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  • Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America
  • Thomas Chase Hagood (bio)
Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America. Edited by Thomas A. Foster. (New York: New York University, 2007. Pp. 448. Cloth, $75.00; Paper, $25.00.)

Long Before Stonewall is a provocative new collection of original essays and previously published articles that highlights the centrality of sexuality within early American history. The volume’s well-known contributors challenge readers to reevaluate the prizing of sex and sexuality as social constructs acted out by individuals over the notion that these constructs were determined by diverse communal norms that varied from time and place in the early modern world. For Thomas A. Foster and his essayists, no such simple dichotomous explanation can accurately describe same-sex relationships or encounters in early America.

Confronting the dearth of obvious sources for evaluating how same-sex sexuality functioned, or malfunctioned, in bolstering one’s social, cultural, and economic position in early America, authors like Caleb Crain, Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Clare A. Lyons, Richard Godbeer, and Laura Mandell exemplify the creativity necessary to perform research in this emerging field of historical inquiry. An impressive array of sources, including ethnohistorical documentation, court testimonies, popular publications (e.g., novels, newspapers, pamphlets), sermons and canonical texts, and personal correspondence, all inform this compilation of impressive historical work, which will serve as a model for how the history of same-sex sexualities should be approached. Breaking out of the mold of previous scholarship on early America, which centered on male homosexuality, usually in New England, and which was based largely on court records and legal statutes, Long Before Stonewall offers a much [End Page 690] broader view of early American sexuality. These studies sweep across the continent from the borderland experiences of Native–Spanish interactions in the sixteenth-century Southwest to the transnational intellectual connections that influenced high and low print cultures in nineteenth-century America and Europe.

Long Before Stonewall is divided into four parts, each of which packs quite a combined contextual and theoretical punch. In Part I, readers discover Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Tracy Brown staking out new ground in determining how alternative views of same-sex sexuality shaped the contact experiences between the American Indian populations in the American Southwest and their Spanish counterparts. Gunlög Fur adds to this interesting opening section with a piece on gender crossing among the eighteenth-century Delaware, probing the connections between effeminate males’ social status during times of war and peace and the occurrence of same-sex sexual practices.

Part II transports readers to the colonial experiences along the Atlantic coast. Richard Godbeer’s now classic essay, “The Cry of Sodom,” forces a complete reconceptualization of male–male sexual practices in colonial New England as he endeavors to deploy “sodomy as a sexual category and as a social issue” (82). Godbeer’s influence can be read throughout Long Before Stonewall; however, his contribution confronts the nexus of gender, sex practices, and social class in a way that continues to cast a long and positive shadow. As Godbeer demonstrates, in colonial New England, cultural conceptions of proper gendered behavior did not always match up with real-life male-to-male sexual interaction. When the two did collide, practitioners’ class standing could, and often did, reveal the elasticity of the category “sodomite.” Fitting nicely with Godbeer’s thesis on ideas and actions, Anne G. Myles examines the “queer erotics” of Quakerism in seventeenth-century New England. Myles finds that as an “extreme point on the Puritan continuum,” Quakerism threatened Puritan dominance in the region by embracing spiritual marital metaphors and relying on itinerant travel partnerships, both of which buttressed Quakers’ status as religious and social “others.” These and other distinguishing markers signified not only religious difference, but also “nonnormative erotic desire” (116–17). In Elizabeth Reis’s exploration of the physicality of sexual dualism in early America, she frames such intriguing cases as Thomas/Thomasina Hall and Deborah Lewis within the context of contemporary medical knowledge and legal statutes concerning acceptable gender performance. Reis connects debates over the [End Page 691] existence of hermaphrodites, cross-dressing...

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