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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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DEFl NITIONSAND DEVIAN C E: SEXUAL

TRANSFORMATIONS AT THE TURN OF

THE CENTURY

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 of the 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

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same ways African Americans and other people of color have suffered, and thus deserve the same kinds oflegal protections. Trying to explain my view of the history of same-sex sexuality made me sweat. When I mentioned that some scholars con­ sider race as well as sexuality socially constructed-after all, what it means to be "black" is not the same in Brazil, say, as in the United States-they seemed to think I had taken leave of my senses.

But the last straw was the concept of "political lesbians." They had heard that some women identify as lesbians even though they are not in sexual relationships with other women, but I don't think they really believed it. When I told them, in response to their questions, that an article that Verta and I had written together used the term "political lesbians" and discussed the fluid identity of such women, they immediately, and I imagine with a sigh of relief, scratched us off the list. This was not a concept they wanted mentioned in court! How could the law protect a category with so little stability?

It was a sobering experience for me. I felt frustrated that I could not explain my understanding of the history of same­ sex sexuality in a way that made sense to them, and I felt useless in the important legal struggles for our community. How could the scholarly explanations that many of us have striven to construct be so dangerous? Did we really have to

I violate our scholarship and argue that people are simply born gay and always have been? Because the meanings of same­ sex sexuality have differed across time and place and among different groups of the population in the same time and place,

Lshould discrimination be allowed? Since this experience I have taken courage from Lisa

Duggan's brilliant and creative argument that we should take as our model religious toleration, rather than civil rights based on race and gender. I That is, sexual desire, like religion, is not biological or fixed, but neither is it trivial or glibly

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changed. Sexual difference can be seen as a form of dissent. Religious liberty and religious dissent are principles the Amer­ ican public-and perhaps especially the forces of the religious right arrayed against those whose sexuality differs from the heterosexual-holds dear. It is an intriguing approach that I think has a great deal to commend it.

The ongoing debate over the societal consequences of dif­ ferent understandings of sexuality takes us back to the end of the nineteenth century, when "homosexuality" and "het­ erosexuality" first came into being as categories into which people might be placed and might place themselves. As we have seen, expressing desire for a person of the same sex, or engaging in a same-sex sexual act, or falling in love with someone of the same sex did not traditionally mean that one merited designation as a special kind of person. All that began to change with the creation of the categories "homo­ sexual" and "heterosexual." In this chapter we consider the sexual transformations that swept across American society in the decades on either side of 1900. With the rise of a consumer society came increased emphasis on sexual expres­ siveness and public discussion of sexuality. Subcultures of those with same-sex desires began to coalesce, developing further what we have already glimpsed through the experi­ ences of Horatio Alger and Walt Whitman. Doctors known as "sexologists"-dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of human sexuality and treating sexual dysfunction-began to articulate the problem of what they called "homosexuality" and sex "inversion." But they did not make up these con­ cepts out of thin air. The expanding subcultures provided the inspiration for their ideas, suggesting that the doctors' definitions and the identities of men and women engaged in same-sex sexual activities interacted in a complex fashion. Walt Whitman moved in an urban male subculture that the

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experts would have labeled "inverted:' but this was not a term he applied to himself. The newly articulated sexual categories had particular impact on romantic friends. Now more likely to be viewed with suspicion, they sometimes maintained their relationships untouched by the swirl of new ideas, sometimes reacted defensively, and sometimes embraced the labels of the medical profession, suggesting a far from simple relation between behavior and ideology. Furthermore, the new ideas about same-sex sexuality by no means entirely displaced older conceptions, as we can see by looking at men who had sex with other men in early twentieth-century Long Beach, California, and Newport, Rhode Island.

The Sexual Revolution

The sexual revolution of the turn of the century-or what has also been called the rise of sexual liberalism-meant greater public acceptance ofsexual expressiveness. As the existence of prostitution and sexual subcultures in the nineteenth century makes clear, the sexualization of society that we associate with the sexual revolution was a matter of degree. Most striking was the growing public acceptance of "respectable" white women's sexuality, the spread of sexual expressiveness from the urban working class to the middle class, and increasing public discussion and expression of sexuality. The shift to a consumer society, accompanied by the growth of the adver­ tising industry, and the continuing process of urbanization underlay the changes in sexual attitudes and behavior.

The bubbling up of the sexual underworld that brought about what looked like the sexualization of society prompted the breakdown of public barriers between women and men: young women and men had more freedom to participate in heterosocialleisure pursuits and to form heterosexual rela­ tionships outside courtship and marriage. The sexual revo­

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lution had mixed consequences for same-sex sexuality. On the one hand, the relentless "heterosexualization" of society limited opportunities for same-sex interaction and raised the specter of sexuality in every interaction between individuals of the same sex. On the other hand, newly formulated ideas about same-sex sexuality helped to publicize an identity that individuals might embrace, inadvertently contributing to the growth of what would become gay and lesbian subcultures.

