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

11. Sexual Desire, Crime, and Punishment in the Early Republic

Chapter 11 Sexual Desire, Crime, and Punishment in the Early Republic Mark E. Kann The American Revolution ushered in a “sexual revolution” that lowered restraints on sexual desire but heightened fears that youths would fail to exhibit republican virtue.1 One indicator of impending failure was the perceived growth of crime in cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia . Beginning in the 1780s, penal reformers argued that the primary means for preventing crime was to encourage people to discipline desire and the preferred method for curing criminality was to rehabilitate convicts by incarcerating them for long periods. Importantly, disciplining desire meant restraining sexual desire and rehabilitation required enforcing prisoner sexual abstinence. Penal reformers prided themselves on their enlightened advocacy of liberty and independence but they were uneasy about reduced restraints on sexual desire. They believed that excessive passion was the basis of many crimes, including sex crimes ranging from adultery and bigamy to prostitution and rape. They also identified excessive passion as the source of same-sex desire and sodomy—which they considered particularly sinful and subversive of the biological, social, and political order ordained by God, nature, and reason. Where individuals failed to discipline desire, their promiscuous, lawless behavior needed to be punished lest sexual impunity undermine social stability. Penal reformers’ recommended punishment was long-term imprisonment in penitentiaries that were specifically designed to dampen men’s passions, enforce sexual abstinence, and teach redeeming self-discipline. Ideally, penitentiaries were designed so that the sexes were segregated; each man was isolated from other men; and panoptic systems of surveil279 lance ensured that prison life was passionless. In reality, constant overcrowding in penitentiaries meant that men and women inmates occasionally found each other; and male inmates, boys and men, shared cells and beds with one another. Reformers’ main priority was to keep men and women apart, eventually, by calling for the creation of separate institutions for each sex. Furthermore, reformers feared that young male inmates were being seduced and raped by older men and, once fallen from virtue, these boys could never be rehabilitated. This fear gradually gave rise to a movement to protect delinquent boys from adult criminals by placing youths in their own facilities. Finally, although reformers complained about persistent sexual behavior among adult male prisoners, prison officials had neither the logistical ability nor the political motivation to prevent it. Officials’ grudging toleration of same-sex behavior suggested that the state’s power over prisoners found its limits in same-sex desire. The Context for Penal Reform Dr. Benjamin Rush was an early leader in American penal reform. In his medical practice and public service, he dwelled on men’s sexual excesses. He wrote that the “solitary vice” of masturbation fixed “physical and moral evils . . . upon the body and mind.” Additionally, “The morbid effects of intemperance in sexual intercourse with women” ruined male mental and physical health. Moreover, in schools where boys lodged together and shared beds, “the venereal appetite prevails with so much force and with such odious consequences” that youths were permanently damaged . Rush claimed that male masturbation, promiscuity, and sodomy produced debilities ranging from insanity to criminality.2 His anxiety about same-sex experimentation among boys in boarding schools anticipated later reformers’ apprehensions about the sexual vulnerability of young boys in adult prisons. Rush joined other civic leaders and intellectuals to urge Americans to restrain sexual desire. In her literary study of the early Republic, Karen Weyler observes that fiction, advice literature, and education theory, along with medical writings, routinely prescribed “self-knowledge, self-discipline , and self-control.” Liberty had to be wed to self-restraint to sustain an orderly republic.3 Elites agreed that liberty led to licentiousness whenever self-restraint failed to neutralize excessive desire. Religious realists and enlightenment idealists long recognized that a degree of sexual licen280 m a r k e . k a n n tiousness was predictable. But was it tolerable? The American answer was mixed. In colonial New England, for example, officials legislated capital punishment for sexual deviancy but rarely hanged men convicted of sodomy . Magistrates even allowed some exhibitions of same-sex desire. Nicholas Sension’s sexual aggression toward other males was well known to his seventeenth-century Connecticut neighbors, but it did not diminish “the general esteem in which he was held.”4 Overall, post-Revolution officials scaled down the practice of prosecuting sexual offenses. Quiet adultery was usually allowed. Bigamy, often a product of...