Heterosexual Histories. Группа авторов

on the Day of Judgment and by whom they hoped to be ravished in an everlasting ecstasy that they envisaged in literal and explicitly erotic terms. They were able to do so because they inhabited a world in which neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality existed as categories of identification. Early Americans had clear notions of what we now call sexuality and gender, along with strong opinions about what constituted appropriate and inappropriate behavior, but the ways in which they understood and evaluated love and desire were very different from and in some respects much more capacious than our own. This was not simply a question of using different vocabulary to describe universal emotions or drives: because their ideas and assumptions shaped how they processed internally their own feelings and those of others, their actual experience of sexual desire and love was different from ours.

Let me pause for a moment to unpack the last few sentences. Just over a quarter century ago, the scholar David Halperin pointed out in his now-classic essay entitled “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality” that the introduction of the words “homosexuality” and (shortly afterward) “heterosexuality” at the end of the nineteenth century marked “a major reconceptualization of the nature of human sexuality.” Previously, nineteenth-century medical experts had linked desire for members of the same sex to what they called “sexual inversion” (the adoption of feminine roles and traits by an anatomical man or of masculine traits and roles by an anatomical woman). But this new taxonomy shifted attention away from gender performance and focused entirely on the anatomical sex of those who were engaging in a sexual act: those who chose to have sex with persons of the same sex were homosexual, and those who chose instead members of the opposite sex were heterosexual, regardless of whether they seemed manly or effeminate. That paradigm of sexual orientation became the dominant framework used by twentieth-century Westerners to understand sexual attraction. Many people came to assume that this paradigm had a transhistorical validity, so that they could apply it to any cultural or historical setting. Yet Halperin argued that terms such as “homosexuality,” “heterosexuality,” and even “sexuality,” far from being “the basic building-blocks of human identity for all human beings in all times and places,” constitute “peculiar and indeed exceptional ways of conceptualizing as well as experiencing sexual desire” that would have made little sense to people living in the past (emphasis in original). Because people living before the late nineteenth century would not have described sexual desires and behavior using modern taxonomy, they would therefore have understood and even felt such desires differently. It follows that the assumptions embedded within words like “heterosexuality” present “a significant obstacle” to understanding sexual life in the past. Instead, we need to recover what Halperin called “the cultural poetics of desire,” that is, the formal ideas and informal assumptions that people drew on to classify and evaluate sexual desire and behavior, along with the ways in which contemporaries disseminated and enforced those ideas and assumptions.4

If we are to understand what we would characterize as gender and sexuality in the context of British America and the revolutionary period, we need to take seriously the profound implications of Halperin’s essay and recognize that “the cultural poetics of desire” during those periods looked and felt very different from anything we experience today. Colonists, in common with their contemporaries in early modern England and Europe, did not think about their sexual impulses in terms of a distinct sexuality that oriented men and women toward members of the same or opposite sex. Early Americans were taught to believe that all sex outside marriage—whether masturbation, casual fornication, premarital sex, adultery, or sodomy—was driven by innate moral corruption inherited from Adam and Eve; it expressed moral, not sexual, orientation. The most fundamental distinction that colonists made between licit and illicit sex depended on the marital status of those involved, not their biological sex. We know that there were men in British America who found themselves attracted to other men, and women who desired other women, yet the modern category of “homosexual” would have made little sense to them or their neighbors; they had their own conceptual frameworks through which to make sense of their urges and behavior.5

Early Americans understood erotic desires and acts as an expression of moral and social standing, not of intrinsic sexual identity. Consider the seventeenth-century Puritan New Englander who condemned any form of nonmarital sex as a “pollution” of the body that should be kept pure as a temple for the soul and who worried constantly about succumbing to “unclean” impulses; or the eighteenth-century southern planter who characterized sex as a demonstration of his cherished identity as a gentleman, referring to intercourse with his wife as a “flourish,” or courtly gesture, to extramarital sex as “promiscuous gallantry,” and to venereal infection as a “polite disorder.” The first individual categorized sexual acts as part of a larger moral and spiritual endeavor, the second in terms of social identity. Both gave meaning and value to sex using categories that were not themselves intrinsically sexual. Strictly speaking, men who practiced sodomy during this period did not engage in homosexual acts, any more than the planter who gave his wife “a flourish” was engaging in a heterosexual act.6

      In addition, and crucially, early Americans experienced love and sexual desire in the context of gender roles that adhered less rigidly to either men or women than in a modern Western setting. As we will see, women and men assumed both feminine and masculine roles, depending on the context in which they found themselves. The expectation that men could assume a female persona in certain circumstances and women a male persona reveals a culture of intricate possibilities, including the ways in which colonists enacted gendered authority. The use of spousal imagery to describe relations between savior and saved, for example, reinforced a gender-based hierarchy within the family. But Christ was much more than a masculine role model for men, who developed a range of social capacities by relating to him as brides as well as emulating him in the role of bridegroom, just as women performed the role of husband in the absence of male spouses and adopted masculine characteristics in a spiritual context that would astonish modern Christians.

Setting aside our own assumptions about sexuality is not easy. Consider the insistence by many otherwise astute and careful scholars that we should read expressions of love between male friends living in the past (such as John Winthrop and William Spring) as at least implicitly homoerotic. These scholars assume that expressions of loving devotion must necessarily imply a desire for sexual intimacy or, to put it another way, that people who are in love with each other must want to have sex. That many modern readers would make this assumption is perhaps not surprising: the paradigm of sexual orientation teaches us that romantic feelings generally go hand in hand with sexual attraction and that sexual orientation impels most of us sexually and romantically toward members of the same or opposite sex. That paradigm has established a firm and tenacious grip on our hearts, minds, and bodies.7 Yet early Americans did not automatically conjoin romantic love with erotic desire, as would become the case once the paradigm of sexual orientation took hold. Equally important, their conception of how gender worked enabled them to embrace combinations of love and desire that would later become problematic. This essay uses two particular categories of romantic and erotic relationship in early America to illustrate how necessary it is for us to set aside our most deeply felt assumptions if we are to understand past men’s and women’s experiences of sexual desire and love.

      ***

      Let us now visit briefly with another seventeenth-century New Englander in the happy grip of two symbiotic love affairs that defy, among other things, our persistent stereotypes of what it meant to be a Puritan. Edward Taylor, the young pastor at Westfield, Massachusetts, was about to be married. In September 1674, two months before his wedding to Elizabeth Fitch, Taylor sent his prospective wife a passionate love letter. “I know not how to use a fitter comparison to set out my love by,” he wrote, “than to compare it unto a golden ball of pure fire rolling up and down my breast, from which there flies, now and then a spark like a glorious beam from the body of the flaming sun.” Yet Elizabeth Fitch was not the only love on Edward Taylor’s mind, as the young man openly confessed. Love for a human spouse,