Introduction

In 1988 John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman published Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, the first overarching (and still the only) scholarly survey of the history of US sexuality. The book made an immediate splash. On the front page of the New York Times Book Review Barbara Ehrenreich placed it on “the front lines of research in social history,” and in the Washington Post Jonathan Yardley called it “comprehensive, meticulous and intelligent.” (He also noted approvingly—no doubt reducing sales—that it “resists, at every turn, titillation and prurience.”)¹ The book appeared just as the history of sexuality emerged as a scholarly subfield, and it introduced the latest findings to a broader public.

But Intimate Matters was more than an introduction. It also built a framework for much of the research that followed. The book posited a fundamental shift in sexual regimes, from an early American moment when sexuality was seen primarily as procreative to a twentieth-century “sexualized society” that tied sexuality to pleasure, happiness, and individual self-fulfillment. It pointed to the economic underpinnings of social and cultural change, to the ways that a capitalist economy promoted the commercialization of sex and encouraged the pursuit of desire. And it showed how the construction of sexuality sustained race, class, and gender hierarchies. In the years that followed its debut, other historians picked up on its cues and further developed its histories of “sexual meanings, sexual regulation, and sexual politics.”²

In the past two decades the scholarship on the history of sexuality has grown exponentially. The field is now so well populated—with books, articles, courses, and conferences—that it’s hard to remember just how new it was in 1988. It’s worth noting that Intimate Matters came out before Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality—and the “cultural turn,” more generally—had had its full impact in shifting the center of gravity from private experience to public discourse.³ It also appeared before queer theory, critical race theory, and transgender studies had shaped our historical accounts, and it predated much of the rich literature on the history of masculinity, interracial sex, sexual science, and more. Nonetheless, Intimate Matters, out this year in its third edition, still serves as an indispensable text, assigned in classes, mined for lectures, and cited in scholarly works. The book that helped launch a subfield is still a touchstone and a guide.

To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Intimate Matters, we held a roundtable session in April 2013 at the Organization of American Historians meeting in San Francisco. Four scholars—each with important recent books in the history of US sexuality—used the occasion to reflect on the impact of Intimate Matters and on the current state of the field. Then John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman offered their own reflections on writing Intimate Matters in the 1980s and revisiting it today. Although we can’t replicate the buzz in the conference room, with its standing-room-only crowd, we’re pleased to offer here in print the papers and comments presented that day.

As you’ll see in the pages that follow, the history of US sexuality now has multiple overlapping areas of specialization. What’s especially intriguing is how different the history looks from its disparate vantage points. Cynthia M. Blair reminds us that sexual violence, sex work, and pathologization have deeply shaped the history of African American women’s sexuality. She invites us to interrogate our own silences and to pursue the complicated meanings that sexual acts and sexual pleasure have had for black women themselves. Margot Canaday asks us to look for the queer sites within the seemingly straight triad of church, family, and workplace, and she suggests that lgbt historians might pay more attention to women. Thomas Foster turns to early American histories and to the ways that sexuality informed imperial encounters, and Nayan Shah calls our attention to recent Asian American histories and to transnational kinship, cross-cultural intimacies, and the “affective complexity of race and sexuality.” Each historian gives us a roadmap to a different historiography, and each points us in new directions...