love you and you only."l ?

That their relationship involved at the very least the touching of breasts is revealed by a letter Addie wrote from her post at Miss Porter's School, where she reported that the "girls are very friendly towards me .... One of them wants to sleep with me. Perhaps I will give my consent some of these

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nights:' In response to Rebecca's (lost) reply, Addie explained: "If you think that is my bosom that captivated the girl that made her want to sleep with me, she got sadly disappointed injoying it, for I had my back towards all night and my night dress was butten up so she could not get to my bosom. I shall try to keep your flavored] one always for you. Should in my excitement forget, you will partdon me I know."18

Addie did not categorize her feelings for Rebecca as utterly different from her attraction to men. She wrote that she preferred Rebecca's kisses to those of the African American head of the household where she worked as a servant. "How I did miss you last night. I did not have anyone to hug me up and to kiss .... I don't want anyone to kiss me now. I turn Mr. Games away this morning. No kisses is like youres." And "You are the first girl that I ever love so and you are the last one .... If you was a man, what would things come to? They would after come to something very quick." "What a pleasure it would be to me to address you My Husband."19

Not only did the two women share love and erotic passion, but their relationship merited recognition in their commu­ nity. While Rebecca was teaching in the South, her mother defended their relationship. As Addie reported, "She said I thought as much of you if you was a gentleman. She also said if either one of us was a gent we would marry."20 In a sense, the bond between the two women fit the pattern of extending kin ties to nonfamily members that was typical in both slave and free African American communities. Yet there were limits. Rebecca's aunt warned Addie not to let her suitor, Joseph Tines, know of the depth of her love for Rebecca: "She also said if Mr. T[ines] was to see me, think that I care more for you then I did for him. I told, I did love you more then I ever would him. She said I better not tell him so."21

What Addie really wanted was to live with Rebecca. "Re­ becca, if! could live with you or even be with you some parts

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of the day, I would never marry."22 But it was not to be. With great ambivalence, Addie married her suitor, stopped her correspondence with Rebecca, and died of tuberculosis at age twenty-nine. Rebecca also married and lived to be ninety-five.

It is impossible to know how widespread such relation­ ships might have been in the African American community or whether the caressing ofbreasts Addie and Rebecca seemed to engage in was part of more romantic friendships than we know. What these rich letters do suggest, though-along with the briefer Hammond-Withers correspondence-is that romantic friendship was a complex experience that could take many forms. Some women, like Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, may have acted on their erotic desires . Perhaps others did not, or found satisfaction in the kissing, caressing, and fondling of ordinary romantic friendship. As long as they did not cross the lines of respectability in some way-by appearing "mannish" or utterly rejecting men, as Rebecca's aunt warned Addie not to do-romantic friends may have had quite a lot of leeway to express their love and desire.

Cowboys, Miners, Mormons, and Prostitutes: Sex in Single-Sex Communities

As urbanization and industrialization swept across the North­ east, quite a different story unfolded on the frontiers where migrants encountered new worlds. From the East and South, individuals and families undertook the journey farther and farther west into territories populated by Native Americans, where they reestablished a preindustrial mode of economic organization. At the same time, they took with them the ideas of their previous worlds, including the notion of appropriate male and female spheres. But the boomtowns of the fron­ tier were not New York or Boston. For one thing, far more men than women went to make their fortunes in mining or

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ranching. The scarcity of women meant the creation of all­ male worlds. For women the sex imbalance led to a variety of sexual alternatives to traditional monogamous marriage, some voluntary and some forced: polygyny in the case of the Mormons, cohabitation for Mexican women, sexual slavery for Chinese women, and sexual exploitation or prostitution

for some women ofall groups. For cowboys, miners, and pros­ titutes, life on the frontier brought increased sex segregation. Although evidence is scarce, those subcultures seem to have fostered same-sex sexual relations.

An early frontier of white settlement gave rise to the popular stories about Davy Crockett, the mythic hero of the Tennessee wilderness. From the 1830s to the 1850s, readers across the country devoured the tall tales in which Crockett battled nature, killed Indians with his bare hands, and sub­

dued wild animals. Although the stories gave Crockett a wife and daughters, he moved in a savage and largely male world where his domination of both animals and other men took on a cast of same-sex sexuality. Consider an 1846 account, for example, of Crockett's taming a wild stallion:

I grabbed him by the scuff of the mane, jerked him down instantly

and mounted him slick as a cow bird on the back of a brindle bull.

I then locked my feet under him ... and off we put ... the tarnal

critter tried to ... brush me off, but I pull his head .. . give him a

kick in the flank .... After that he laid right down and grunted the

perfect cart-horse submission an tameness.

