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

14. In a French Position: Radical Pornography and Homoerotic Society in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond or the Secret Witness

Chapter 14 In a French Position Radical Pornography and Homoerotic Society in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond or the Secret Witness Stephen Shapiro Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond or the Secret Witness (1799) is the most radical novel written by an American until perhaps Melville’s Moby Dick (1850). Brown’s narrative rejects middle-class aspirations of individual merit and commercial success by looking to nurture a community based on the values of rational cooperation and mutual betterment. Though these collectivist ideals are rooted in the Quaker worldview of Brown’s family background, Ormond breaks from the Society of Friends’ pacifism by exploring violence as a catalyst for liberation, especially for homoerotic relations. Inspired by a brief moment of renewed revolutionary activity throughout Europe in the late 1790s, Brown’s novel differs from the period ’s emerging descriptions of same-sex sexuality as it conceptualizes homoeroticism more in terms of its group politics, rather than those of aberrant biological sex or its codification in gender roles. Instead of wondering what sexual acts reveal about an individual’s personality, their “identity,” Brown’s romance considers homoerotic desire and an enlightened, democratic ethics as mutually enabling. This consideration of sexuality as defined by the striving for social justice appears remarkably modern, but the historical context of Brown’s perspective belongs to eighteenth-century arguments surrounding the concept of civil society, which was developed as a counterweight against the early modern institutions of the absolutist state and doctrinal church. Locating Brown within the period’s definition of civil society, rather than the consecration of personal “individuality,” will prove tremendously 357 useful to students of pretwentieth-century (homo)sexuality, as it breaks out of a current impasse in sexuality studies regarding the self-aware emergence of groups associated with certain erotic modes of pleasure. After Foucault, the dominant paradigm for analyzing same-sex sexuality has been his distinction between sexual acts and identities.1 Anglophone cultural historians consequently often argue that a homosexual identity was only possible after the concept of personhood, defined by a subject’s interior psychology of quasi-genetic drives, arose and became consolidated throughout the nineteenth century. In the early modern period, roughly between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, same-sex activity was punished if it violated the traditional hierarchies of rank and gender submission , but it was not held to signify a truth about one’s self, mainly because the period’s elites could not allow the potentially dangerous notion that the lower ranks might have a private life worth noticing, let alone policing. The acts-versus-identities model has had ambiguous effects for recovering sexual cultures. For the notion that conceptions of sexuality are socially conditioned and historically mutable has frequently meant that even otherwise gay-friendly critics often deny that pretwentieth-century agents gave meaning to their sexual practices. The initial problem with an overly dogmatic use of Foucault is that his work concentrates on tracking the changing terms used by officials to describe sexual activity. He never attempted to develop a method for discerning how the subjects covered by terms like “sodomy” or “homosexuality” may have conceptualized their own erotic behavior. Likewise, his work never acknowledged the belatedness of bourgeois professional knowledge, where middle-class writers and publicists usually begin discussing cultural matters long after these formations have already existed, especially if they were initiated by the laboringclass or other groups on the margins of middle-class expectations. The fact that early modern authorities refused to acknowledge the presence of alternative attitudes and semicovert communities in their midst does not mean they did not exist before 1800. A tendentious use of Foucault has resulted in sexuality studies policing itself in ways far more rigid and unimaginative than is the case for other kinds of social history. We acknowledge the presence of a middle class before 1800, even while we understand that the particular bourgeois ideal of antagonistic individualism protected by the refuge of nuclear family domesticity does not fully exist then because the middle classes have different traits that they emphasize as defining themselves. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe does not have the rich interiority of a nineteenth-century Bil358 s t e p h e n s h a p i r o dungsroman’s hero, but the novel begins by clearly nominating Crusoe as belonging to the mercantile, middling class. It would be nonsensical to argue that, just because Crusoe does not fit...