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Afterword John D’Emilio Let’s face it. For many U.S. historians who teach and research the history of sexuality, early America is an unfortunate inconvenience. It does not provide us with a route to the present. We cannot turn to it for the origins —even the distant attenuated origins—of our own world in which sexuality is bound closely to and has helped constitute a regime of mass consumption , an ethic of pleasure, and a sense of both individual and group identity. Sex in colonial North America seems firmly embedded in a marital reproductive matrix. We move quickly through it until the magical properties of the nineteenth-century demographic revolution shift sex into a sphere in which human beings are able to exercise at least some modicum of choice. We try to make the best of the situation. We seize the opportunity at the beginning of the semester to entertain our students with stories about those odd Puritans who placed animals in line ups and executed the ones who had participated in the crime of bestiality. Early America gets cast as the unalterable other: that was then, this is now. For the history of samesex relations, it allows us to demonstrate the acts (then) versus identities (now) paradigm. It serves almost as a form of prehistory, a starting point that precedes real history, the moment (located somewhere in the late eighteenth century) when change over time finally begins. I know the early modernists reading the above two paragraphs must be shaking their heads in dismay or rolling their eyes as they dismiss the intellectual provinciality of someone who writes mostly about a past that is so recent that some do not even consider its history. So, alright, I admit that I am exaggerating. But, still, I would wager that many U.S. historians structure their teaching—and their understanding—of the history of sexuality in ways that give the nineteenth and twentieth century pride of place. 384 Part of the great value of Long Before Stonewall is that it takes a giant step toward redressing this imbalance. By pulling together a wide range of essays, some previously published and some brand new, it allows us to rethink both the marginalization of early America to the history of sexuality and the simplistic interpretations we have of sex over this long stretch of time. It also does more. The writers in this volume are struggling over issues of interpretation, significance, and method that are vital to all students of sexuality. Their essays allow us both to see new things and to see the familiar differently. They also provoke us into caring about the issues and arguing about interpretation. Let me offer a few examples of what I mean. 1. A generation ago, Carl Degler published a very influential essay titled “What Ought to Be and What Was.”1 In it, he drew a sharp line between prescriptive literature and lived experience. The former, Degler argued, could not be used as evidence for the latter. The essay was an important milestone in the continuing effort to rethink Victorian sexuality. Since then, the cultural turn in many academic disciplines has encouraged us not so much to abandon this distinction but to move beyond the simple clarity of it. Texts cannot be read as literal transcriptions of daily life, but language does help constitute experience. Learning how people think, what people think, and how they choose to represent their experience through cultural texts is indispensable in developing sophisticated, complex , and nuanced understandings of how these folks might have lived. A number of authors play with these distinctions and subtleties. By looking closely at the evidence of two different cases, Richard Godbeer is able to identify a difference between the harshly condemnatory prescriptions of clerical and legal authorities and the views, shaped by daily living, of ordinary people. Clare Lyons mines the content of the books that crossed the Atlantic for clues about the structure of thought and feeling in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Lisa Moore is able to see in the conventions of the landscape poem an opening for the expression of desire and passion between women. At the same time, the examination of these cultural products as a route into the past provoked in me a yearning to go beyond them. Stephen Shapiro ’s characterization of Ormond as “the most radical novel” of its era made me want to know more about the social history that produced such sexual radicalism. What experiences generated...

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