18 A Queer History of the United States
Early colonial life in the northern continent was a mass of con- tradictions. It was extraordinarily intolerant, yet often surprisingly lax. The European settlers’ relations to the native peoples ranged from murderous genocide to a complex series of eroticized relation- ships. While Europeans brought with them a persecuting society, the manifestations of that society took many forms. One of the
lasting legacies of colonial social and .legal culture was the appli- cation of laws prohibiting and punishing sexual activity between people of the same sex. Treating some sexual behaviors differently because potentially they had less impact on the community had a twin effect on future American culture. It gave rise to the social (and eventual legal) concept of “consenting adults” and to a domestic-
based idea of privacy that offered protections to some people at certain points in history.
This concept of privacy, however, had another, damaging, im- pact on future social convention and law. By assigning sexuality to a private sphere, it prevented any public acknowledgment or dis- cussion of almost all sexual activity. Thus it laid the groundwork
for same-sex sexual behaviors and identities to be hidden and even considered shameful. While the Puritans rejected what they saw as sexual license or overt licentiousness in British culture, they fully ac- cepted the role of sexuality and sexual desire in everyday life. This sharp divide-not exactly a contradiction, although it may have ap- peared so later, as sexual mores in American culture became more
lenient-has remained a basic tenet of America’s cultural life. The tension between the needs and demands of society and the decisions of an individual to live her or his life as part of, yet separate from, the community informed the four centuries that followed Europeans arriving in this foreign land.
TWO
SEXUALLY AMBIGUOUS REVOLUTIONS
The transition from the colonial period to the Revolutionary era,
during which a daring political experiment took root, led to the emergence of a new nation. Fundamental to this new nation was
the reshaping of ideas about gender and sexual behavior as they re- lated to the political concept of the citizen.
The period from the Pilgrims’ landing to the early eighteenth
century was a time of enormous population growth. In 1700 the Anglo-European population in the Northeast was 250,000. By 1720 that number had almost doubled to 475,000. This surge in popula- tion was accompanied by the rapid growth of cities-by 1725 the population of Boston was over 12,000, nearly doubled from 6,700 in 1700; Philadelphia was home to rn,ooo people. New York, al- though growing rapidly, had just 7,000 residents (by 1800 it would have 60,000). In 1760, colonists numbered I.5 million-six times the population at the turn of the century.
This expansion of colonies and people meant that the influence of Puritanism was waning. Many of the newer colonies were founded on non-Puritan beliefs.
In 1682 Charles II granted wealthy English Quaker William Penn a large tract of land west of what is now New Jersey. Penn nallled it Sylvania for its densely wooded terrain, and then renamed it Penn- sylvania after his father. (Like many of the colonies, Pennsylvania was a commercial venture that was intended to turn a profit for its investors, in this case through the trading of furs and lumber.)
19
Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011)
20 A Queer History of the United States
Penn’s charter for the new colony reflected his progressive Quaker views. There was freedom of religion for all who believed in God, and a constitution that called for two “houses” of government and that allowed, in the spirit of a Quaker “open discourse.” Most important, Penn treated the native peoples of the area- primarily the Lenni Lenape, called the Delaware tribe by the An- glo settlers-with respect, buying land from them rather than at- tacking and taking it. Pennsylvania grew quickly as Quakers from all over Europe settled there, joined by Catholics, Amish, Menno- nites, and Jews. Penn designed Philadelphia-the city of brotherly love, denoting many faiths-between 1682 and 1684. Within fifty years it was the second largest urban area in the colonies. Progres- sive Quaker views on religious freedom and abolition-and later, sexual freedom-would be a strong influence on American political thought.
This rapid growth and diversity meant that the social and reli- gious cohesiveness of the early colonies was lost; the Puritans’ strict social demands on the individual were waning and being questioned.
The infamous Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693, in which twenty people were executed and :five more died in prison, were a grim man- ifestation of the excesses of the Puritan imagination. However, the Massachusetts General Court issued a public apology for the trials five years later and eventually granted monetary compensation to the families of those executed. The 1682 Pennsylvania sodomy law did away with the death penalty for sodomy and replaced it with a whipping, six months of hard labor, and the forfeiture of a third of the accused’s estate. (Thirty-two years later Pennsylvania made sodomy a capital crime again, reflecting changing demographics and belief systems.)
The growing assemblage of people, social structures, and politi- cal entities fostered a sense of pluralism unique to the colonies. But this pluralism did not reconcile the tension between the freedom of the individual and the need for a strong state formally embodied by the personal moral rectitude of the Puritans.
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 21
SLAVES AND CITIZENS
Despite the progressive inclination of some colonies, the persecuting society persisted. Colonists continued their sexualized treatment of native people, sodomy laws proliferated, and the legal, economic, and cultural institution of slavery was introduced into the colonies. It is impossible to understand American history-including the posi- tion of LGBT people-without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country. From the mid-seventeenth century, organized, profit-driven slavery influenced all aspects of American life. Slavery struck at the heart of the ideals of individualism, personal liberty, and equality that were present, in sophisticated and rudimentary forms, at the birth of the colonies. Slavery was integral to how the colonies, and later the Republic, continued to reconceptualize individual freedom, race, property, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, over Af- ricans were brought to North America as slaves. However, this is a relatively small number compared to the twelve million Africans who were transported and sold, mostly in the Caribbean and South America, in the mid-Atlantic slave trade, also referred to as the first Middle Passage.
Slavery arose in the colonies hand in hand with both European and African indentured servitude, which was commonplace. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more than half o