Or this 1836 tale of a fight with a stagecoach driver:

I jumped right down upon the driver and he tore my trowsers right

off me .... luckily there was a poker in the fire which I thrust down

his throat, and by that means mastered him.23

As with pirates and sailors in earlier times, same-sex

sexuality among groups of men on the frontier seems to have

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been a response to isolation from women and perhaps in some cases what drew men to frontier living-or at least did not deter them. Cowboys and miners spent most of their time in all-male company. Their work was hard and their culture unrelentingly masculine, and they developed special rituals. When cowboys castrated bulls, for example, they cooked

and ate the testicles. 24 Although both miners and cowboys caroused with available women when they had the chance, some also took on "female" roles as dance partners when

no women were available. A 1922 western novel described a raucous all-male dance in a mining camp: "A roar oflaughter came from the celebrating miners and all eyes turned their way. Sinful and Hank were dancing to the music of a jew's­ harp and the time set by stamping, hob-nailed boots. They parted, bowed, joined again, parted, curtsied and went on, hand in hand, turning and ducking, backing and filing, the dust flying and the perspiration streaming down."25

Some cowboys paired off and formed deep attachments with their sidekicks. A ranch hand who had worked in South Dakota and Arizona wrote a poem after his partner's death, describing his feelings that "Al ain't here no more!" Published

in 1915, the poem included these lines:

We loved each other in the way men do

And never spoke about it, AI and me.

But we both knowed, and knowin' it so true

Was more than any woman's kiss could be.

I wait to hear him ridin' up behind And feel his knee rub

mine the good old way. 26

North of the United States border, in British Columbia, simi­ lar lifelong bonds between men in the nineteenth century led

one gold miner to commit suicide after the death of a partner, leaving a note that read, "I can't live without Cy."27

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That cowboy life might also lead to sexual relations is sug­ gested by the testimony of early twentieth-century cowboys. One Oklahoma cowboy described the sexual progression of cowboy partners: ''At first pairing they'd solace each other gingerly and, as bashfulness waned, manually. As trust in mutual good will matured, they'd graduate to the ecstatically comforting .... Folk know not how cock-hungry men get." Bonding, he wrote, "was at first rooted in admiration, infat­ uation, a sensed need of an ally, loneliness and yearning, but it regularly ripened into 10ve."28 Another man who worked in logging and gold mining camps in the early years of the twentieth century also reported widespread sexual activity.29

Furthermore, off-color cowboy limericks reinforce the notion that cowboy culture could foster same-sex relations. Listen to these two examples:

There was a cowboy named Hooter,

Who packed a big six-shooter,

When he grabbed the stock

It became hard as a rock,

As a peace-maker it couldn't be cuter.

Young cowboys had a great fear,

That old studs once filled with beer,

Completely addle'

They'd throw on a saddle,

And ride them on the rear.3D

The same kinds of attachments may have formed among other groups of men on the frontier. Cowboys and miners came from a variety of cultures, including Mexican, African American, and Chinese, in which same-sex relations were tra­ ditionally viewed differently than in European American so­ ciety. In Mexico the most important distinction was between "active" and "passive» sexual acts among men; as in the older

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W OR LD S O F M EN , W O R LD S O F W OMEN

l~uropean libertine tradition, to penetrate was acceptable, to be penetrated was not. In China, same-sex relations between men who also married women had a long tradition. Two terms for male love-"the love of shared peach" and "the cut sleeve"-derive from ancient stories about elite men. In the first case a peach proved so delicious tha t a man offered the rest of it to his ruler, whom he held in great affection. In the other an emperor and his lover fell asleep one afternoon, the lover's head on the emperor's sleeve; when the ruler had to attend to business, he cut off his sleeve rather than disturb his 10ver.31 Although the Qing dynasty in the mid-eighteenth century cracked down on the blossoming of male love, it is possible that male same-sex sexuality flourished in Chinese enclaves in the United States. Certainly the distorted sex ratio among the Chinese population, the result of deliberate immigration policies designed to prevent family settlement, militated in that direction . In California in 1860, for example, there were almost twenty Chinese men for every Chinese woman, most of whom were brought into the country to work as pros­ titutes. Male same-sex sexuality may have bloomed within the Chinese bachelor societies that formed in the early years of settlement. We do know that labor contractors provided male prostitutes for Pacific Coast Asian American cannery workers in the 1920s and 1930s, confirming the existence of same-sex sexuality among the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino workers. 32 Just as different sexual systems came into play in the early years of European settlement, so too on the frontier did different cultures interact.

Within the Mormon community of Salt Lake City-yet another distinct culture on the frontier of white western settlement-same-sex relationships took on various forms. Despite the family basis of Mormon migration and settle­ ment, Mormon congregations remained segregated by gen­ der throughout most of the nineteenth century, encouraging

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CHAPTER THREE

same-sex love and intimacy. Male Mormon missionaries, even when married, often left their wives for two years or more to spread the word of God. The church directed such men to be celibate and to remain glued to the side of a missionary com­ panion in order to ward offloneliness. A guide for prospective Latter-Day Saints missionaries, issued in 1889, assumed that the men would "become quite attached to each other."33