"Colonies of Male Sexual Perverts"

The Chicago doctor who reported on the colonies "of male sexual perverts" lurking in every city of any size was typi­ cal of the observers whose interest in same-sex subcultures produced a written, if disapproving, record for posterity. A sex manual for males, written by Dr. George Napheys in 1871, referred to an urban sexual underworld, including "restaurants frequented by men in women's attire, yielding themselves in indescribable lewdness," in which men could meet each other for sexual encounters.2 Psychiatrist G. Alder Blumer of the Utica Asylum in New York State reported in 1882 that one of his patients told him of being "on several occasions ... approached by men of unnatural desire"; he also asserted that such individuals "are able to recognize each other."3 A Saint Louis doctor, C. H. Hughes, in 1893 described what he called "an Organization of Colored Erotopaths" in Washington, D.C. According to his account, cooks, barbers, waiters, and "some even higher in the social scale" decked themselves out in "low-necked dresses . .. feathered and rib­ boned headdresses, garters, frills, flowers, ruffles, etc. and deport themselves as women." A queen, naked but for a ribbon on his penis, "is subject to the gaze and osculations in turn, of all the members of this lecherous gang of sexual perverts and phallic fornicators."4 Yet what troubled observers even more

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than the sight of "colored erotopaths" was interracial same­ sex activity, in which, they thought, race substituted for sex difference, African American men taking the "female" role. One doctor, having attended a mixed-race dance, described the men as "homosexual complexion perverts."5

Such subcultures were a part of the underworld of com­ mercialized sex and vice-remember the association between prostitution and female same-sex sexuality-that grew up in the poor sections of cities. For the most part, such subcultures catered to men and not to women, who had less freedom of movement given their domestic responsibilities and the violence of the city streets. But it is clear that previously isolated women were beginning to find each other in public. Charles Nesbitt, yet another doctor, testified that in the 1880s and 1890s "perverts of both sexes maintained a sort of social set-up in New York City, had their places of meeting, and advantage of the police protection for which they could pay." He described beer gardens, dance halls, and city streets in New York and Philadelphia where effeminate men and masculine women congregated. In New York Dr. Nesbitt met a "big, not especially good-looking, red-headed girl" who worked as a detective for the city. "She was quite plainly and as mannishly dressed as the styles ofthat time would permit.... Her sort occupied a relatively higher social plane than the male prototypes;' according to Nesbitt. "Not many of them commercialized their peculiarities as such. They were usually occupied in some gainful way otherwise, while many of them were married and lived in homes of their own, to all outward appearances with perfect respectability."6

Dr. Nesbitt seemed more comfortable with the "mascu­ line females" than what he called "queer creatures;' "fairies;' and "perverts" whose attention he seemed to attract. His observation that the women did not often "commercialize their peculiarities" suggests that not until the early decades of

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the twentieth century did a female public world of same-sex sexuality emerge on anything close to the scale of the male subculture.

The emergence of urban subcultures of men and women who acted on their desires for same-sex sexual encounters paved the way for the development of the concept of a ho­ mosexual identity. The doctors who wandered the streets of American cities and wrote reports on what they saw carried from the urban subcultures ideas about what made the kind of people they watched tick.

Defining Inversion

From the mid-nineteenth century on, the medical profession had begun to distinguish among different kinds of nonpro­ creative sexuality, and this process led to defining same-sex sexuali ty as a particular kind ofperversion. At first the medical literature conceptualized the desire for sexual relations with t a member of one's own sex as a symptom---::-not the defin­ ing characteristic-of what was called "inversion." Inversion meant thinking, acting, and feeling in total violation of one's expected gender. According to sexologist George Beard, writ­ ing in 1884, "Men become women and women men, in their tastes, conduct, character, feelings and behavior."? Naturally passive women and sexually aggressive men traded natures. In an early description of a "Case of Sexual Perversion," P. M. Wise told of a woman institutionalized for passing as a man. She "embraced the female attendant in a lewd manner and came near overpowering her .... Her conduct on the ward was characterized by the same lascivious conduct, and she made efforts at various times to have sexual intercourse with her associates."8 In other words, she acted like an out-of­ control man. James G. Kiernan, writing in a Chicago medical journal in 1892, introduced the term "homosexual" to the

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United States audience, but he meant persons whose "general mental state is that of the opposite sex;'9 Kiernan took the concept from the Viennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft­ Ebing's monumental work Psychopathia Sexualis, published in German in 1886. Krafft-Ebing stirred together physical traits, cross-gender behavior, and sexual desire in whipping up the category "lesbian;' He discerned four types oflesbians: "normal" -appearing women who responded to the approach of masculine women; women who preferred male clothing; "inverts" who assumed "a definitely masculine role"; and full­ blown homosexuals, who possessed "of the feminine qualities only the genital organs; thought, sentiment, action, even external appearance are those of a man."lo Likewise, those who described male inverts zeroed in on gender transgres­ sion. Doctors noted that one man "never smoked and never married; [and] was entirely averse to outdoor games" and that another enjoyed"looking in the mirror .. . [and] talk [ed] in a squeaking, effeminate voice." I I

