FIERCE DESIRES
A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America
by Rebecca L. Davis
W. W. Norton. 480 pages, $35.
THE SUBTITLE of Fierce Desires announces an ambitious agenda: “A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America,” hinting at a challenge to John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s influential book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, first published in 1988 (with subsequent editions in 1998 and 2012), which conceptualizes American sexuality as the historical development of privacy, moving from the primacy of the family toward greater individualism. Rebecca Davis, a history professor at the University of Delaware, has set out to rethink the subject by integrating new scholarship that has widened the scope of attention to include nonwhite Americans and sexual minorities, and has brought to the fore a conceptual distinction between sex and gender.
Davis’ strategy is to recount this four-century history by telling stories. Eighteen generally chronological chapters, each dedicated to one person or a few people of interest, provide the guiding dots the reader is invited to connect. This strategy tends to favor the scandalous and the outrageous or dramatizes the pedestrian.
We begin in Colonial America, with a suggestive episode based on two pages of court proceedings in 1629 in Jamestown, Virginia. Following fornication allegations against an intersex English immigrant named Thomas or Thomasine Hall, the local court ordered that Hall be known formally in the community as both a man and a woman, and be recognized as such by donning a combination of female and male attire. Davis is critical of this ruling—somewhat contradicting her own rule against imposing 21st-century standards on past ages—charging that the court “effectively created a gender category, but in doing so mocked Hall’s identity.” And yet, one could argue that the court actually minimized innovation, resorting to the categories of man and woman, while reducing gender to a matter of clothing worn in public.
The discussion of homosexuality in Colonial and early American law gives rise to some fascinating points: for example, that New Haven Colony, overly zealous even by Puritan standards, was the only Colonial jurisdiction to expressly outlaw sex between women (but only until 1664, when Connecticut absorbed New Haven, expiring the prohibition). Centuries later, the story of gay liberation and AIDS is told through the activist Steve (Kiyoshi) Kuromiya, who was born in 1943 in an internment camp for Japanese Americans in Wyoming. Kuromiya lived through the Civil Right Movement, anti-Vietnam War activism, the pre-Stonewall thrust for LGBT rights, the Gay Liberation era that followed, the advent of AIDS and ACT UP, and the push for medical marijuana legalization in the 1990s.
An implicit question lingers as one reads this book. What is specifically American about American sexuality? Would a book about, say, Canadian sexuality—or Mexican, British, European, or global sexuality—be all that different, or is there something uniquely American about it? Davis’ approach is to focus on the racial history of the U.S., rendering the American story one of the interplay between oppression and liberation. Is America truly a “melting pot” when it comes to sexuality? Davis’ focus on power relations quietly replaces the tired old myth of the lingering impact of puritanism, which some people take as an explanation for American men trudging the beaches in baggy swimming trunks while their European counterparts sport revealing Speedos.
In the end, it is perhaps up to every reader to formulate their own answer. The conditions that Davis considers—political control, conservative backlash, the authority of science, among others—are all there for the weighing. One can cook these ingredients in numerous ways to varying effect, but the American sexual story, and our understanding of it, remains a work in progress.
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Yoav Sivan is a New York City-based freelance writer and researcher on cultural topics.
