U.S. Lesbian And Gay History Notes

  MIDTERM GROUP STUDY GUIDE – LECTURES  U.S. LESBIAN AND GAY HISTORY  GEORGE CHAUNCEY   LECTURE 1: INTRODUCTION    Email Chauncey directly to set up lunch   Course logistics  Ethnography (2-3 pages) – Sept 8  Section participation (up/down a notch)  Two 5-6 page papers (20% each) o 2 options: analyze primary docs o 1 option: oral histories with parents/grandparents  Midterm (20%) – Oct 9 o IDS  Final (40%) – Dec 18 Homosexuality and heterosexuality intertwined   (1) Construction of sexuality: heterosexuality, homosexuality  Examples of Yalies (John Sterling, etc) who have documented sleeping with other members of the same sex  Homosexuality did not govern intimacies  Shift in photos of Yale sports teams; hands over each other in 1902, keeping hands to themselves in 1968 Victorian era of sexual repression  1968, height of sexual revolution  Changes in sexual culture more complex  Creation of new regulatory regimes governing intimacy; restricted behavior, governed behavior of homosexual couples  Marriage used as a regulatory apparatus  Rise of immigration brought new sexual mores to the U.S.  More info on white gay people than in other groups; very small research   20th Century Gay Anthems  Prove it On Me Blues  My Buddy  Over the Rainbow  I Was Born This Way, etc…    Explore how pop songs, etc dominated by Hollywood shaped Queer subjectivity Marlene Dietrich became a lesbian icon after appearing in Morocco, 1930.  Insisted on a right to life not defined by her relationship to men  In Morocco, Dietrich chooses her partners. Rebuffs man and moves to woman and kisses her, Dismisses man by showing him a flower. Initially is booed because of her tuxedo, but wins them over with her power 2        Inhabits power, authority and privilege normally reserved for men Many lesbians at the time thought their only way to assert their autonomy was to assert their masculinity Also became an icon for gay men, who thought the only way they could assert their sexuality was by asserting a kind of femininity. Designed to signify their femininity Gender nonconformity and transgenderism Changes in gay and lesbian self-presentation  Hypermasculine look of the 1970s  (2) Politics of Homosexuality Image of “pansy club” in Call Her Savage After prohibition in 1933, bars were banned from serving gay men or allowing them to meet on their premises  Gay people had to hide their identities even more carefully when they went into public. Made it less likely that they would openly socialize  Sent a powerful message that gay people were a despised class of people  Inadvertently fostered the growth of secretive all-gay meeting places, esp bars, which came to play a huge role in gay culture bc it was the only place people could feel secure and be openly gay   It’s not a linear story of liberalization  Early 20th century more tolerant/open to gay people than the 60s  1920s and 30s: new laws passed in many states that classified and discriminated against people on the basis of their identity and status as gay o Hooking up with someone in a public bar became illegal.  Bars prohibited from serving gay and lesbian men, Hollywood prohibited films of gay culture, in WWII the military banned gay soldiers, in the 1950s: banned gays in civilian industries  Still, anti-gay hostility predated these laws   Why did anti-gay hostility arise in the mid-20th century? Not a new trend, anti-gay history has a history   Opponents of fascism painted fascism as distinctly homosexual   McCarthy denounced homosexuals and Communists in government; state department actually fired more homosexuals than Communists   Gay liberation of 60s and 70s tied to cultural and political development   (3) Gay culture, consciousness and the social organization of LGBT life   YMCA hotels, established to help migrants, became centers where gay people would come to meet other gay people  Developed gay code, which only gays knew about in the 1930s. Even term “gay” was code LECTURE 2: THE COLONY OF NEW HAVEN Why did the colony of New Haven execute two men for sodomy?  William Plaine, 1646 3 Plaine was accused of engaging in sodomy back in England, and was accused of masturbating “100 times” and corrupting the youth of Guilford. o Had a wife o Executed for blasphemy as well as sodomy – questioned whether there was a God John Knight, 1655 o John Knight was accused of trying to engage in sodomy with a servant boy. o Also tried to rape a young girl Biblical law Lust fosters disobedience Everyone a sinner Unnatural lust The covenant with God o  1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Why were only two men executed for sodomy in all of colonial New England?  Nicholas Sension (Windsor, CT, 1640-77) Why did sodomy not equal homosexuality?  If the colonists found sodomy so abhorrent, why were these the only two people executed in all of colonial New England?  Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) upheld the right of Georgia to criminalize homosexual conduct. But the law in fact criminalized oral or anal sex between any two people. The Puritan colonization of New England  Plymouth, 1620 – left England because they felt Christianity was not being practiced properly (“fanatics”)  Massachusetts Bay, 1629  New Haven, 1638 o William Plaine executed, 1646 o Yale founded, 1701 New Haven was the strictest Puritan colony in New England  Felt that Massachusetts had become too lax in its morals. o So theocratic that it prohibited other churches from being established here o New Haven was the only colony where the clergy formed the jury—not peers. o Only an extreme version of the puritan tendencies that governed colonies across New England. Why punish sodomy? 1. Puritans’ understanding of Biblical law a. Leviticus 20:13: “If any man lyeth with mankind, as he lyeth with a woman, both of them have committed abomination; they both shall surely be put to death.” b. Genesis 19: God’s destruction of Sodom i. Israelite tradition has always ascribed the destruction of Sodom to their wickedness and mistreatment of visitors. Some believe this involved sexual humiliation (but only some), others their disregard for the poor, and others, their general disregard for morality. ii. Ezekiel 16:49: “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness.” iii. Thomas Aquinas, 13th century theologian, used sodomy to refer to any sexual conduct used to produce orgasm other than penile-vaginal intercourse in approved positions. iv. Secularization of the offense, 1533: The English Reformation Parliament recasts sodomy as “the detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast.” (Not two women! Anal between men and women, men and men, or anything between human and animal) v. The Puritan New England colonies enacted both more laws and more precise laws about sexual behavior, drawing on biblical injunctions. vi. New Haven also criminalized homosexual conduct between women and anal sex of any kind (punishable by death). 4 2. 3. 4. 5. Lust or “wild sex” fostered disobedience and disorder, reducing humans to beasts a. They believed it could undermine peoples’ obedience to God. b. Drunkenness and personal ambition also did this—and were also regarded as lustful. i. Disciplining one’s passions crucial in Puritan society Significantly, they believed that we all had to worry about such temptations because we were all sinners. a. Susceptibility to one temptation over another was not attributed to sexuality; rather, they all had their origin in the fall of man, and were present in all people (even the gay sins!). b. This is a sharp contrast to our own views today, which are relegated to a small minority of people: “homosexuals.” i. The Puritans did not have any such categories. Anyone was a sinner, and anyone could harbor such corrupt feelings. c. As David Halperin argues, the idea that homosexuals and heterosexuals are distinct kinds of people with different preferences is a modern idea; it depended on the emergence of sexuality as a domain of personhood in the 19th century. It is utterly alien to the puritan view of sodomy. d. “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” – Michael Focault, History of Sexuality Unnatural “going after strange flesh” / bestiality a. Fornication vs. “going after strange flesh” b. Why were sodomy and bestiality considered unnatural? Because they crossed the boundaries established between the sexes and the species by God. Policing these boundaries was especially important far from the civilizing impulses of European society (in the colonies!) when people lived in close quarters with animals and with each other. c. In Sweden, sodomy was far overshadowed by bestiality during the same time. 600-700 boys and men were executed for having sex with animals (they also executed the cows). Boys weren’t even allowed into the barns with the cows because they might be overcome with lust. d. In Puritan New England, 6 people were executed for bestiality—three in New Haven. The Puritan covenant with God a. They believed they had a special covenant with God and with one another. They routinely compared Sodom with England—and they were abandoning it for the same reasons. They were creating a new beacon of hope for the world. Sense of sodomy shaped Puritan mission. b. They had to protect their community from the wrath of God and the ridicule of humankind (the cynics wanted them to fail). Why were only two men executed for sodomy in all of colonial New England?  How do we account for the discrepancy between puritan law and ideology and actual practice? o The legal requirements for evidence made it almost impossible to convict someone for sodomy: two witnesses who could claim to have seen penetration. o More important: Ordinary people were less concerned and more forgiving (and this only became more and more so).  Ignored as long as possible.  Using informal community pressure to stop people.  Treating them more leniently than death. The Case of Nicholas Sension  People knew all about his advances toward other men. It was documented for years, and yet no one ever did anything about it. Many believed that he had a long-term relationship with Nathaniel Pond, his indentured servant.  