Perhaps even more striking, given current Mormon intol­ erance of same-sex sexuality, were the published descriptions of the relationships of two prominent nineteenth-century Mormons. Evan Stephens, director of the famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir from 1890 to 1916, formed a series ofintense attachments with "dear boy chums." At sixteen, Stephens left his parents' home and moved in with his "dearest friend" John Ward. When Ward married after about six years, Stephens lived with a succession of what the Mormon publication Juvenile Instructor termed his "numerous boys;' most of whom also married but remained close to Stephens. Children's Friend, another Mormon publication, described the "last of his several life companions, who have shared his home life." Tom S. Thomas Jr. was eighteen when he went to live with the fifty-seven-year-old Stephens. After putting through college his "blond Viking who captured the eye of everyone as a superb specimen of manhood;' Stephens left his position with the Tabernacle Choir to move to New York, where Thomas entered medical school. They lived together in Greenwich Village, which by then was the site of a nascent gay and lesbian community.34

The same issue of Children's Friend that carried the story of Stephens's life and loves also paid tribute to the relationship of Louie B. Felt, president of the Mormon organization for young children, and May Anderson, who worked in Felt's organization and edited Children's Friend. Felt's intimacies with women began within her polygynous marriage when

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WORLDS OF MEN, WORLDS OF WOMEN

she "fell in love" with a woman named Lizzie Mineer and asked her husband to marry her. But it was Anderson who came to share Felt's life. "Those who watched their devotion to each other declare that there never were more ardent lovers than these two:' They moved in together, and Felt's husband went to live with his other wives. "Unless duty called them away from each other;' they never separated. "When they were too tired to sit up any longer they put on their bathrobes and crawled into bed to work until the wee hours of the night."35 The story of Felt and Anderson, like that of Evan Stephens, suggests that gender-segregated organizations and institutions within Mormon culture fostered the same kinds ofsame-sex ties that we find in other single-sex environments.

Turning to a very different world, prostitution cultivated same-sex communities of women who lived together and sometimes formed close and loving bonds. Scraps of evidence suggest that at least some frontier prostitutes had sex with each other. A story circulated in the Comstock lode in northwest­ ern Nevada, for example, that the infamous Calamity Jane had been ejected from a brothel for corrupting the inmates. In another incident in the area, a male audience at a show discovered that a flirtatious gentleman was really a woman. 36

In San Francisco in the 1870s, a woman named Jeanne Bonnet, who dressed as a man, visited the local brothels and won prostitutes away from their pimps. Bonnet had sworn to "step in between as many women" and the men who lived off them as possible. As a result, Bonnet met a violent death at the hands of an angry man, shot through the window while preparing to get into bed with a woman named Blanche BuneauY

The connection between prostitutes and same-sex activ­ ity was hardly unique to the West. 38 As early as the 1840s, a pioneering study of Paris prostitutes found that a large per­ centage engaged in sexual acts with other women. The author concluded, perhaps not unreasonably, that "repugnance for

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C H A PTE R THREE

the most disgusting and perverse acts ... which men perform on prostitutes" drove what he called "these unfortunate crea­ tures to lesbian love."39 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Ger­ man sexologist who would introduce the term "homosexual," agreed. "Disgusted with the intercourse with perversive and impotent men;' prostitutes "seek compensation in the sym­ pathetic embrace of persons of their own sex."40 At bottom, prostitutes seemed too sexual to be women, so it was not surprising that they, like men, might lust after women.

Our images of the western frontier are rife with rowdy whores with hearts of gold carousing with drunken miners and cowboys. Ironically, such encounters highlight the mixed­ gender interactions of people who lived in separate and pre­ dominantly single-sex communities. In such environments same-sex affection, love, and desire have left only traces, although they may well have flourished.

Transgressing the Boundaries of Gender

Segregated communities of women and men on the frontier promoted not only same-sex love and sexuality, but also trans­ gressions across the boundary ofgender. We have already seen two women who dressed as men hanging out at brothels. The notorious Jeanne Bonnet, born in Paris in 1849, by the time he was fifteen "cursed the day she was born a female instead of a male," according to local newspaper accounts. Described as a "man-hater" with "short cropped hair, an unwomanly voice, and a masculine face which harmonized excellently with her customary suit of boys' clothes, including a jaunty hat which she wore with all the grace of an experienced hoodlum:' he faced constant arrest for wearing male attire. Undaunted, he proclaimed that the police "might arrest me as often as they wish-I will never discard male attire as long as I live."4! And in fact he died having just smoked his pipe, drunk a glass

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GOO D G O D% The Crbnes of SodODl and GoDlorrah Discounted.

Front cover of the New Orleans Mascot, October 21, 1893, showing the association between prostitution and lesbianism. Courtesy of

Special Collections, Tulane University Library, New Orleans.

CHAPTER THREE

of cognac, and removed his male clothing to climb into bed with Blanche.42

San Francisco, in the aftermath of the Gold Rush, shel­ tered several other passing women whose existence has come to light. A wealthy woman, Lillie Hitchcock Coit, dressed in men's clothes to haunt nightspots, Charlie Parkhurst drove a Wells Fargo stagecoach and even voted, and another "freak of fancy," according to a newspaper account, earned denun­ ciation for "deceiving the opposite sex."43 As in early modern Europe, women in the American West dressed in male cloth­ ing for a variety of reasons, but their transgression across the line of gender always held the potential of same-sex sexuality.

