When We Found Each Other - The Gay & Lesbian Review

Contents

Foreward………………………………………………………………………………………………..ix

1. The Genderfluid Master of Bizarre……………………………………………………1

2. My Name Is Not Yours To Give………………………………………………………….7

3. John Fryer, Foremastman…………………………………………………………………17

4. A Dab of Tar on a Sailor’s Posteriors………………………………………………..23

5. The Sweat of Vile Bodies…………………………………………………………………….31

6. Bottom Shamed By Mark Twain………………………………………………………..39

7. Absconding to Arcadia…………………………………………………………………………51

8. Enough For Us That We Are Together………………………………………………..59

9. The Men in the Trees…………………………………………………………………………..73

10. Painted Angels and Tainted Fruit…………………………………………………….85

11. Pervert Patient Zero…………………………………………………………………………..91

12. Butterflies Caught in a Web…………………………………………………………….103

13. Tuckernuck May Call You………………………………………………………………..115

14. The Sublime Sewer Club…………………………………………………………………127

15. Stripping for Mister Sargent………………………………………………………….135

16. On the Road to Hobohemia……………………………………………………………149

Endnotes……………………………………………………………………………………………….161

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………179

FOREWARD

THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY IN THE UNITED STATES was a time of disconcerting social change for men and women who were non-conforming in their sexual practices. During this period, extending in the U.S. roughly from the end of the Revolutionary War to the outbreak of World War I, sexual mores experienced a sea change unprecedented in our country’s history. In the opening decades, Americans enjoyed a level of freedom and tolerance that is unimaginable to any modern reader inclined to paint the entire 19th century with the broad-brush term “Victorian.” Once Puritanism was routed, a period of laissez-faire reigned, an ethos that drew on both a revolutionary spirit of throwing off all repressive bonds, and on an entrepreneurial fervor that left little time for meddling in a neighbor’s private life. In Europe highly-organized police entrapment programs led to the arrest and punishment of hundreds of homosexuals, but American cities had no police departments until the 1830s and 1840s. Only a private complaint filed with a magistrate by an actual eye-witness to the event could lead to a man’s prosecution for sodomy. Sex between men was definitely frowned upon, but there were no community-wide campaigns aimed at its suppression. Non-marital sexual activity of all types was widespread, and it carried little in the way of public censure. By the 1770s and 1780s, close to thirty percent of brides in America arrived at the altar pregnant.¹

Then everything changed. The establishment of police departments in the nation’s major cities signaled an alteration in the public’s perception: your neighbor’s activities—including those of a sexual nature—were your concern. “At no other period in American history has such a sexually repressive belief system been so elaborately delineated,” wrote Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. “Appearing suddenly in the 1830s and 1840s, it contrasts sharply with the sexual permissiveness of either the 18th or the 20th century.”² For gay men, the populations of cities like Philadelphia, New York and Boston had finally begun to reach the size where it was possible to form unobtrusive underground communities, and to establish what today would be known as “queer space”—parks and taverns where like-minded men could meet and mingle. For these nascent communities, the new morality campaigns, with their echoes of European arrests and prosecutions, were therefore ominous. While no one in 1830s America was yet suggesting the necessity of police sweeps of the types being carried out in Paris and London, the threat was very real.

Fortunately for men seeking to have sex with other men, at this very moment the American West was opening for exploration and settlement. Vast stretches of open country were de facto men-only zones. Native American women were the only females a man might sometimes encounter, and while some men married and raised mixed-race families, most men traveling through Indian territory were not inclined to put down roots. It would be a generation or more before the number of women settlers would approach gender parity, so the West provided a place where male-male sexuality was by general agreement given a temporary dispensation. The men who traveled West represented the full range of the Kinsey scale, from men who would have little interest in having sex with other men had they stayed in the East, to men who were drawn to the area specifically because of the stories of the freedom they believed they could experience there. That freedom proved to be real—and persistent. In the 1940s Alfred Kinsey found it lingering in rural areas of Montana, Wyoming and other sparsely-populated states. “It is a type of homosexuality which was probably common among pioneer and outdoor men in general,” Kinsey reported. “Today it is found among ranchmen, cattle men, prospectors, lumberman, and farming groups in general—among groups that are virile, physically active. These are men who have faced the rigors of nature in the wild. They live on realities and on a minimum of theory. Such a background breeds the attitude that sex is sex, irrespective of the nature of the partner with whom the relation is had.³