In 1677 he was finally brought to trial, 30 years after his arrival in Windsor (CT). o It became clear that the neighbors tolerated his behavior for 30 years. o When Pond died in 1675 and Sension made advances on his neighbor’s sons the community finally took action. What lessons can we learn from this?  Many people don’t regard sodomy with the same horror as the clergy. o It was difficult to connect the everyday sodomy they saw around them with the stories belted from the pulpit. 5 They were willing to grant a degree of freedom to men with authority and power. (So long as Sension’s actions took place with his servant, no one really cared. He only became a problem when he approached other acceptable men). They also had a more nuanced view of human nature than their clergy. They agreed that everyone was susceptible to these temptations, but they also believed that Sension also had a propensity for it. Sension’s reputation does not = “homosexual.” There’s no indication that his inclination for pursuing sex with other men gave him a distinct standing in the community, or a distinct kind of person (a “homosexual”). o    Stephen Groton (New London, CT): a Baptist minister.  His sexual behavior with other men had likewise been widely known.  No one ever did anything about it until it reached an unmanageable level after many years; so they briefly suspended him from the pulpit.  But he remained a popular minister. He was a sinner, like everyone else, but once he had overcome it, he was to be welcomed back. What we can learn from the Puritan conception of sodomy: 1. Alterity of the past. It was very different from the present. a. The categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality simply did not exist. b. Sexual lust was simply one of many lusts that could lead people astray. 2. The Sension case reminds us that no society is monolithic in its views. 3. Sexual behavior is usually not just seen as an individual matter; as a question of personal choice or morality; but is vested with a much greater political significance. (We will see this over and over again in this course) 4. The religious view that homosexual conduct is a form of sinful behavior that can tempt anyone has hardly disappeared from our society. The homosexual did not replace the sodomite (as Aquinas said). LECTURE 3: LOVE, FRIENDSHIP, BEDSHARING: ABRAHAM LINCOLN & HIS CONTEMPORARIES Abraham Lincoln circa 1837  Slept with another man, Joshua Speed, for three years  Both men got married later on o Wrote each other letters about their feelings o Lincoln grew depressed o Relationship sundered by their marriages  Not homosexual, but not exactly heterosexual o Labels could not grasp the complexity of Lincoln’s relationships in his time o Need to understand the relationship in its own terms o Product of history, not nature  No model or concept of homosexuality in their day? o This assumes that there was a model of heterosexuality  Hetero and homo are a binary; one needs to have the other o Cannot call him homo any more than we can call him hetero  Men and women were treated as polar opposites in the 19th century more than today  Gender differentiation, inequality, segregation  People were closer to the same sex than the other  Some people were more passionate about the same sex than others 6  Bed sharing o Very common in that day o Little beds, space o Cold; depended on each others’ body heat to stay warm o Adults shared beds before marriage o Bed sharing was “normal”  There was a degree of physical intimacy between men that is not seen today o Men chose their bed companions Edward Sheffield, Yale 1859  Chose to sleep with three close friends during the winter  Asher Wilcox  Didn’t share a bed out of necessity  Made plans to spend the night together, after doing things with other people  Sharing a bed was a sign of how close two friends were o Test of friendship; asking and consenting o Confirmed how deep attachment was and increased physical and emotional intimacy between them o Fundamental aspect of male friendship  Defensive; men wanted a soulmate through the challenging Yale culture  Lots of men who remained unmarried; it was nice to have an anchor Albert Dodd, Yale 1839  Mainstream of Yale student life, but “loved” a couple male friends o What was the character of their love? o Struggled to find a language to capture and express their complex and fervent feelings for the same sex; not just friendship o “romantic friendship” o never asks “does this mean I’m gay?” but there was a rich set of terms for expressing these feelings Religious faith  Provided an important framework for understanding these feelings  Allowed powerful connections for people of the same sex  Many people rejected Calvinist ideas; people were inherently good not bad  Sheffield worried that Asher didn’t have a close enough relationship to Christ  Erotic love vs. carnal lust o Agape/Christian Love o Dodd’s love of Anthony vs. lust that characterized sodomites o Not all forms of physical contact between men are good o Moral man vs. sodomite/immoral man  Line not always clear What were the boundaries of their physical intimacy?  