For men, wearing female clothes had a different set of meanings, gaining them no privileges of mobility or occu­ pation. Yet some men did don dresses, sometimes regularly and more often in jest. In the 1860s and 1870s, a company laundress attached to Custer's Seventh Cavalry married a suc­ cession of soldiers. In 1878 this "Mrs. Nash" was living with a corporal at Fort Meade in the Dakota Territory when she died suddenly while the corporal was away from the garrison. Only when the women went to lay her out did they discover that the always heavily veiled woman was really a man. In response to his comrades' ridicule, Mrs. Nash's husband killed himself.44

In the other cases of cross-dressed white men, the impli­ cations for same-sex sexuality are much less clear. Cowboys at dances with few women sometimes marked their "female" cowboy partners by tying a scarf on their arms. Edgar Beecher Bronson, in his 1908 Reminiscences ofa Ranchman, described a tall blonde in drag dancing with another cowboy. Dancing the first set "made 'Miss De Puyster' the belle of the day and night."45

Cross-dressing among the white inhabitants of the fron­ tier must be considered in light of cross-gender Native Amer­ icans, who had raised such alarm among the first European

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WORLDS OF MEN, WORLDS OF WOMEN

immigrants. Cross-gender individuals ofboth biological sexes could be found in many of the Native American societies living on the frontier of white settlement, and their existence did not go unremarked. A Kutenai "female berdache:' de­ scribed by one commentator as "the Woman that carried a Bow and Arrows and had a Wife," appeared at Fort Astoria in Oregon in 1811.46 George Devereux, a Freudian psychi­ atrist, reported the story of Sahaykwisa, a Mohave woman who married three women in succession. Devereux labeled Sahaykwisa, known as a hwame by the Mohaves, "a Lesbian transvestite" in his 1937 study. According to informants, men teased the wives, saying, "Why do you want a hwame for a husband? A hwame has no penis; she only pokes you with her finger." Although at the beginning the first wife replied, "That is all right for me, if I wish to remain with her," eventually all the wives deserted Sahaykwisa because of the ridiculeY

Far more common were reports of cross-dressed men. Those who encountered them in the West echoed the disgust of the first Spanish, French, and English invaders. "Sodomy is a crime not uncommonly committed:' wrote Edwin James in Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains in the Years 1819 and '20. 48 About the Chippewa people, Thomas A. McKenney noted in 1826, "Nothing can induce these men-women to put off these imitative garbs, and assume again the pursuits and manly exercises of the chiefs."49 And anthropologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson, who did fieldwork among the Zunis in 1896-97, noted circum­ spectly that "there is a side to the lives of these men which must remain untold. They never marry women, and it is understood that they seldom have any relations with them." When We'wha, one of these Zuni "men-women:' or ihamana in Zuni, visited Stevenson in Washington, all who met We'wha assumed she/he was a biological woman. 50

«63 »

We'wha (d. 1896) wearing the ceremonial regalia of Zuni women. Neg. no. 85-8666. Courtesy of the National Anthropological

Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

WORLDS OF MEN, WORLDS OF WOMEN

But there are also some tantalizing suggestions of in­ teractions between cross-gender Native American men and white men on the frontier. Peter Grant, who lived among the Sauteux Chippewas early in the nineteenth century, knew several berdaches. In his memoir oflife among the Chippewas in the 1820s, John Tanner told of a fifty-year-old Chippewa, Ozaw-wen-dib, who had had many husbands and made it clear that she wanted to live with Tanner. "She often offered herself to me, but not being discouraged with one refusal, she repeated her disgusting advances until I was almost driven from the lodge." Nevertheless, Tanner was not too disgusted to accompany Ozaw-wen-dib several days later on a journey to another lodge, where he found relief when the host added her to his household of two wives. "This introduction of a new intimate into the family ... occasioned some laughter and produced some ludicrous incidents, but was attended with less uneasiness and quarreling than would have been the bringing in of a new wife of the female sex;' Tanner noted. 51

Another intriguing account comes from a cowboy's 1903 reminiscences about the 1880s. He described how a group of cowboys "became occupied by a controversy over the sex of a young Indian-a Blackfoot-riding a cream-colored pony ... distinguished by beads and beaver fur trimmings in the hair." He thought the young Indian was female, but one of his buddies disagreed, and to find out "rode alongside the young Indian, pretending to admire the long plaits of hair, toyed with the beads, pinched and patted the young Black­ foot." Asked if she wanted to be his "squaw," the Blackfoot smiled and replied, "Me buck."52

Whatever such incidents mean, it seems likely that cross­ dressing and traversing the gender line were more common in the West than elsewhere in American society. We can only speculate on what impact the phenomenon of the berdache had on white women and men who changed their gender, but

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CHAPTER THREE

perhaps the fact that Native American societies throughout much of the frontier region made a conceptual place for «third gender" people made a difference. In any case, the persistence ofa cross-gender role among Native Americans shows that the dominant European American sexual system is not the only one we need to comprehend in order to understand sexuality in the United States.

