Situating Sex: Prison Sexual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States

One of the most important insights in the history of sexuality has been that "sexual identity"—the notion that the direction of one's sexual desire determines and reveals the truth of the self—is a relatively recent production. Most historians locate the formation of modern Euro-American sexual identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Around this time, so the argument goes, sexual acts became newly constitutive of identity: what one did, and with whom, came to define who one was. In Michel Foucault's famous words, "The nineteenth- century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, . . . with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. . . . The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species." ¹

During the last fifteen years or so this insight has become a guiding truism, a mantra even, for historians of sexuality, inspiring work that highlights the alterity of sexual systems remarkably different from our own, as well as explorations of the emergence of this new "species" in the relatively recent past. But some sexual acts and actors confound this historical narrative. Practices associated with certain sex-segregated spatial settings—prisons and other carceral institutions, the armed services, boarding schools—and performed by those who understand themselves and are understood by others as "normal" or "heterosexual," stand in an awkward relationship to sexual identity formation as outlined by historians. Apparently unmoored from identity and resistant to the taxonomic pressures of the twentieth century, these sexual acts and their practitioners can seem curiously outside time. The term that evolved by the mid-twentieth century to describe same-sex practices produced by circumstance, architecture, and environment, situational homosexuality, aimed to distinguish these practices from a "true" or authentic homosexuality, presumed to have a somatic or psychic origin.

In 1976 Jonathan Ned Katz warned historians against joining psychiatrists, sociologists, and criminologists in giving life to this midcentury distinction. "The term [situational homosexuality] is fallacious," Katz wrote, "if it implies that there is some 'true' homosexuality which is not situated. All homosexuality is situational, influenced and given meaning and character by its location in time and social space." ² We might assume that anyone committed to exploring the historicity of sexual meanings and expressions would agree. But with few exceptions, historians have lent credence to the boundary between "situational" and "real" forms of homosexuality by their disinclination to consider the former appropriate for study. That disinclination is usually left unsaid. In a recent recounting of the essentialist-social-constructionist debate among historians, however, Vernon A. Rosario remarks that these warring camps are united by their disinterest "merely in any same-sex sexual activity (for example, the 'situational' homosexuality of prisoners or sailors restricted to a single-sex environment). It is the more elusive issue of same-sex desire or sexual orientation ('true' homosexuality or 'gayness') that is the matter of concern." ³ This essay interrogates that disinterest. Exploring the shifting responses to prison sexual culture, in particular during the mid- twentieth century, I argue for the payoffs as well as the productive challenges of cultivating historical curiosity about sexual practices assumed to have no history.

How are we to understand the tendency of historians to explore some sites in which same-sex sexuality flourished—cities, bars, resorts, political movements —but not others? This near-complete silence—above all on prisons, where situational homosexuality arguably takes its quintessential form—may reflect historians' reluctance to include less-than-salutary subjects in lesbian and gay ancestry. Donna Penn has observed that "evidence from prisons, like that from the annals of psychiatry, has been shunted aside with arguments that it does not represent the lives of 'normal,' 'well-adjusted,' 'average' lesbians." ⁴ The question of who counts as a proper subject in queer history has long been a vexed one; the...