A Queer History of the United States

The author generally uses the word “homosexual” (as opposed to LGBTQ+) throughout the book, in part because that was the language used during the time periods he describes, and, for the most part, I have adopted that vocabulary.

The Preliminaries

• In 11th- and 12th-century Europe, physical changes (growth of cities, shift in hierarchical power distribution) led to social changes that stigmatized certain minorities (Jews, “sodomites,” prostitutes, etc.) and physically separated them from society – this became known as the persecuting society.
  • These social classifications supposedly stabilized society by containing “dangerous pollutants.”
  • Modern society is predicated on the creation of minority groups whose only purpose is to be vilified in the name of societal safety.
• Many people throughout US history, including presidents, believed in eugenics: a social-political theory that advocated the improvement of humans by deterring the reproduction of those people with less-than-desirable traits.
  • Eugenics produced a scientific model of “fitness” that limited homosexual lives in numerous ways. Their “unfitness” denied them full citizenship and rendered them medically inferior, legally unequal, and morally suspect.

Europeans in the Americas – 15th and 16th centuries

• Europeans came to the Americas with uncompromising views of gender and sexuality.
  • Military men, clergy, and explorers believed that indigenous people’s real and imagined sexual practices proved their “lower place,” which meant that European Christians had a religious duty to cure them.
  • European religious and social thought held that people who didn’t adhere to Christian concepts of sexual behavior or gender were less than human, which meant they could be deprived of individuality, liberty, and life.

The Puritans – 17th century

• In Elizabethan England, same-sex relationships were illegal, but the culture was accepting enough to allow public discussion of same-sex attraction.
  • Partially in response to this behavior, highly politicized and radical religious groups separated from the Church of England, such as Quakers and Puritans.
• When the Puritans established a religious society in America, they enacted strict legal sanctions against deviance from gender norms.
  • US sodomy laws punished all non-reproductive sexual activity because it didn’t contribute to the family, which was the unit on which society organized.

Slavery – 17th and 18th centuries

• The persecuting society persisted as slavery arose. Lawmakers constructed a separate class of nonwhite non-Christians to be an economic bulwark of cheap labor.
  • The biblical justifications for slavery, like the ones that prohibited same-sex sexual activity, reinforced strict laws and justified harsh punishments.
• Europeans accused Africans of sexual immorality, claiming they were dangerously hypersexual—this solidified white power.
  • For instance, slave owners depicted enslaved women as hypersexual to justify their right to rape these women.
  • The colonists “othered” Native Americans, too—Native American characters appear as eroticized demons and ghosts in European American literature.

The American man after the Revolutionary War – 18th and 19th centuries

• The new American man was defined by heroic actions in the colonial militia and was a prototype of the citizen. Slaves, Native Americans, free Africans, and white men without property could not join the militia—thus, a true citizen emulated a certain ideal.
  • This is, in part, why the US didn’t abolish sodomy laws. Highly gendered societies reinforce traditional ideas about gender by regulating sexual behavior.
• President Andrew Jackson advocated for the voting rights of all white men. He championed the common man and rejected “civilized” English behavior.
• In the West, because of harsh living conditions, the absence of strict legal policing, and relaxed demands of propriety, gender norms were very different.
  • For women, westward expansion meant a release from gender restrictions; they could run farms or ranches.

The Civil War – 19th century

• Defenders of slavery and abolitionists both quoted Bible verses for their arguments. 
  • The use of biblical texts to justify arguments continues today, including the justification for legal prohibitions against same-sex sexual behavior.
• During the Civil War, many women dressed as men so they could enlist, and some spent most of their lives passing as men.
  • There are many instances of women living together as partners and being socially accepted as a couple.
  • Never before were women, unattached to men, this independent or so prominently involved with other women.

Second Industrial Revolution – 19th and 20th centuries

• The Second Industrial Revolution required a large labor force: 10 million immigrants came to America to work in factories.
• Social purity groups sought to abolish activities that certain Christians considered immoral; they felt that society’s biggest problems—public violence, domestic abuse, and the abandonment of pregnant women—stemmed largely from alcoholism. These groups proliferated.
  • Social purity groups, predicated on social control, also had a tremendous effect on how America conceptualized and discussed sexuality.
  • The social purity movement was wedded to a model of racial purity that worshipped whiteness, linking nonwhite races to sexual impurity.
• Laws addressed “sexual psychopaths” (male homosexuals) and “purity,” such as the Comstock Act that banned from the US mail “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material, including some anatomy books.
• The most common theory of same-sex desire was that it was the result of physical, emotional, or psychological “inversion.” When a man desired a man, it was actually a woman, existing within the man’s body, who was desiring a man.
  • This metaphysical explanation, accepted as scientific, informed two popular stereoyptes: the mannish lesbian and the effeminate homosexual man.
  • People believed that sexual psychopaths would murder children.

