The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia (review)

In this study, Jay Hatheway—the author of earlier works on Nazi ideology and on his own challenge to the sexual policies of the U.S. military—locates the emergence of a modern homosexual identity in the Gilded Age. Inspired by students' questions about the roots of antigay medical and social opinion, he argues that the late nineteenth century, when new European ideas and writings about same-sex sexuality reached the United States, saw the flowering of negative beliefs and assumptions about homosexuality that a later generation would label "homophobia." Examining how medical and scientific theories of same-sex attractions and activities largely replaced older views based on Christian morality, Hatheway argues for a "distinctively American response" to homosexuality (p. 10).

The book's first section covers a vast terrain, sweeping across antebellum and then post-Civil War American norms. Searching for themes uniting theology, law, new settlement and class patterns, and popular and scientific knowledge, Hatheway argues that nineteenth-century Americans crafted a coherent and consistent philosophy of sex that married religious, social, and health beliefs. He then moves to the Gilded Age, asking whether the category of the homosexual can be "used in any meaningful way" in the late nineteenth-century United States (p. 173), and concluding that a modern homosexual identity was "in the process of becoming" (p. 175). This identity, he argues, emerged from negotiations between gay subjects and medical authorities, and he discusses the American reception of works by Krafft-Ebing and other European sexologists, along with the work of less-known U.S. figures such as anthropologist G. Frank Lydston and neurologist James Kiernan. Placing American clinicians at the heart of his study, Hatheway follows earlier analyses in maintaining that turn-of-the-century neurologists, eager to elevate their professional standing and separate themselves from alienists, drew on a social Darwinist discourse of civilization, racial evolution, and degeneration to diagnose middle-class whites as suffering from neurasthenia. A number of commentators have commented on the gendered dimensions of nervous disorders, but Hatheway instead focuses on their intersections with sexuality, arguing that Gilded Age authorities recognized two very different categories of homosexuality: The first type, which he describes as "homosexual depravity" (p. 146), correlated with general inferiority, poor inheritance, and a love of vice. The second, "congenital homosexuality" (p. 159), was diagnosed in the elite, educated, and civilized—the very group whom neurologists sought to serve, and upon whom the nation's future rested. This latter diagnosis leads Hatheway to conclude that "the creation of a homosexual identity owes much to the Gilded Age neurologist, who in his quest for authority pulled same-sex eroticism from the depths of moral depravity and handed it over to the clarity of modern science" (p. 193). He locates a few American homosexuals who resisted the clinical label of degeneracy and decline, but concludes that ultimately "the aspirations of the physician to help the homosexual turned into a prescription for homophobia" (p. 200).

In this study, Hatheway searches for modern concepts of homophobia and gay identity in the Gilded Age. Rather than a recent concept born of changing sexual and psychological norms in the late twentieth century, "homophobia" here describes virtually any derogatory opinions of same-sex sexuality, as he argues that the modern concept is rooted in neurologists' concerns and diagnosis. Similarly, he maps an emerging "homosexual identity" in the late nineteenth century—in contrast to Jonathan Ned Katz's preferred term of "love between men before homosexuality," or George Chauncey's more nuanced delineation of such varied groups as "fairies," "inverts," and "trade" (putatively heterosexual men available for same-sex encounters).¹ Although Hatheway's attention to the American reception of European sexology and to lesser-known authors adds detail to our picture of Gilded Age medicine and the delineation of sexual categories, such generalizations limit the book's utility for historians of American medicine and sexuality.