Within a few decades, sexologists began to move away from the idea of gender transformation and to focus more specifically on same-sex sexual object choice as the defining characteristic of a new category of "homosexuals." That is, desire for sexual intimacy with an individual of one's own sex increasingly came to be seen by the good doctors less as a natural corollary of gender inversion and more as the central problem. In 1913 British sexologist Havelock Ellis de­ fined sexual inversion as referring to sexual impulses "turned toward individuals of the same sex, while all the other im­ pulses and tastes may remain those of the sex to which the person by anatomical configuration belongs."12 In the case of men, Sigmund Freud detached gender nonconformity from same-sex sexual desire altogether, changing the meaning of the word "inversion" to what would come more frequently to be called "homosexuality." "The most complete mental

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masculinity can be combined with [male] inversion:' Freud wrote. 13 Yet it was harder for the sexologists to conceive of women who sought other women as their lovers as anything other than masculine, leading to rampant confusion about the "feminine" women who desired other women.

In line with the trend in late nineteenth-century medi­ cine, the doctors and psychologists eagerly looked for physical causes for same-sex desire. This produced a kind ofpaternalis­ tic liberalism that criticized harsh legal sanctions and religious condemnation directed at "the homosexual." If people were born "inverted" or "perverted:' how could society reject them for what they could not help? In place of denunciation, the doctors offered pity and pathology. G. Frank Lydston, in 1889, criticized the tendency to view "the unfortunate class of individuals who are characterized by perverted sexuality" as having "moral responsibility" for their behavior when they should, he insisted, be treated as "victims of a physical and incidentally of a mental defect."14 Some argued that those acting on same-sex desire could only be hermaphrodites, sta­ tistical oddities combining features of both sexes. A number of sexologists who themselves sought out same-sex relations, including the German Karl Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld and the British Edward Carpenter, seized the biological notion of hermaphroditism but transformed it into a mind/body split, conceptualizing a female spirit trapped in a male body or vice versa. The claim of representing a third or "intermediate" sex held powerful appeal, for despite assumptions that such people were defective, the logical conclusion was that they should not be punished.

The emphasis on biology-and the lingering diagnosis of hermaphroditism-also carried assumptions about the bod­ ies of "inverts." In particular, the persistent fancy in Western culture that women who had sex with other women had to have an enlarged clitoris ("one vagina plus one vagina equals

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The sexologists define inversion: photographs of a cross-dressing man in Austin Flint, "A Case of Sexual Inversion, Probably with Complete Sexual Anaesthesia," New York Medical Journal, December 2, 1911.

zero," as a classic sex manual of the 1970s put it) surfaces in the work of the sexologists. IS And here racial stereotypes came into play, the female equivalent of the myth of the well­ endowed black man . A study sponsored by the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants in New York in the 1930s shows how these ideas persisted, not just in popular culture but in the medical profession as well. But not only did the doctors iden­ tify elongated clitorises among African American subjects, some of the women themselves claimed with enthusiasm that their physiology allowed them to please their lovers better than a man could. Myrtle, an African American vaudevillian, reported that her clitoris grew when she "started going with women .... I insert my clitoris in the vagina just like the penis of a man ... . Women enjoy it so much they leave their husbands." Another black woman, Susan, also bragged about her prowess: "I think they are fond of me because of my

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large clitoris. I think that's the chief reason. They comment upon it. They whisper among themselves. They say, 'She has the largest clitoris.' "16 In women's embrace of the medical stereotypes (and possibly their leg-pulling of the experts) we see the elaborate process of interaction between "subject" and doctor, between interpretations within a same-sex subculture and definitions imposed from without.

Although some experts had argued early on that same-sex sexuality could be acquired, especially by those who engaged in masturbation, the spread of Freudian theory gave an enor­ mous boost to the idea that social factors were at work in producing same-sex desire. Freud looked to developments within the family to explain the deviant state of homosex­ uality, thus taking same-sex sexual desire out of the realm of the biological. Yet other experts continued to cling to at least partially physiological explanations. C. P. Oberndorf separated individuals engaging in same-sex sexuality based on the way they participated in sexual acts. In his eyes, "passive" lesbians and "aggressive" homosexual men-in other words, those who behaved "appropriately" but just had sex with the wrong-sex person-resulted from social factors. But "biolog­ ical anomalies of development which are often coupled with unmistakable physical signs" had to be called up to explain masculine women and feminine men. 17

Over the years, then, the doctors who witnessed the emer­ gence of urban subcultures that fostered same-sex sexuality struggled to come to grips with this particular kind of sexual deviance. That they shifted from definitions focusing on gen­ der violations to ones highlighting the sex of desired partners, and that they offered social as well as biological explanations, does not mean any of these questions were settled, then or now. But their discussions do remind us that contemporary debates over these issues have a long history. Perhaps most important, by the early twentieth century the "experts" had

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accepted the notion that same-sex sexual desire might serve as the defining characteristic of individuals.