As white settlers continued to encroach on Indian lands, the United States government tightened its grip through large-scale programs of land expropriation, confinement to reservations, and forced assimilation. Sexuality represented a key area in which Indians, the missionaries and government agents believed, needed to be taught to behave properly. That meant toning down any sexual expressiveness and, of course, toeing the gender line. In the 1870s the government agent assigned to the Hidatsas forced a berdache to cut her hair and wear men's clothing, prompting her flight to the Crow reservation. There too a government agent tried to make what the Crows called bades conform to white ideas of proper gender roles. An anthropologist, in 1907, described Osh­ Tisch, a Crow bade: «Dressed as a woman, he might have passed for one except for his affectedly piping voice. Agents, I learnt, had repeatedly tried to make him put on masculine clothing, but the other Crow protested, saying it was against his nature."53 A Baptist missionary on the reservation also denounced Osh-Tisch, warning other men to stay away. Such sanctions could not be resisted in the boarding schools that separated Indian children from their communities. A Navajo woman remembers that her cousin, what the Navajos called a nadle, was sent to the girls' school in Carlisle because of her dress. During a lice infestation, the authorities, to their horror, discovered her biological sex and sent her away, to what fate the Navajo woman never knew. 54 Religious and government authorities continued to do their best to wipe

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WORLDS OF MEN, WORLDS OF WOMEN

out gender crossing in Native American cultures, although they never entirely succeeded.

"Gentle Boys" from the "Dangerous Classes"

Back East, on the other side of the metaphorical tracks, a different kind of sex-segregated culture began to emerge by the mid-nineteenth century. At this point American cities, like European urban centers in earlier centuries, began to provide the numbers, mobility, and anonymity that made same-sex sexual subcultures viable. With the emergence of an urban working class came the formation of a culture in which sexuality was more public and, for women, less confined to marriage than was thought to be characteristic of the middle class. Until late in the century this working-class subculture was overwhelmingly heterosexual for women, but men began earlier to make contact with other men for both intra- and

interclass sexual encounters. We can find glimpses into this world through an unlikely

window: the «rags to riches" novels of American hero Horatio Alger Jr. Dismissed in 1866 from his Unitarian ministry in Brewster, Massachusetts, for what the church committee of inquiry baldly called «the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys," Alger moved to New York to begin anew. 55 He took up not only writing his famous stories but also the work of «rescuing" working-class boys from the streets. In common with other writers and reformers not known for overt sexual interest in boys, Alger glorified the affection and support of older, powerful men for «gentle" boys from the «dangerous classes." What first interested the men in particular boys was their looks. In Ragged Dick, Alger wrote, «In spite of his dirt and rags there was something about Dick that was attractive. It was easy to see if he had been clean and well dressed he would have been decidedly good

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CHAPTER THREE

looking." In Phil the Fiddler, "In spite of the dirt, his face was strikingly handsome." In Jed the Poorhouse Boy, "He was a strongly-made and well-knit boy of nearly sixteen, but he was poorly dressed .... Yet his face was attractive."56 Taken by the contrast between a handsome if dirty face and a rag-clad body, older men began the process of "seducing" boys away from street life and the temptation to fall into a life of crime. Like Henry Higgins with Eliza Doolittle, elite men in Alger's stories saw the potential in their subjects; like other real-life elite men drawn to working-class women as the embodiment of sexual expressiveness, men like Horatio Alger found cross­ class interactions erotically charged.

Within the "dangerous classes," all-male worlds fostered a concept of masculinity that contrasted with the middle­ class ideal of domesticity, with its emphasis on male respon­ sibility and self-control. If working-class men had lost their economic independence and could not achieve manliness in the workplace, they could still be tough and strong. The "manly art" of prizefighting expressed these working-class values and fostered a homoerotic aesthetic. In an environment of male camaraderie, boxers slugged it out, admired as much for their beauty as for their pugilistic skill. As one sporting journal described a boxer, "His swelling breast curved out like a cuirass: his shoulders were deep, with a bold curved blade, and the muscular development of the arm large and finely brought out."57

The homoeroticism of male working-class culture at­ tracted upper- and middle-class men interested in same-sex encounters. The poet Walt Whitman sought out working­ class men in the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Wash­ ington, D.C. A story he published in 1841, as a young teacher on Long Island, described the interest of working-class men in a thirteen-year-old boy. A group of sailors in an inn grab the boy. " 'There, my lads: " says one, " 'There's a new recruit

