From Sodomists to Citizens: Same-Sex Sexuality and the Progressive Era Washington State Reformatory

In 1911 authorities in Spokane, Washington, arrested eighteen-year-old Edward Doyle because he had “voluntarily submitted himself to carnal knowledge by one Frank Williams.” In response to police interrogation, Doyle admitted to having done this with a number of other men for at least two years and claimed that he always allowed men to perform acts on him and that he never performed the acts on anyone else. He cited the need for money and assured authorities that he “did not derive any pleasure from the act.” When it came time for sentencing, the judge, E. H. Sullivan, doubted Doyle’s claim that he was devoid of same-sex desire, but he also had faith that Doyle’s same-sex desires could be cured. Sullivan sent Doyle to serve his term at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe, Washington, instead of the state penitentiary in Walla Walla, where men whose same-sex desires were deemed incorrigible were generally sent.¹

Three years later, George Chase, a businessman, sponsored Doyle for parole by offering him a job on a ranch in rural Grandview, Washington. Work there soon dried up, so Chase sought approval to send Doyle to Spokane to find steadier employment. This was a usual request within the state’s parole system, but it was met with opposition from the reformatory’s chief parole officer. In multiple letters to people involved in the case, Chief Parole Officer C. J. Webb expressed his belief that Doyle’s sexual problems arose from his exposure to urban environments: “It was distinctly understood that he should not go to a large city” and that “a year in the country would be the best thing for him.” Webb believed that Doyle was a “weak fellow” and that he would “fall again if he goes to Spokane.” This had no doubt something to do with Doyle’s first, failed attempt at parole in December 1912, which found him “sleeping with a bunch of hoboes in a Mission in the lower part of Seattle” and led to his reincarceration. Doyle, the parole officer insisted, would need to find work in a rural area if he wanted to remain on parole.²

Doyle was not the only young man convicted of a crime for engaging in same-sex sex in early twentieth-century Washington State who had his carceral experiences shaped by the prejudices of reformatory officials. Of the 134 men and boys incarcerated for sodomy or attempted sodomy in the state during these few years, twenty-two, or about 16 percent, spent time at the Washington State Reformatory, located in Monroe, Washington. Historians of sexuality such as Peter Boag, George Chauncey, and Nayan Shah have explored how government authorities in various American jurisdictions used sodomy laws to criminalize the same-sex sexual activities of young or immigrant men,³ but far less scholarly attention has been paid to state attempts to reform that same-sex sexual desire out of young men. This is especially true for those incarcerated at state reformatories.⁴

Washington State adopted a sodomy law in 1893 and reformed it in 1909. The 1893 legislation made it a felony to “commit the infamous and detestable crime against nature, either with mankind or any beast.”⁵ The 1909 law expanded the definition of sodomy by legislating that “every person who shall carnally know in any manner any animal or bird; or who shall carnally know any male or female person by the anus, or with the mouth or tongue; or who shall voluntarily submit to such carnal knowledge, or who shall attempt sexual intercourse with a dead body, shall be guilty of sodomy.”⁶ Both statutes made it illegal for men to engage in various kinds of nonprocreative sex with other people. The sodomy law was most often used to prosecute men who engaged in sex with other men, and it was also successfully used to prosecute men who had sex with young girls or animals, but I have uncovered no instances of the law being used to prosecute cases of necrophilia...