"I'm Not an Invert:' Says Walt Whitman

That the experts debated how to define persons inclined to same-sex sexual desire and activity did not mean these questions were widely discussed at the end of the nineteenth century. Nor did it mean that men and women in the embry­ onic same-sex subcultures read the doctors' pronouncements and thought, "Aha! That's what I am!" It is impossible to know for sure what impact these emerging definitions had on people with same-sex desire or on the larger public. But we have a hint of one man's experiences through the case of Walt Whitman.

As we have seen, Whitman's surviving private writings attest to his interest in men, and his poems celebrate male friendship and sexuality. But he never admitted a sexual interest in men, and he even explicitly denied that his poetry dealt with male same-sex sexuality. In 1890 the British writer John Addington Symonds, familiar with the new definitions of "sexual inversion," asked Whitman directly if his concept of "comradeship" involved "those semi-sexual emotions & actions which no doubt occur between men?" Whitman re­ sponded with a denial and a denunciation of such "morbid inferences." 18 Was he simply lying (as he no doubt was when he boasted to Symonds that he had fathered six children)? Or did he speak such a different language that his take on love between men had nothing to do with the nascent notion of inversion and "homosexuality"?

There is some evidence that Whitman may have gotten into trouble with boys while teaching school on Long Island in 1841. (Remember his story about the boy and the sailors?) According to oral testimony passed down in Southold, New

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York, a minister denounced him from the pulpit for "his behavior to the children," and a crowd tarred and feathered him. Whatever actually occurred, he left abruptly, his school gained the nickname "the Sodom School" because of his reputation, and for a time Whitman's literary production ground to a halt.!9

Furthermore, Whitman used a code name and feminine pronouns when recording his misery over Peter Doyle, sug­ gesting an uneasiness over his feelings for another man. And Whitman and his friends used the word "gay" in a way that might suggest its use by this time as a coded term for those interested in sex with men. One correspondent, in 1863, wrote of a mutual acquaintance, "I wished that I could see him this evening and go in the Ward Master's Room and have some fun for he is a gay boy."2o

But perhaps Whitman simply did not recognize himself in the portrayals of the sexologists. In his writing he used the terms "adhesive love," "fervid comradeship," "manly friend­ ship," and "amative love" to describe the male-centered ethic that was so important in his life. The concepts of "adhesive­ ness" and "amativeness" came from phrenology, the then popular science of reading one's character from the shape of the skull. Although such words mean little to us now, we cannot dismiss them as terms for Whitman's feelings while embracing only the word "gay" simply because it carries meanings we grasp more easily.

Revolutionizing Romantic Friendship

In some ways the new definitions of deviance fell most heavily on romantic friends, who could no longer always assume an innocent interpretation of their love, devotion, and physical affection. It is not that suddenly the entire world saw inverts in every same-sex couple. But the category "homosexual"

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opened up such a possibility, in the minds of both observers and romantic friends themselves. Psychiatric literature began in the 1910s to report homosexual activity, often interracial, among girls and women in reformatories and prisons, and while such kissing and petting and mutual masturbation might be dismissed as sexually depraved women "making do" with each other, it also raised troubling questions about what might be going on in the more respectable middle-class women's institutions such as boarding schools and colleges.2!

We know little about what happened to the male form \ of romantic friendship-although I suspect that the greater visibility of male same-sex sexuality in the urban subcultures threw stronger suspicion on pairs ofloving male friends-but certainly the sexual revolution cast female romantic friends in an entirely new light. In the 1870s and 1880s, women's colleges were hit by a fad known as "smashing." As an article in the Yale student newspaper described it, "When a Vassar girl takes a shine to another she straightway enters upon a regular course of bouquet sendings, interspersed with tinted notes, mysterious packages of 'Ridley's Mixed Candies,' locks ofhair perhaps, and many other tender tokens, until at last the object of her attentions is captured, the two women become inseparable, and the aggressor is considered by her circle of acquaintances as-smashed."22 But a 1928 novel about Vassar described a sea change. By 1920, "intimacy between two girls was watched with keen distrustful eyes. Among one's classmates, one looked for the bisexual type, the masculine girl searching for a feminine counterpart, and one ridiculed their devotions."23 What had once seemed a natural, if occasionally too obsessive, relationship within the ivy-covered walls of the women's colleges now took on the taint of deviance.