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WORLDS OF MEN, WORLDS OF WOMEN

for you. Not so coarse a one, either,' he added as he took a fair view of the boy, who, though not what is called pretty, was fresh and manly looking, and large for his age:' Whitman's alter ego in the story, a twenty-year-old, in Horatio Alger fashion saves the lad and offers to share his bed in the inn. "As they retired to sleep, very pleasant thoughts filled the mind of the young man .... All his imaginings seemed to be interwoven with the youth who lay by his side; he folded his arms around him, and, while he slept, the boy's cheek rested

on his bosom."58 If this smacks of male romantic friendship, suggesting

the difficulty of separating eroticism from that relationship, other of Whitman's writings show that he frequented taverns, parks, public baths, and other places where he encountered working-class boys. His Daybooks provide lists ofboys he met: "Hugh Harrop boy 17 fresh Irish wool sorter ... Robt Wolf, boy of 1 0 or 12 rough atthe ferry ... little black-eyed Post boy at ferry, Paddy Connelly ... Harry Caulfield, 19, printer:' and so on. 59 Whitman's diaries record his practice of taking men home for the night: "Jerry Taylor, (NJ.) of 2d dist. reg't slept with me last night ... Saturday night Mike Ellis-wandering at the cor of Lexington avo & 32d st.-took him home to 150

37th street."60 In the late 1850s Whitman lived for a time in New York in

his family home with Fred Vaughan, the boy who seemingly inspired him to write his homoerotic "Calamus" poems, in

which he celebrated male comradeship:

I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were

threatening to consume me, I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering

fires, I will give them complete abandonment,

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,

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CHAPTER THREE

(For who but I should understand love, with all its sorrow

and joy?

And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)

And:

It shall be customary in all directions, in the houses and

streets, to see manly affection,

The departing brother or friend shall salute the remaining

brother or friend with a kiss.61

Fred Vaughan married, like so many of the boys who later passed through Whitman's life, and Whitman moved on to Washington, where he served as a nurse to Union soldiers

wounded in the course of the Civil War. As he wrote to his mother in 1863, "I believe no men ever loved each other as

I & some of these poor wounded, sick & dying men love each other." To a friend, he described "how one gets to love them, often, particular cases, so suffering, so good, so manly & affectionate ... lots of them have grown to expect as I leave at night that we should kiss each other, sometimes quite a number, I have to go round-poor boys, there is little petting in a soldier's life in the field."62 It was in Washington that Whitman met Peter Doyle, to whom he remained attached for almost a decade. The teenage Doyle met the nearly fifty­

year-old Whitman on a streetcar. Later Doyle described the scene: "We felt to each other at once . ... something in him drew me that way .... We were familiar at once-1 put my hand on his knee-we understood."63 Whitman recorded

his agonizing struggle to control his feelings for Doyle in his diary, swearing "TO GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY & for good, from the present hour, this FEVERISH, FLUCTUATING, useless, UNDIGNIFIED PURSUIT."64 Doyle, like Fred Vaughan before

him, was succeeded in Whitman's affections by a series of men, all younger and working-class.

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Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, 1865. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Photograph Collection.

CHAPTER THREE

The city streets in which Alger and Whitman found male companionship were less sex segregated than the other com­ munities we have explored here, yet they were still primarily a male domain. That urban world points the way to what would later in the century become a central site for the emergence ofa recognizable same-sex subculture. By 1889 G. Frank Lydston, a Chicago doctor, would make the startling assertion, "There is in every community of any size a colony of male sexual perverts; they are usually known to each other, and are likely to congregate together."65

East and West, worlds of women and worlds of men formed in the course of the nineteenth century, promoting same-sex interactions of very different kinds. But the sex-segregated worlds of cowboys and miners, Mormon missionaries and leaders, prostitutes and romantic friends, were no lasting fixture on the American scene. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the separate spheres of women and men began to break down, triggering another transformation of the sexual system with important consequences for the history of same­ sex love and sexuality.

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_?-nul"

DEFI N ITI ONS -A ND DE V I A N C E: S E X UAL

T RANS FORM A TIO NS A T THE TUR N OF

T HE C E N TU RY

In 1993, on the heels of Colorado's Amendment 2, which prohibited local governments in the state from outlawing discrimination against gay men, lesbians, or bisexuals, the city ofCincinnati passed a version ofthe legislation known as Issue 3. Issue 3 forbade Cincinnati from enacting or enforcing civil rights protections based on sexual orientation. The lawyers fighting against Issue 3 wanted to put together a homegrown case, and their search for potential expert witnesses led them to Columbus and to me and my sociologist partner, Verta, among others. When I met with the lawyers heading up the case, I found that we spoke different languages. What they-especially an attorney from the American Civil Lib­ erties Union-wanted to hear was that history shows that people are born gay, have been discriminated against in the

«73»

NOTES TO PAGES 57-77

32. Friday 1994, 54-55, 114; Mason and Guimary 1981. I am grateful to Judy Tzu-Chun Wu for these references.

33. Quoted in Quinn 1996, 113. 34. Quinn 1996,233-42. 35. Quinn 1996, 233, 242-44. 36. Goldman 1981. 37. San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project 1989. 38. On the historical associations between prostitution and les­

bianism, see Nestle 1987. 39. Quoted in Miller 1997,8. 40. Quoted in Miller 1997, 11. 41. Quoted in San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project

1989, 188. 42. Nestle 1987,239. 43. Quoted in San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project

