Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America

5. Border Crossings: The Queer Erotics of Quakerism in Seventeenth-Century New England

Chapter 5 Border Crossings The Queer Erotics of Quakerism in Seventeenth-Century New England Anne G. Myles One of the more arresting stories circulated in the English pamphlet literature attacking the emerging Quaker movement of the 1650s concerned a Quaker who purportedly committed an act of bestiality: “What doe you think of the Quaker that acted that most abominable, unnameable sin with a Mare? What doe you think of it, was it not from his light within?” asked Christopher Fowler and Simon Ford, the tract’s authors.1 In linking such an act of perversion with the reliance upon the “light within” that was the most distinguishing and radical feature of Quaker belief, the authors relied on the long-established Western association between religious difference and sexual deviance.2 This association, while it often leads to the targeting of same-sex sexuality, operates much more broadly as a kind of “heterophobia,” a tendency to link the threats posed by otherness of all kinds. Yet while it is easy to see the strategic uses of such rhetoric in cultivating fear and prejudice toward individuals or groups who pose any threat to established belief or structure, Fowler and Ford’s language was not merely rhetorical; rather, it reflected an early modern world in which it would not necessarily have occurred to anyone to isolate sexuality from other categories of order and disorder, of spiritual motive and outward manifestation. The connection between religious and sexual order was even more integral within early New England, for Puritanism’s vision of a godly society rested on marital and familial metaphors. As one commentator aptly summarizes it, “The regulation of sexual expression was an integral, even essential part of the Puritan commonwealths; sex explicitly became the car114 rier of social meaning. The marital and reproductive, familial and patriarchal order of the Puritan settlements was thought to replicate in small the larger order of the commonwealths. These, in turn, dramatized the covenantal bonds of marital love between God and His people.”3 Such an ideological foundation meant that religious, social, and sexual dissidence could scarcely be distinguished from one another. To falsify the plan of God’s covenant love, by ignoring or departing from orthodox faith and one’s appropriate place within the social and familial hierarchy, suggested that one either already had, or likely very soon would, transgress sexually as well. Within this context, same-sex behavior did not draw unique attention as a form of sexual aberration; rather, any departure from marital heterosexuality represented a threat to the colony’s symbolic integrity.4 While the marital metaphor implicit in the covenant helps explain New Englanders’ policing of deviant sexual behavior, it does not tell the whole story about the complex relationship between spirituality and sexuality with Puritanism. Expanding the study of sexuality beyond recorded evidence of literal genital behavior, a range of scholars have considered how sexual metaphors permeate the devotional rhetoric of early modern Protestantism , and explored how religious communities are shaped by discourses and forms of affect that cannot be clearly distinguished from the erotic. In many cases, such spiritual and social erotics complicate and/or transgress traditional gender distinctions and heteronormative assumptions about sexuality. A number of studies of Puritan spirituality have observed how frequently the male devotional subject occupies a feminized position in relation to God—a male God toward whom he expresses desire to be penetrated or possessed. This potential for evoking an apparent spiritual homoeroticism holds true even within what might seem the resistant context of New England Puritanism, although there is less agreement about how to interpret such formations or Puritans’ responses to them.5 However we construe these spiritual erotics, they take on added resonance when one considers them in light of the centrality of (male) homosocial bonds to early modern English society, to the Anglo-American Puritan spiritual network, and to the very symbolism of the religious and social covenant.6 Indeed, Michael Warner has found these dimensions at play in one of the founding documents of the New England way, John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity.” Warner points out how Winthrop invokes the idea of “simile simili gaudet, or like will [i.e., is drawn] to like” as the foundation of the Puritan covenant. This concept of Christian love is based in sameness rather than in hierarchy, a love that Winthrop Border Crossings 115 illustrates through the same sex Biblical relationships...