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  • Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships
  • Thomas A. Foster
Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships. By William Benemann (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2006. xx plus 322 pp.).

Male-Male Intimacy in Early America is the first book to undertake the overdue task of synthesizing the last 30 years of scholarship on homosexuality in early America. Benemann, who at University of California at Berkeley is both the Archivist for the School of Law and Adjunct Curator for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender materials for the Bancroft Library, brings together the scholarly literature with his own provocative interpretations of documents that he has culled from the archives.

The book employs a loosely chronological format as it explores thematic chapters organized around a wide range of topics including, male-male intimacy in the fledgling colonies, among soldiers, in the rhetoric of abolitionism, in the imported literature of the early Republic, in the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening, and in the everyday experiences of soldiers, prospectors, cattlemen, businessmen, slaves, and ordinary early American men.

Benemann finds three main types of male-male intimate relationships. He uses the term “romantic friendship to describe a close affectionate relationship between two men who were social equals” (xv), “romantic mentorship to describe a close affectionate relationship between two men with a substantial age gap” and “erotic employment” which took place, usually with an age gap, to describe the relationship of employer/employee. (xvi)

The book is as much about how to read his sources as it is about the content of the sources themselves. The subtitle is aimed at moving the academy out of its rigid formulation of heterosexual-unless-proven-otherwise. This is not just a synthesis of the existing literature bolstered by Benemann’s own interpretation of primary sources to fill in the gaps. His is a bold thesis. Using Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 statistic that 4 percent of white men are exclusively homosexual and the 1790 United States Census, Benemann starts with the premise that “we need to assume that 32, 292 white males with a homosexual orientation were living in the United States in 1790.” (xiii) Benemann argues “I am convinced that there were men who were homosexual” in early America, and that they “regarded themselves as different from their comrades, a difference based solely on their sexual response.” (xv) This is not simply a matter of source interpretation. For Benemann there is a moral imperative being neglected by the profession. “Proper interpretation of ambiguous language is a challenge,” he writes, but “it is one historians must embrace—or leave an entire aspect of American history unexplored.” (16) [End Page 1053]

To find the “32, 292 homosexually inclined men” who were “hiding in plain site.” Benemann reads a wide variety of sources including, court and police records, fiction, and private papers. (xiv) Consider, for example, his provocative reading of a New York City police report from the early nineteenth century. In 1808 a black hairdresser named Louis Hart witnessed a white sailor beating the black woman who lived in Hart’s basement. When Hart tried to intervene on behalf of the woman, who had retreated to her apartment, he was struck by the sailor. As the police report detailed: “‘[T]he deponent … not being willing to fight with him went into the House.’” (156) Eventually the white sailor returned with six shipmates and the gang proceeded to beat the woman, assault the hairdresser, trash his apartment, and steal several silver teaspoons. As Benemann concedes, “Nothing in the police report specifies the hairdresser’s sexual orientation, and it is perhaps only through the lens of modern stereotypes that we can read this narrative as homosexual.” (156) Yet Benemann argues that to leave the reading there will obliterate an important history. “Such an intentionally ‘queered’ reading can never be determinative, but it may at least provide us with a place to start to fill in the gaps of a part of black history that will otherwise remain hidden.” (156) While such an analysis will leave some readers wanting more, other will applaud Benemann’s attempt and admire his moral stance.

The book also uses popular...

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