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

Introduction: Long Before Stonewall

Introduction Long Before Stonewall Thomas A. Foster In mid-eighteenth-century Massachusetts, the engraving featured on the cover and on the facing page, published in the Boston Evening Post, depicted the Freemasons of Boston engaged in anal penetration with a wooden spike or treenail. Treenails were commonly used in ship-building in the eighteenth century and joined timbers by becoming engorged when wet. Thus, the very object being used for penetration was a multilayered phallic symbol. The image also included the figure of an “ass” (furthering the anal emphasis) that brayed “Trunnel him well, brother.” A poem accompanied the engraving and depicted the Masons as romantically and sexually interested in one another. It only added to the focus on the phallus (note that the word “trunnel” was highlighted with capital letters) and the posterior with the lines: “I’m sure our trunnels look’d as clean / As if they ne’re up A—se had been; / For when we use ’em, we take care / To wash ’em well, and give ’em Air, / Then lock ’em up in our own Chamber , / Ready to trunnel the next Member.” Sodomy was, of course, still a capital crime in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, yet the story managed to muster humor about the act by calling on a cultural association of depraved and inferior manhood with same-sex sexual interest.1 That by the eighteenth century an all-male secret social club could raise the specter of homosexuality is significant. We might even speculate that the satirist was referencing molly houses of London, which were reported on in local newspapers. Traditional scholars might argue that the engraving displays the scatological , not the sexual. But to draw too fine a line around the sexual limits our understanding of ways in which the erotic, romantic, intimate, repro1 ductive, and physical join together with so-called nonsexual areas of life and society in early America. The anal “intimacy” depicted in the image necessarily raises the possibility of sodomy, enabling us to speak of samesex sexuality without actually locating the term sodomy in this discussion. This book, a collection of reprinted and original ground-breaking work, uses history, anthropology, psychology, literary criticism, political theory, and sociology to tease out various histories of same-sex sexualities in early America. Parts one and two chart the contours of same-sex sexuality in colonial societies, including interactions among Native Americans and Europeans. Parts three and four examine new meanings of same-sex sex in the early United States. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that long before the modern era, individuals came together to express their same-sex romantic and sexual attraction. Some reflected on their desires in quiet solitude. Some endured great hardship for their words or actions that expressed homosexual interest.2 The eighteenth century in particular was a critical period in the development of traditions of sexuality. These languages and ideas around sex and personhood were only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries officially enshrined in the professional terms of the then-relatively new fields of psychology and sexology. Long Before Stonewall exposes the deep foundations that modern sexual political movements and identities are built upon. Reconceptualizing sexuality in preindustrial America has broader implications for our understanding of the development of the modern subject or self. Studying same-sex sexuality can also tell us something about life in early America, in particular something about connections of sex and reputation and character. Sexuality in early America was not as cordoned off into a realm of “private” behavior as it is today. The distinction between private and public was not so starkly drawn yet and therefore sex and sexuality affected more “nonsexual” arenas than has generally been understood. Indeed, the modern propensity to view sex as part of one’s private life has led to its teleological absence from studies of public life. Early American society was agrarian and localized. Face-to-face interactions established one’s personal reputation in the community. In colonial America, troublemakers always ran the risk of being pushed out or worse. But we should keep in mind that character and reputation were about more than simply being able to hold one’s head high. The entire economic system, of both credit and household economies of barter, was based on character and reputation. In an era before depersonalized credit scores, 2 t h o m a s a . f o s t e r what one...