The Bonds of Men

Masculinity studies has reached a new level of sophistication and maturity since its inception in the 1970s as an offshoot of feminism. As the study of masculinity has developed, masculinity in its American context has also seen some remarkable changes. In terms of social constructions of masculinity in the past two decades, key shifts have occurred as a result of the extraordinary new visibility of queer sexuality from the early 1990s to the present day, chief amongst them the transformation of hegemonic straight white male masculinity. White straight masculinity, which for some time had been framed as the privileged wielder of the desiring gaze in much of feminist theory in several disciplines, has itself become the object of multiple gazes, and with that decentering has come a new self-consciousness, a new awareness that males can be the object of desire as well as those who take the active role in desiring. As masculinity has elicited a new scrutiny, masculinity studies has traced out new histories of its development. Especially interesting is the current movement towards the study of masculinity in an Anglo-American context. Though situated in quite distinct eras, these two new books discuss masculinities in a shifting, cross-fertilizing transatlantic context that illuminates the shared histories of gender construction within both Britain and the United States. Both works also explore the significance of same-sex desire—incipient, suggested, contained, repudiated—to the discourses of masculine subjectivity.

The reader of Richard Godbeer's enveloping, consistently revelatory new book comes away from it feeling both entranced and frustrated: entranced because Godbeer is a deft presenter of an almost dizzying array of texts that give evidence of a now-vanished world of male-male emotionalism, frustrated because Godbeer has not properly accounted for its loss. Most of this review will be written in the "entranced" mode, for this is a splendid work of scholarship and a deeply valuable cultural intervention. The frustrations of Godbeer's work, however, are also complexly revealing, and I will turn to them in the conclusion.

Studying the surprisingly ample surviving record of correspondences between eighteenth-century American men in the period just preceding the Revolutionary War up to its immediate aftermath, Godbeer writes that they reveal a striking "emotional intensity" that demands scrutiny. "What did loving friendship mean to these men as part of their personal and social identities?" Finding plausible answers involves "setting aside modern assumptions about love between members of the same sex" (2009, 9). Immediately, an obstacle to understanding the period's rhetoric of male love emerges: our modern paradigm of sexual orientation, i.e., Freudian theories and the late-nineteenth-century emergence of such new taxonomical sexual categories such as "heterosexual" and "homosexual." Godbeer presents a world of love between men that is historically and culturally prior to these more recent, and apparently calcifying, ways of thinking about sexuality: the "modern assumption that most people are attracted—sexually and romantically—to either men or women would have surprised early Americans. Their attitudes toward love, sexual desire, and the relationship between the two differed from ours in significant ways," and presenting these differences makes all the difference in terms of developing a proper understanding of eighteenth-century male relations (3).

Unlike in London, no subculture related to males who desired sexual intimacy with other men developed in British America; indeed, Americans regarded sodomy as an "alien vice," tied to images of a degenerate Old World-Europe. Although such groups as the Freemasons, significant in the role they played in the forging of the new republic, were attacked for the unseemliness of the homoerotic passions they promulgated, most Americans were not suspected of hiding sexual designs within their expressions of ardent affectionalism. If anything, classical and biblical precedents—Damon and Pythias; David and Jonathan—seemed to sanction...