Thus African American poet Angelina Weld Grimke, the grandniece of abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke, in the last decade of the nineteenth century formed a romantic

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friendship but later obscured her love for women. As a mem­ ber of the middle class, Grimke's friendship with her school friend Mamie Burrill followed the pattern common among white middle-class women. In 1896 Burrill wrote to Grimke: "Could I just come to meet thee once more, in the old sweet way, just coming at your calling, and like an angel bending o'er you breathe into your ear, 'I love you.''' Grimke, later that year, expressed her own longing: "0h Mamie if you only knew how my heart beats when I think of you and it yearns and pants to gaze, if only for one second upon your lovely face."24 But Grimke was always careful to veil her desires in her published poetry, pouring out the pain of a lost love only in unpublished lyrics.

Yet no wholesale rejection of romantic friendships dark­ ened the skies. Just as only certain behaviors had triggered suspicion about female friends during the heyday of romantic friendship, so now some women went blithely about their way with no apparent concern about being mistaken for inverts or homosexuals. In the Bryn Mawr College yearbook for 1921, two graduates contributed an essay about smashing that gave absolutely no hint that the students felt any shame about the practice: "Crushes are bad and happen only to the very young and very foolish," the authors wrote with evident irony. "Once upon a time we were very young, anu the bushes on the campus were hung with our bleeding hearts .... Only the most jaundiced mind could call by any other name than friendship Nora's tender feeling toward Gertie Steele, which led her to keep Gertie's room overflowing with flowers, fruit, candy, pictures, books, and other indispensable articles."25

Romantic friendships and Boston marriages lived on well into the twentieth century, even in circles exposed to the writings of the sexologists. American women active in the international women's movement moved in a world familiar with the terms "fairies:' "queer," "manly-looking women:'

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Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1958). Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

and "perverse from a sexual point of view."26 Yet some loved and lived with women partners, with an apparent lack of self-consciousness. Consider, for instance, the relationship of Hull House founder and international peace activist Jane Addams with Mary Rozet Smith. When they traveled, they wired ahead to be sure to get a double bed.27 When separated, Addams wrote to Smith, "I miss you dreadfully and am yours till death," and Smith expressed similar longing, writing, "You can never know what it is to me to have had you and to have you now."28 Smith inspired a great deal of enthusiasm among Addams's colleagues. "Will you kiss your dear friend, Miss Smith, for me and tell her that in sleepless nights and even in nice dreams I see her before me as a good angel," wrote Dutch feminist Aletta Jacobs in 1915. "I have a remembrance of her as one of the sweetest women I ever met in the world:' Jacobs added four years later. And, even more extravagantly, Jacobs

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concluded in 1923, "I always have admired her and if! would have been a man 1 should have fallen in love with her."29

Anna Howard Shaw, minister, charismatic orator, and international leader, had a reputation within suffrage circles for her "strong and passionate attachments to other women:' some of which "have broken up in ... tempestuous fashion:' Shaw described her "abiding love for home and home life" at her country house, Moylan, which she shared with her partner Lucy Anthony. When Shaw fell and broke her foot and Anthony, at the same time, fractured her elbow, Shaw ruefully labeled them "rather a broken up couple." Anthony called Shaw, after her death, "my Precious Love," "the joy of my life."3o

Or consider M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College and a redoubtable lady if ever there was one, who chose as her life's loves two women, with some overlap. As a student in Switzerland in the early 1880s, she formed with her Baltimore friend Mamie Gwinn what they both considered a marriage. They lived together, loved each other passionately, and left a record of kisses exchanged and heads nestled in laps.31 By the time Thomas became president of Bryn Mawr in 1894, she was also in love with another Baltimore friend, Mary Garrett, who in addition was her financial patron. Unable to give up Gwinn's "little love" for the intense and fully requited passion of Garrett, Thomas carefully arranged the two women's comings and goings so they did not have to meet, although they of course knew of each other. But what is particularly striking about Thomas's story is the way she bridged the worlds of romantic friendship and homo­ sexuality. For she read about lesbianism, including sexual acts between women, she admired and followed the trial of Oscar Wilde, and she kept lists of books labeled "Lesbianism" and "Books on Sapphism." While she shared a bed with the

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M. Carey Thomas and Mamie Gwinn, 1879. Courtesy of the Bryn Mawr College Archives, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

CHAPTER FOUR

woman she loved, as had countless romantic friends, she also read texts that linked love between women and sexuality. Yet Thomas seemingly never took in any negative portrayals of lesbianism, never expressed any guilt or unease.

