Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships (review)

This ambitious new study seeks to uncover the sexual experiences of adult men "with a homosexual orientation" (xiii) who lived in the North American colonies that became the United States. It encompasses a vast expanse of territory through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. Benemann is not the first scholar to attempt a history of same-sex intimacy in early America, but previous studies of sexual relations between men have taken the form of much shorter essays and journal articles. His is the first full-length book on the subject.

Historians interested in male-male sexual desire during the colonial and early national periods have faced a range of obstacles. These include the understandable reluctance of men to acknowledge openly their attraction to other men in a society that criminalized sodomy and the lengths to which some embarrassed or perplexed contemporaries went in their efforts to avoid acknowledging same-sex desire. The vocabulary that Americans used during this period to describe sexual attraction or activity was sometimes ambiguous and unspecific, making it difficult to determine exactly what was being described. Across the Atlantic major metropolitan centers had already produced urban subcultures for men attracted to other men that then attracted attention from contemporaries; the absence of large cities in North America meant that male-male encounters were more diffuse and elusive. And last but not least, the determination of past scholars to ignore or suppress evidence that they found distasteful also presents an obstacle for historians of sexuality.

Undeterred by these challenges, a growing number of historians have set out to scour surviving sources, looking for evidence that would enable a history of same-sex intimacy in early America. Drawing on court records, legal and theological commentaries, private journals and correspondence, articles in newspapers and magazines, and literary works either imported for consumption by Americans or produced in North America, these historians have produced a rapidly expanding scholarship examining same-sex intimacy in the colonial and early national periods. William Benemann has combined these findings by previous scholars with the results of his own search to reconstruct a world of male-male attraction and sexual intimacy in early America.

Most of the evidence that Benemann discusses in his book falls into one of four categories: unequivocal statements or claims that men either wanted to have sex with each other or were in fact having sexual relations; much less clear-cut evidence suggesting that particular men may have been attracted sexually to each other or perhaps had sexual relations; evidence for loving friendships between men that gives no indication of an erotic component in the relationship; and material in newspapers, novels, or other printed matter describing sexual attraction or relationships between men. Most of the surviving documentation that falls into the first category originates in seventeenth-century court records. That evidence has to be used with great care, given the negative context in which it was recorded. But as recent scholars have shown, court transcripts have much to tell us about popular as well as official attitudes and can be used to reconstruct the varied, often contested sexual culture of early Americans. Surprisingly, Benemann makes little use of this evidence and indeed has little to say about the seventeenth century. A few of these case records include substantial transcripts that contain rich cachets of information, which makes it all the more perplexing that the author ignores them. Any claim to comprehensive treatment of the available evidence is much weakened by this decision.

Benemann does present some direct evidence for male-male sexual activity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though his claims for what that evidence demonstrates tend to the hyperbolic. In a chapter on the armed forces, for example, he declares that he has "ample evidence" that "male-male sexuality" was "part of the military experience" (57). What he actually presents is two documented cases from the Continental army's court-martial records, four from...