Varied between men; there was a range  “playful”  shared pillows  sometimes crossed lines, Dodd’s diary has pages torn  some men were happy to go further than Dodd  “poking and prodding each other with their flesh and poles” Photography  Developed in 1840  Used to record special relationships  Intimate poses, comfortable with one another 7  Yale sports teams these photos were also common in the elite o General comfort with physical intimacies o Some men were more intimate than others (hand on knee) Women  Vassar women had passionate friendships with others  “smashing” on women’s college campuses o bouquet sendings, tender notes, tokens of affection  did men worry and wonder about these relationships?  These kinds of friendships were quite common, even though many would come to marry  Not lesbians, but not heterosexual  Occupied their own sexual universe different than our own o Changed by the rise of the concept of homo and hetero LECTURE 4: RADCLYFFE HALL AND TURN-OF-THECENTURY SEXUAL SCIENCE 1. 2. 3. 4. Mid-19th century: Frances Willard & Romantic Friendship a. Frances and others turn to language of kinship to describe their attraction to women Late 19th century: M. Carey Thomas, the New Woman, & Boston Marriages a. M. Carey Thomas (1857-1935): “If only one could elect to spend one’s life with a woman instead of a man.” Ends up doing so. Lives with one woman for 10 years while president of Bryn Mawr College b. “The New Woman”: got education, became independent, fought for right to vote. Women’s colleges founded in 1860’s-1880’s. Most colleges wouldn’t hire women as professors, so many became highly ambitious social workers. Education => higher ambitions colliding with men’s reluctance to give up their turf. Women organized settlement houses for other women, suffrage movement, temperance movements (Frances Willard was president of Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 1879-1898) c. Boston marriages: Most New Women realized they couldn’t get married and have a meaningful professional life, so many chose to live with women instead. There were so many of these pairs in Boston that they became known as “Boston Marriages”. 1893 Susan B. Anthony speech “The Lives of Single Women” discusses the fact that many professional women lived with a special friend who took care of domestic stuff. No hint of sensuality. Early 20th century: the 2nd generation of New Women; mannish women & lesbians a. 2nd Generation of New Women: rebelled against convention by cutting hair short, smoking, wearing boys’ clothes. Wearing trousers was socially acceptable, but barely: Greta Garbo wore stylish trousers, and Marlene Dietrich’s tuxedo in “Morocco” was fine. But the 2nd Generation of New Women crossed boundaries by dressing just like men. b. “dykes” = women who dressed as men for an evening out. Bull Daggers, Third Sexers, Trans a. Bull Dagger Women: black women asserting mannish interest in women & wearing men’s clothes. (early 20th century.) b. Gladys Bentley: one of many lesbian or bisexual African-American blues singers. She performed in a tuxedo and married her white girlfriend in a widely publicized ceremony. c. “Third sex theory”: at the time, people took it for granted that there were unbridgeable differences between the genders. Fairies and mannish women—“inverts”—were the most visible queer people and provided a model for others. These were supposed to be members of a “third sex” because they were neither men or women. 8 d. 5. 6. Transgender: Erotic desire for women was seen as a male prerogative, so lesbians adopted male clothing to make sense of their identity (fashioning themselves in relation to the dominant culture). So many mannish lesbians would not now be considered to be transgender men. Radclyffe Hall and Eleanor Roosevelt a. Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943): moved away from home, dated and lived with many feminine women (most famously Una, or Lady Troubridge). Wrote The Well of Loneliness and fought for it in court when it almost wasn’t allowed to be published. Widely read by lesbians ever since. Big question: Is it a lesbian novel, or a novel about transsexuality before surgery? b. (There were always competing ideas about sexuality. Not all lesbians identified with the mannish lesbians c. Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962): had affairs with women, including Lorena Hickock. Roosevelt and Hickock were both feminine, and treated it as a romantic friendship. Richard von Krafft-Ebing & Sexual Science a. Sexual Science: This was the heyday of scientific racism and the theory that women could be proved to be biologically destined for home tasks, but sexual science may have been better than the alternatives. Alternatives: Religion: homosexuality is a sin. The Law: homosexuality is a crime. Science: homoseuality is a biological anomaly. b. Krafft-Ebing: wrote Psychopathia Sexualis. Based his theories on the inverts who came to him. Went from a harsh to a sympathetic attitude. c. Doctors argued that odd sexual desires were connected to a host of other “psychic abnormality”. Stigmatized lesbians and argued that all women professionals and those working for suffrage must also be inverts. They were biological anomalies: an odd force within them led them to invade the men’s sphere. (Women started carrying babies with them in suffrage parades to prove their normalcy) Lecture wrap-up: many saw mannish women as a symbol of freedom; and at this time, everyone, including heterosexuals, had to define themselves in terms of inverts. LECTURE 5: NEW DISCOURSES OF (MALE) DESIRE 1. Early networks of gay intellectuals  These gay intellectuals were mostly men, and they fiercely resisted third sex ideology  Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) – author of Well of Loneliness (more popular in the UK during this time)  developed theories, cultural strategies to defend and validate themselves, imagined selves as part of community who shared similar desires Five points about them: 1.) Trans-atlantic and global community (began in Germany, France, Britain)  Traveled across seas to travel and meet with each other  Walt Whitman’s book—Whitman met and interacted with many gays  Andre Gide (1894)- Algeria  1920s, Magnus Hirschfeld, traveled across globe to meet other homosexuals and create organizations to foster support and community 2.) Focus on writers, their writings give us access to intellectual trends of the time and culture where people were forging new identities  They don’t stand outside of culture, they’re shaped by it  Writing served as an intervention and they shaped the gay culture  books widely circulated for those seeking a new language and to validate themselves 3.) The term “gay” constituted the first generation of activists and writers BROADLY two things: 9 4.) Queers as Gender-bending: Sexual inverts (who inverted their gender), creating an intermediate or third sex  “an invert had a woman’s soul, and a man’s body” 5.) Many men rejected belief that homosexuality was the loss of masculine self and identity, while others didn’t feel themselves as being gender bearing  Today’s male intellectuals are of a masculine character, but also gender-normative, and some are even portrayed as more manly men 2. Greek love, or the love of youth a. John Addington Symonds (1840-1893)  Read classics, born into upper class Victorian society, aware of interest in other boys, enamored by Greek statuary in father’s study  1858- he began reading Greek classics, stunned to discover that the love of one man to another was a constant theme  He read that Plato discovered love as the primary forces motivating learning, philosophical exchange and statecraft  He was amazed by how taken for granted love was, and his own hostility in his own time was not surprising  Ancient Greeks were considered the apogee of Western civilization -Zeus seizing Ganymede -1532- Rape of Ganymede, Correggio, c. 1532 -Albert Dodd wrote poem about Ganymede  Edward Sheffield wrote about Apollo (considered the god for male homosexuals) like biblical David and Jonathan, Damian and Pithius  Addington wrote about the Roman poets, Catullus and Martial, in which they wrote, “why should a man marry a woman when he could enjoy a man instead?”  Addington= first person to translate Michelangelo’s sonnets -Wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics (1873) -Wrote A Problem in Modern Ethics (1893)  Argued it was a highly masculine form of love that bound one soldier to another and urged them to greater sacrifice  Found near Jerusalem, men have power to penetrate whomever is subordinate (cray cray) -Instruction in gym, distinctly hierarchical love between men and teenagers -Historically, people have expected sex to be of moral domination, Greeks felt they had more in common with teenage men than wives (women were of a subordinate class)  Greeks were ambivalent about character of their love -Effeminate love led to social decline, and they found hierarchy and inequality troubling -Contrasts with Hellenistic hierarchical love  White landowners and black slaves; sex a more precious demand in 19th C., more pressure from women to raise age of consent, and only in last generation was rape in marriage a possibility -Sex= not outside of power, it’s “a forepoint to power, produces inequalities of power…”Foucault -We expect sex to be equal now in this generation Sappho from island of Lesbos, love considered Sapphic Denied university educations until women’s colleges in 18th C.   3. b. Anne Lister (1791-1840)  Diaries expressed love of women  Pursued series of women, hired private tutor and read classical texts about men through women’s eyes  Some books acknowledged women’s same-sex love, although condemning it  Everyone read the Greeks and Romans (lingua franca) The manly love of comrades a. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) 10