1989, 187. 44. Katz 1976, 509-10. 45. Quoted in Westermeier 1974, 104. 46. Quoted in Katz 1976,293-98. 47. Quoted in Katz 1976,304-8. 48. Quoted in Katz 1976, 299. 49. Quoted in Katz 1976,300. 50. Quoted in Katz 1976,313-17; see also Roscoe 1988. 51. Quoted in Katz 1976,301. 52. Quoted in Williams 1986, 172-73. 53. Quoted in Williams 1986, 179. 54. Williams 1986, 180. 55. Quoted in Moon 1987,91. 56. Quoted in Moon 1987,94. 57. Quoted in Gorn 1986,74. 58. Quoted in Shively 1987, 11-12. 59. Quoted in Shively 1987, 19. 60. Quoted in Shively 1987,52. 61. Quoted in Katz 1976, 338-39. 62. Quoted in Shively 1987,67. 63. Quoted in Shively 1987, 100. 64. Quoted in Reynolds 1995,250. 65. Quoted in Burnham 1973,41.

Chapter Four 1. Duggan 1994. 2. Quoted in Katz 1983, 157.

«204 »

NOTES TO PAGES 77-98

3. Quoted in Burnham 1973,41. 4. Quoted in Burnham 1973,46. 5. Quoted in Mumford 1996,399. 6. Quoted in Katz 1983,218-22. 7. Quoted in Chauncey 1982-83, 119. 8. Quoted in Chauncey 1982-83, 118. 9. Quoted in Katz 1995, 20. 10. Quoted in Smith-Rosenberg 1989,269. 11. Quoted in Chauncey 1982-83, 120. 12. Quoted in Chauncey 1982-83, 122. 13. Quoted in Chauncey 1982-83, 123. 14. Quoted in Chauncey 1982-83, 129. 15. Quoted in Taylor 1980,225. 16. Quoted in Terry 1991,67. 17. Quoted in Chauncey 1982-83, 138. 18. Quoted in Reynolds 1995, 198. 19. The evidence is discussed in detail in Reynolds 1995,70-80. 20. Shively 1987,23-24. 21. See Lunbeck 1994,297. 22. Quoted in Sahli 1979, 21. 23. Quoted in Faderman 1991,35. 24. Quoted in Hull 1987, 139. 25. Quoted in Faderman 1991,52. 26. Rupp 1997,581. 27. Cook 1977. 28. Quoted in Faderman 1991,26. 29. Quoted in Rupp 1997,583-84. 30. Quoted in Rupp 1997,584--85. 31. Horowitz 1994. 32. Quoted in Faderman 1991,53. 33. Quoted in Faderman 1991,54. 34. Freedman 1996. 35. Quoted in Smith-Rosenberg 1989,275. 36. See Duggan 1993. 37. Quoted in Ullman 1995,593. 38. Quoted in Ullman 1995,594. 39. Quoted in Ullman 1995,595. 40. See Chauncey 1989. 41. Quoted in Ullman 1995,597. 42. Quoted in Chauncey 1989,299. 43. Quoted in Chauncey 1989, 306. 44. Quoted in Chauncey 1989, 308.

«205 »

NOTES TO PAGES 98-119

45. Quoted in Chauncey 1995, 310. 46. Quoted in Chauncey 1995, 314. 47. Russell 1993, 33. 48. Quoted in History Project 1998, 103.

Chapter Five 1. See Chauncey 1994,14-18, and Nestle 1993. 2. Quoted in Katz 1983,329. 3. Quoted in Johnson 1997,98. 4. Quoted in Johnson 1997, 104. 5. Quoted in Johnson 1997, 102. 6. Quoted in Chauncey 1994,42. 7. Quoted in Chauncey 1994,237. 8. Quoted in Mumford 1996, 404. 9. Quoted in Katz 1983,447. 10. Quoted in Garber 1989,320. 11. Nestle 1993,932-33. 12. Quoted in Chauncey 1994, 248. 13. Quoted in Meyerowitz 1988, 114. 14. Johnson 1997, 104. 15. Boyd 1997. 16. Quoted in Chauncey 1989, 298. 17. Quoted in Drexel 1997, 126. 18. Quoted in Johnson 1993,5. 19. Quoted in Chauncey 1989, 300. 20. Johnson 1997,97. 21. Chauncey 1994, 52. 22. Quoted in Johnson 1993, 14. 23. Quoted in Johnson 1993, 19. 24. Chauncey 1994, 58. 25. Quoted in White 1993,93. 26. Quoted in White 1993,95. 27. Quoted in Chauncey 1994,66. 28. Quoted in Drexel 1997, 125. 29. Chauncey 1994. 30. Chauncey 1994. 31. Quoted in Chauncey 1994, 103. 32. Quoted in Howard 1997a, 3. 33. Quoted in History Project 1998, 124. 34. Quoted in Chauncey 1994, 109. 35. Quoted in Ullman 1995,578. 36. Quoted in Ullman 1995, 590.