Even more committed to the principle that “sex is sex” were the men who went to sea. The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of American maritime commerce, and the rapid expansion of what had been a very small United States Navy. Sailors when at sea lived in a world where women were explicitly excluded, and as a result a male-male sex culture developed aboard ship that had its own rules and specialized vocabulary. Few vessels (with the exception of whalers) spent long periods at sea; most voyages put into port at least every few weeks. Female sex workers were readily available in “Sailortowns” whenever the men came ashore—and yet homosexual activity at sea still flourished. As with travel into the remote areas of the West, the sea attracted a wide variety of men, including those who had heard that male-male sexuality was accepted in this profession, and many men hurried to take advantage of the opportunity.

Early explorers and travelers also encountered a social phenomenon that required them to examine their assumptions about gender identity. Among Native American tribes they encountered individuals who they perceived to be men behaving as though they were women. French-Canadian traders and trappers labeled them “berdaches.” The phenomenon was widespread and varied in its manifestations, but in the absence of nineteenth-century personal narratives from those individuals, it is impossible to know with any certainty what the dynamics were behind these apparent reversals of gender roles. What is available to us is a significant number of comments made by the men and women who observed the people who today are frequently referred to as “two-spirits.” The early commentaries are necessarily biased and unreliable, as the observers were baffled by what they thought they saw, but their comments do reveal to us much about nineteenth-century American attitudes concerning sexuality and gender.

By the end of the long nineteenth century, men who desired men were living in a very different world from the one that their fellows of the early 1800s had experienced. America now had cities large enough to host more open gay communities, and some even included well-known “fairy” or “pansy” bars. In Europe, sexologists were beginning to study the phenomenon of the newly-named “homosexual,” and to publish their studies in reputable professional journals. When those reports made their way to the U.S., they were eagerly read by a population of lesbians and gay men who saw themselves as a distinct minority, an oppressed community that should not need to slink in the shadows—or to light out for the territory, or to go down to the sea in ships—in order to find others like themselves. For sexual minorities the country was slowly beginning to change.

Most of my essays in this collection were first published in the Gay & Lesbian Review, though in slightly different versions. They have here been expanded to reflect new research, and have been annotated with endnotes giving source material. I am grateful to Richard Schneider, the editor of the Gay & Lesbian Review, for allowing me to present my research in his journal over the last few years, and for agreeing now to publish this collection under the imprint of G&LR Books. For the most part in these essays I have avoided the use of queer theory or the imposition of any type of academic synthesis, in favor of an exploration of first-hand accounts available in primary sources. I have sought out the voices of eye-witnesses in an attempt to reconstruct what it was like in nineteenth century America to be a man who was attracted to other men. The selections cover the full range of time and geography, but are necessarily selective and episodic. My hope is that these essays might be a springboard to further research, and to the restoration of forgotten lives and of voices that have been silenced for too long.

¹Rothman, Ellen K., “Sex and Self-control: Middle-class Courtship in America, 1770-1870,” in The American Family in Social-historical Perspective, 3rd ed., edited by Michael Gordon (New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 398.

²Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “Sex as Symbol in Victorian Purity: an Ethnohistorical Analysis of Jacksonian America,” in American Journal of Sociology, vol. 84, Supplement (1978), p. S213.

³Kinsey, Alfred, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia : W.B. Saunders, 1948), p. 457.