Labor groups – 19th and 20th centuries

• Workers began seriously organizing to combat horrific factory and mine conditions. 
• This movement was less concerned about a woman’s proper place in society and was more concerned about gender issues in the workplace. 
• Labor groups’ advocacy for workers as a class of people who were treated unjustly, and not as individuals, profoundly influenced the gay-rights movement.

The stage & entertainment – early 20th century

• Public entertainment, including the stage, burlesque, vaudeville, movie theaters, etc., provided alternatives to traditional ideas about gender and sexuality.
• Until the 20th century, the heterosexual family unit had been viewed as the standard. 
  • But the movement of many single young women and men to live in cities made other life arrangements possible and prevalent.

WWII – mid-20th century

• There was a major shift in gender roles as men entered the armed forces; women were hired in previously male-dominated occupations. 
  • As such, many women experienced independence, economic security, and psychological satisfaction for the first time.
  • Military women in particular were granted a special social status, as they were viewed as strong, competent, and skilled professionals.
• Large-scale highly organized single-sex social arrangements were considered vital to national security.
  • The physically stressful conditions often led to emotional and sexual intimacy.
• By mid-1941 the US Selective Service screened homosexuals from joining the military.
  • This process focused on mental and emotional disorders—people with “homosexual proclivities” and “psychopathic personality disorders” were banned.
  • For the first time, there was a direct link between homosexuality and a threat to national security.
• The military issued Section 8 discharges for homosexuals—neither dishonorable nor honorable. 
  • This precluded them from accessing VA hospitals and GI Bill benefits (college tuition, occupational training, mortgage insurance, and loans).
  • After this discharge, many were committed to psychiatric units for examinations.
    • They were physically and sexually abused. In some places, they were placed in “queer stockades” until they could be processed.

The Kinsey Report – 1948

• Alfred Kinsey, a biologist, published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which changed how Americans discussed sexuality—it was a detailed, scientific study of American male sexual activity:
  • 37% of all males had some form of homosexual contact between their teen years and old age;
  • 50% of males who remained single until the age of 35 had overt homosexual experiences; and 
  • 4% of males were exclusively homosexual.
• This meant that there were homosexuals everywhere, even if people couldn’t see them. 
  • Clergy, conservatives, and traditional psychoanalysts attacked his findings.

The Vietnam War – 1960s and 70s

• The progressive politics of the late 1960s were predicated on the principle that a person had complete autonomy and control over his or her body.
• In 1969, the police conducted a routine raid on the Stonewall Inn (a gay bar—the police often raided gay bars). A crowd gathered and refused to leave.
  • The events at Stonewall were not riots but sustained altercations of resistance.
  • After this, many lobbied to repeal sodomy laws and pass statutes outlawing discrimination against gays, which was the beginning of a wave of activism.
• In 1972, the American Psychiatric Association voted to formally drop homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
• Anita Bryant (a minor celebrity) formed the Christian group Save Our Children. She said she had proof that gays recruited children to homosexuality.
  • Bryant’s success with an emboldened religious right ignited a series of conservative policies (including under the Reagan administration) that had longlasting negative effects on gay people.
  • Many of the culture wars since then—over sex education, arts funding, family law, and the federal response to the AIDS epidemic—stemmed from this conflict.

AIDS – 1980s

• In 1981, there were 121 US deaths from a “gay-related immune deficiency,” which scientists eventually named “acquired immune deficiency syndrome” (AIDS).
  • By 2007, AIDS claimed the lives of 2.1 million people worldwide.
• Because AIDS, a virus, was first detected in gay males and rapidly spread through that community, it became associated with gay men.
  • Now synonymous with a fatal illness, gay men were even more stigmatized.
  • Numerous laws discriminated against people with AIDS, including children, in insurance, employment, and housing.
• Because the government and media denied the situation’s seriousness at the outset, research and prevention education started too late, and allowed the virus to spread.
  • The Reagan administration did almost nothing in the early years of the epidemic, while over 20,000 Americans died of AIDS.
  • Televangelist Jerry Falwell said that “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals. It is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”
• The Catholic archdiocese and Cardinal John O’Conner exerted their political control on New York City and state policy relating to AIDS and safe-sex education.
  • They lobbied heavily and spent significant amounts of money to stop needle exchange programs (which were effective in preventing HIV transmission in drug users) and declared, falsely, that condoms don’t prevent HIV transmission.

Present

• The rise of new lesbian and gay families has created a new field of family law and adoption law.
• Young people come out earlier and find support in their home and schools.
• Culturally, there have been far more gains than losses, which is something to celebrate.

• Over a hundred examples of same-sex attraction in literary texts, music, plays, and journals throughout US history
• The effect of the Red Scare on the gay population
• The complicated intersection between the feminist movement and suffrage, labor, and gay-rights groups
• The Enlightenment’s (rejection of the acceptance of ideas without evidence) effect on America and gay rights
• Transcendentalism’s (embracing the natural sciences) powerful influence on the gay community, including Ralph Waldo Emerson’s re-imagining of the American man
• How consumerism, marketing, and the invention of the automobile expanded and constrained gay rights