These women-and others like them-may have evaded a deviant label because of their class, their gender confor­ mity, and their all-around "respectability." I doubt they ever thought of themselves as in any way "inverted." Yet some women worried that others would see them in the outlines of the new "lesbian" and as a result vehemently denied the applicability of the deviant definitions. Jeannette Marks, a Mount Holyoke professor who lived in an intimate relation­ ship with · the college president, Mary Woolley, denounced "unwise college friendships" as "abnormal" and insisted, con­ trary to her own life experience, that the only relationship that could "fulfill itself and be complete is that between a man and a woman."32

Other women may have recognized themselves somewhat uneasily in the new conceptualizations. Not as self-deluding as Marks, they fretted about whether they were homosexual and sometimes deployed the doctors' definitions to convince themselves they were not. In her 1930 autobiography, "Mary Casal" (a pseudonym) described her sexual relationship with another woman as "the very highest type oflove" but insisted that "our lives were on a much higher plane than those of the real inverts. While we did indulge in our sexual intercourse, that was never the thought uppermost in our minds."33 Likewise prison reformer Miriam Van Waters, who formed a deeply romantic relationship with her benefactor Geraldine Thomp­ son, herself a married woman, struggled with the definitions. In the 1920s, when the two women first met, the concept of homosexuality was no mystery, and Van Waters had read the work of the sexologists. But "lesbianism" suggested gender inversion, the "mannish" lesbian, or a Freudian notion of

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pathology, and Miriam and Geraldine, like Walt Whitman, considered themselves "normal." Yet they were also careful to conceal their relationship in certain situations, and Van Waters expressed doubt about her own sexuality. When Van Waters later came under attack for tolerating homosexuality at the women's prison she supervised, she and Thompson systematically burned their letters. Van Waters did not con­ sider her relationship with Thompson in the same category as the lesbianism among prison inmates, but she was afraid others would. 34

In contrast to these kinds of strategies, some women embraced the new definitions as a way of claiming their own sexuality. British feminist Frances Wilder wrote in gratitude to sexologist Edward Carpenter (himself homosexual) that through reading his work she had come to realize that she "was more closely related to the intermediate sex than I had hitherto imagined:' 35 Wilder's admission was unusually frank, but we can find hints in the most unlikely places that the relation between the pronouncements of the sexologists and the fashioning of identities by individual women was a dance with the most intricate footwork.

Take the tale of Alice Mitchell, a middle-class white nineteen-year-old from Memphis who in 1892 murdered the girl she loved when their plans to elope went awry.36 At first the passion of Mitchell for Freda (known as "Fred") Ward seemed to their families to fit the mold of romantic friendship. But when Alice hatched a plot to dress as a man, marry, and support her love, the alarm bells went off. Fred's sister, with whom she lived, sent back Alice's engagement ring and other love tokens and forbade the young women to see each other. In the meantime Fred (who was traditionally feminine despite her nickname) had explored relationships with two men, much to Alice's despair. Alice then carried out an earlier threat to kill Fred if she broke her promise to marry her.

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This and similar lurid tales became grist for the mill of the mass circulation newspapers and the sexologists, spreading notions of perverted female love in ever-widening circles. But within the story of Alice Mitchell we can also see two women trying to create a form for their love that went be­ yond romantic friendship. Alice's gender crossing evokes the "mannish lesbian" of the sexologists but also suggests that women might have clung to such a strategy as a means to act on their same-sex love and desire.

From smashing girls through Jane Addams, M. Carey Thomas, Jeannette Marks, and Miriam Van Waters to Alice Mitchell, romantic friends reacted in myriad ways to the changing world of the turn of the century. Romantic friends were not, of course, the only ones affected, as the responses of Walt Whitman and the African American "sex variant" women in the 1930s New York study make clear. All their stories, and their sometimes active engagement with new ideas about sexual deviance, allow us to see the intricacy of cause and effect in considering the relation of ideology and behavior.

The "Twentieth-Century Way"

In November 1914 police in Long Beach, California, arrested fifty men, many of them seemingly respectable, on charges of "social vagrancy." Their crimes involved deviant sexual behavior. Following up on the story, an inquisitive journalist uncovered evidence of a "society of queers" in the area of Los Angeles, reputedly numbering up to five thousand men, who gathered at private parties and "96 clubs" where they dressed in drag and participated in orgies. They also engaged in sexual acts in the public restroom of the Long Beach Bathhouse. An informer, himself part of the community, described a party at which the guests donned silk kimonos

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DE F INITI O NS AND DE V IAN CE

and wigs at the door, and another where the table setting included "a candy representation ofa man's private which was sucked and enjoyed by each guest to the evident amusement of all:'3?

The unfortunate men who ended up in court faced charges of vagrancy rather than sodomy. According to the reporter assigned to the case, this group engaged in "nothing more nor less than 'cocksucking.' "38 As appalling as this prac­ tice was, the investigator explained that it was not the same as "homosexualism." "It resembles homosexualism in the respect that men find their sexual pleasure and gratification with men and boys rather than women and women on the other hand are attracted sexually toward girls and women instead of the opposite sex."39 But only anal penetration seemed to count as homosexuality. Oral sex, tellingly dubbed by the community of men who practiced it the "twentieth­ century way;' was perverse and deviant in its own right. But even when engaged in by men together, it was the particular sexual act, rather than the sex of the partners, that carried the most significance.