«206»

NOTES TO PAGES 120-43

37. Quoted in Chauncey 1994,257. 38. Quoted in Katz 1983, 453. 39. Quoted in History Project 1998, 105. 40. Quoted in Katz 1976, 83, 90. 41. Boyd 1997. 42. Chauncey 1994. 43. Bullough and Bullough 1977. 44. Quoted in Bullough and Bullough 1977,897. 45. Quoted in Bullough and Bullough 1977,902. 46. Kennedy 1996. 47. Kennedy 1996,26. 48. Quoted in Kennedy 1996,27. 49. Quoted in Kennedy 1996, 31. 50. 'Quoted in Katz 1983, 305. 51. Quoted in Katz 1983, 396-97. 52. Russell 1993, 100.

Chapter Six 1. Quoted in Berube 1990,31. 2. Quoted in Berube 1990, 17. 3. Quoted in Berube 1990,8. 4. Quoted in Berube 1990,32. 5. Quoted in Meyer 1996, 157. 6. Meyer 1996. 7. Quoted in Berube 1990,43. 8. Quoted in Meyer 1996, 166. 9. Quoted in Berube 1990,50. 10. Berube 1990. 11. Berube 1990. 12. Quoted in Berube 1990, 137. 13. Quoted in Berube 1990,206-7. 14. Quoted in Berube 1990,232. 15. Quoted in D'Emilio 1983, 46. 16. Quoted in D'Emilio 1983,42. 17. Quoted in D'Emilio 1992, 60. 18. Quoted in Freedman 1987,94. 19. D'Emilio 1983,50. 20. See D'Emilio 1992. 21. D'Emilio 1983, 48. 22. Quoted in Berube 1990, 233. 23. Quoted in Berube 1990,237. 24. Quoted in Berube 1990, 252.

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NOTES TO PAGES 98-119 NOTES TO PAGE S 1 20-4 3

45. Quoted in Chauncey 1995,310. 37. Quoted in Chauncey 1994,257. 46 . Quoted in Chauncey 1995,314. 38. Quoted in Katz 1983, 453. 47. Russell 1993, 33. 39. Quoted in History Project 1998, 105. 48. Quoted in History Project 1998, 103. 40. Quoted in Katz 1976,83, 90.

41. Boyd 1997. Chapter Five 42. Chauncey 1994.

1. See Chauncey 1994,14-18, and Nestle 1993. 43. Bullough and Bullough 1977. 2. Quoted in Katz 1983,329. 44. Quoted in Bullough and Bullough 1977, 897. 3. Quoted in Johnson 1997, 98. 45. Quoted in Bullough and Bullough 1977, 902. 4. Quoted in Johnson 1997, 104. 46. Kennedy 1996. 5. Quoted in Johnson 1997, 102. 47. Kennedy 1996, 26. 6. Quoted in Chauncey 1994,42. 48 . Quoted in Kennedy 1996, 27. 7. Quoted in Chauncey 1994, 237. 49. Quoted in Kennedy 1996, 31. 8. Quoted in Mumford 1996, 404. 50. Quoted in Katz 1983,305. 9. Quoted in Katz 1983,447. 51. Quoted in Katz 1983, 396-97. 10. Quoted in Garber 1989, 320. 52. Russell 1993, 100. 11. Nestle 1993,932-33. 12. Quoted in Chauncey 1994, 248. ( :hapter Six 13 . Quoted in Meyerowitz 1988, 114. 1. Quoted in Berube 1990, 31. 14. Johnson 1997, 104. 2. Quoted in Berube 1990, 17. 15. Boyd 1997. 3. Quoted in Berube 1990,8. 16. Quoted in Chauncey 1989, 298. 4. Quoted in Berube 1990,32. 17. Quoted in Drexel 1997, 126. 5. Quoted in Meyer 1996, 157. 18. Quoted in Johnson 1993, 5. 6. Meyer 1996. 19. Quoted in Chauncey 1989, 300. 7. Quoted in Berube 1990,43. 20. Johnson 1997, 97. 8. Quoted in Meyer 1996, 166. 21. Chauncey 1994,52. 9. Quoted in Berube 1990,50. 22. Quoted in Johnson 1993, 14. 10. Berube 1990. 23. Quoted in Johnson 1993, 19. 11. Berube 1990. 24. Chauncey 1994, 58. 12. Quoted in Berube 1990, 137. 25. Quoted in White 1993,93. 13. Quoted in Berube 1990, 206-7. 26. Quoted in White 1993,95. 14. Quoted in Berube 1990, 232. 27. Quoted in Chauncey 1994, 66. 15. Quoted in D'Emilio 1983, 46. 28. Quoted in Drexel 1997, 125 . 16. Quoted in D'Emilio 1983,42. 29. Chauncey 1994. 17. Quoted in D'Emilio 1992,60. 30. Chauncey 1994. 18. Quoted in Freedman 1987,94. 31. Quoted in Chauncey 1994, 103. 19. D'Emilio 1983,50. 32. Quoted in Howard 1997a, 3. 20. See D'Emilio 1992. 33. Quoted in History Project 1998, 124. 21. D'Emilio 1983,48. 34. Quoted in Chauncey 1994, 109. 22. Quoted in Berube 1990, 233. 35. Quoted in Ullman 1995,578 . 23. Quoted in Berube 1990,237. 36. Quoted in Ullman 1995,590. 24. Quoted in Berube 1990,252.

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