This tiny window into an early twentieth-century world suggests how important it is to recognize the shifting mean­ ings of concepts such as "homosexuality." This becomes even clearer when we turn to the history of an investigation of same-sex sexuality at the Newport (Rhode Island) Naval Training Station just a few years later, in 1919 and 1920.40

The trial documents generated by the navy's investiga­ tion reveal the competing ways of viewing sexuality that coexisted in the first decades of the twentieth century. The navy, concerned about "immorality" in Newport, recruited decoys to seek out, have sex with, and testify against men who self-identified as "queers." In this they were even more ambitious than the police in Long Beach, who had hired two crusading traveling detectives to entrap men into oral sex.

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According to the journalist who investigated the incident, the detectives went to the Long Beach Bathhouse and watched "until they saw a man whom they thought to be given to this sort of thing" and then attracted his attention "by putting their fingers through a hole in the board partition dividing the toilet walls. Upon looking through he would see a man's mouth close to the aperture and if [he1were that kind of man and the suspicions ofthe officers correct, would stick his penis through the hole."41 At this point he would be arrested.

Officials in Newport went further still, but neither the decoys nor the other "straight" men with whom the "queers" had sexual relations were, in the navy investigators' eyes, "homosexual" in any sense of the word. This was not just a case of oral sex versus anal sex, as in Long Beach. The participation ofdecoys in sexual acts with other men, because they always took the so-called "masculine" or "active" role (that is, inserted their penises), had no consequences for their

identity or morality. Even men who had ongoing relationships with the "queers" -known as «friends" or "husbands"-were not themselves considered queer.

The «queers" were queer because they took the recep­ tive role in sexual acts and also adopted other feminine traits. Further, they distinguished among themselves based on what particular sexual acts they preferred. «Queers" might be «fairies," who engaged in oral sex (that twentieth-century way), «pogues," who sought out anal sex, or "two-way artists,"

a name that speaks for itself. An investigator indicated on one list of suspects how each could be identified in terms of such sexual tastes, but a «friend" could be identified only as someone who «went out with all the above named men at various times and had himself sucked off or screwed them through the rectum."42 For the queers, effeminacy in appear­

ance and sexual behavior meant a positive identity; for the navy it marked men as deviant.

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The defense in this case introduced an altogether different line of interpretation by implying that any participation in a same-sex act (not simply gender inversion or taking the receptive part in a sexual act) defined an individual as deviant. By calling into question the interests of the decoys, who vol­ unteered to have sex with the "queers:' the defense suggested that all men involved in same-sex sexual relations, no matter what sexual role they played and for what purpose, shared a similar status. Listen to the following examination ofa decoy:

Q. You volunteered for this work? A. Yes, sir. Q. You knew what kind of work it was before you volunteered,

didn't you? A. Yes, sir. Q. You knew it involved sucking and that sort of thing, didn't you? A. I knew that we had to deal with that, yes, sir. Q. You knew it included sodomy and that sort ofthing, didn't you?

A. Yes, sir. Q. And you were quite willing to get into that sort of work? A. I was willing to do it, yes, sir. Q. And so willing that you volunteered for it, is that right? A. Yes, sir, I volunteered for it, yes, sir.43

From the perspective vigorously pursued by the attorneys for the defense, effeminacy was less important than participa­ tion in a sexual act. Taking a position radically opposed to that of the navy investigators, the defense not only tried to tar the decoys with the brush ofdeviance but also defended a different kind ofsame-sex liaison. For it was not only sailors in women's

clothing who found themselves dragged into court. The navy also brought charges against two middle-class professional men: an Episcopal clergyman, Samuel Kent, and a YMCA worker, Arthur Leslie Green. Although decoys testified that they had had sex with Kent, he won acquittal, and his arrest

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even provoked a successful protest on the part of church officials against the entire naval investigation.

What was at stake here was appropriate masculine behav­ ior. What Kent and Green and their supporters considered "Christian brotherhood"-visiting sailors in the hospital,

lending them money, showing affection and concern, opening their homes to them-could be interpreted as effeminate behavior and inappropriate interest. Witnesses described the two men as "peculiar:' "sissyfied:' and "effeminate," but as one put it in Kent's case, "1 don't know whether you would call it abnormal. He was a minister." According to other tes­ timony in court, Green held the hands of boys in the hospital and "talk[edl like a woman to me:' evidently a reference to the content of the conversation rather than the pitch of the voice. 44

Newport's church officials stood solidly behind Kent and Green because lavishing attention on the boys in the navy, in the tradition ofHoratio Alger, was the mark ofa good minister or volunteer. Kent saw his job as "trying to be friends with them, urging them to come to my quarters and see me if they wanted to, telling them-l think, perhaps, 1 can best express it by saying 'Big Brotherhood.' "45 Even Kent's invitation to

a decoy to come into his bed could be explained away. The decoy had complained of being lonely and having no place to sleep, so Kent had invited him home; settled on a cot in the living room, the decoy had then said he was cold, so Kent invited him into his own bed. Pure Christian brotherhood, according to the church. Perversion, according to the navy.

The Newport investigation reveals the process oflabeling in flux and shows us how little settled these issues were in the

first decades of the twentieth century. Although the concept of gender inversion is evident in the self-definitions of the "queers" and inthe decoys' insistence that feminine traits be­ trayed a "fairy," only one self-identified fairy used the medical

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DEFINITIONS AND DEVIAN CE

term "invert:' explaining that he had heard the term in theater circles. The medical literature played almost no part in the trial. No sexologist took the stand to analyze what was going on, and the one doctor who played a central role in the inves­ tigation did so because of his job at the naval hospital. He read up on the literature in the course of the trial but stuck to the opinion common in Newport: that there was a fundamental difference between "congenital perverts" and "normal people

submitting to acts of perversion, as a great many normal people do, [who 1do not become perverts themselves."46

This is not to suggest that the concept of inversion had no impact anywhere. At about the same time that the decoys cheerfully reported for duty, a twenty-year-old college student at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, was falling in love with his male friends. "Jeb Alexander" (a pseudonym) wrote in his diary in 1921, "1 want love and affection! Damn it! ... 1 am madly in love with C. C. Dasham. 'Sexual inversion,' Havelock Ellis calls it." Alexander recognized himself in the writings of the sexologists and took courage from the identification. "This diary of mine is a tissue

of posturing. My real thoughts on such matters as sex are not admitted even to myself. 1 will be frank:' he wrote, just before admitting his love for Dasham. 47 Soon he graduated to cruising Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., his hometown, though he also found the love and affection he sought in a

long-term relationship with "Dash." Likewise F. O. Matthiessen, newly graduated from Har­

vard and embarking on his career as a cultural historian, wrote to his lover, the painter Russell Cheney, about his

reaction to reading the work ofthe sexologists in 1924. Having read Edward Carpenter's The Intermediate Sex in one day, he recalled the work of Havelock Ellis. "Then for the first

time it was completely brought home to me that 1 was what 1 was by nature .... Was it possible for love and friendship

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to be blended into one?" He discovered that it was, since his relationship lasted until Cheney's death in 1945.48

If not representative of every tendency in the unfolding story of men's same-sex desires, the Newport investigation nevertheless throws open the curtains, affording us a full view of an early community of men engaged in same-sex sexual activity. The all-male military environment, of course, encouraged the formation of such a community by pulling young men away from their homes and enclosing them in a single-sex world. But Newport was not an utter anomaly, as was made clear by the report from Long Beach and the extensive testimony about sailors' trips to cruising grounds in other locales and visits from out-of-town men to the hot spots in Newport. In Newport, as in Long Beach, men might engage in particular sexual acts with other men and not rank as "homosexuals." If exactly what did make one queer differed from person to person and group to group, it is nevertheless clear that men with same-sex desires knew how to find others who shared their passions.

The sexual revolution had different consequences for what would come to be called heterosexuals and homosexuals. Discussion and expression ofcross-sex sexuality became more public and accepted; same-sex sexuality also became more public, but it came to serve as the defining characteristic of a particular kind of deviant person. The early sexologists observed the emerging urban subcultures of men and women and tried to categorize what they saw. In turn, women and men who experienced same-sex love and desire, including romantic friends who were not part of the sexual underworld, reacted to the new definitions. Out of this tangled interaction came communities that fostered same-sex sexual identities, although these were never a mere reflection of the pronounce­ ments from on high.

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_7-':lIt?

COMING TOGETHER: CONTESTED

IDENTITIES AND THE EMERGENCE

OF COMMUNITIES

Sometime in the mid-1980s, Joan Nestle of the Lesbian Her­ story Archives called hoping that Verta and I could help her with an urgent matter. A woman named Marge McDonald had died not long before in Athens, Ohio, and when her will was read her family discovered she had left all her personal belongings that had any significance for lesbian history to the Archives in New York. This was the first they knew of her lesbianism, and they were most uncomfortable about the revelation. Their lawyer had called the Archives, and Joan was desperate to find someone close by who could drive to Athens and physically take charge of whatever material was there, lest

the family destroy or hide anything. Verta and I immediately thought of two of her graduate

students, Phyllis Gorman and Kelly McCormick. We had

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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, II. 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 I. Duggan 1994. 2. Quoted in Katz 1983, 157.

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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.

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NOTES TO PAGES 98 - II9 NOTES TO PAGES I20 - 43

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. Chapter 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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