Colonial Gender Non-Conformity
Same-sex love and gender nonconformity have been present throughout US history and during pre-European contact and colonial times. But how those have been defined and documented has shifted considerably in recent decades, causing modern-day historians to struggle with labeling people who mostly shunned such labels, or who had different or more secret ways to define themselves. Unlike Native peoples, whose colonial-era identities and relationships are understand largely based on the descriptions left by European explorers and colonists, the identity and culture of white colonists have been to a large degree understood through their own written words.
Traces of homosexual practices, sometimes on a large scale, have been found among all the great divisions of the human race. On the whole, however, unnatural intercourse (sodomy) had been regarded as an anti-social offence, and punishable sometimes by the most serious penalties that could be invented. This was the case in ancient Mexico, in Peru, among the Persians, in China, among the Hebrews and the Mohammedans.
The homosexual tendency appears to have flourished chiefly among warriors and warlike peoples. During war it flourished, for instance, among the Carthaginians and among the Normans, as well as among the warlike Dorians, Scythians, Tartars and Kelts; and when there has been an absence of any strong moral feeling against it, the instinct was cultivated and idealised as a military virtue, partly because it counteracted the longing for the softening feminine influences of the home, and partly because it seemed to have an inspiring influence in promoting heroism and heightening esprit de corps.
In the lament of David over Jonathan was a picture of intimate friendship— "passing the love of women"—between comrades in arms among a barbarous, warlike race. There is nothing to show that such a relationship was sexual, but among warriors in New Caledonia friendships that were undoubtedly homosexual were recognised and regulated; the fraternity of arms, complicated with paederasty, was more sacred than uterine fraternity.
But the most important and the most thoroughly known case is that of Greece during its period of highest military as well as ethical and intellectual vigor. In this case, the homosexual tendency was sometimes regarded as having beneficial results which caused it to be condoned, if not, indeed, fostered as a virtue.
Homosexuality seems to have flourished in Rome during the Empire, and is well exemplified in the persons of many of the Emperors.1 Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Commodus, and Heliogabalus — many of them men of great ability and, from a Roman standpoint, great moral worth — were all charged, on more or less solid evidence, with homosexual practices. In Julius Caesar — "the husband of all women and the wife of all men" — excess of sexual activity seems to have accompanied, as is sometimes seen, an excess of intellectual activity.
The great tome of Sanchez, De Matrimonio, covered the whole sexual life of men and women, analysed in its relationships to sin. Everything was set forth, as clearly and as concisely as it can be—without morbid prudery on the one hand, or morbid sentimentality on the other — in the coldest scientific language; the right course of action is pointed out for all the cases that may occur, and are told what is lawful, what a venial sin, what a mortal sin.
An ignorant informer brought certain charges of freethought and criminality against Thomas Marlowe, and further accused him of asserting that they are fools who love not boys. These charges had doubtless been coloured by the vulgar channel through which they passed, but it seemed absolutely impossible to regard them as the inventions of a mere gallows-bird such as this informer was.
Shakespeare has also been discussed from this point of view. All that can be said, however, is that he addressed a long series of sonnets to a youthful male friend. These sonnets are written in lover's language of a very tender and noble order. They do not appear to imply any relationship that the writer regarded as shameful or that would be so regarded by the world. Moreover, they seem to represent but a single episode in the life of a very sensitive, many-sided nature.
The captain of an English man-of-war said that he was always glad to send his men on shore after a long cruise at sea, never feeling sure how far they might not all go if left without women for a certain space of time.
Shifting gender presentation, at one time at least ostensibly to enter military service, was an example of a larger historical pattern of people who crossed genders during times of war. Deborah Sampson was one such soldier who served in the Continental army during the American Revolution.
Sampson served seventeen months in the Continental army as Robert Shurtleff and served with the Light Infantry Company of the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment. Wounded in the leg in 1782 at a skirmish near Tarrytown, New York, she left the hospital before her wounds could be treated to avoid detection and removed a musket ball from her own leg using a penknife. Her leg healed poorly, and she was reassigned to serve as a waiter to General John Paterson. Though her identity as a woman was found out in the summer of 1783 after she got ill in Philadelphia, General Paterson did not reprimand her. She was honorably discharged at West Point, New York in October 1783.
Early nationalists celebrated Sampson's gender-nonconforming exploits as epitomizing the patriotic fervor of the colonists in their war against England. Although Sampson married a man after leaving military service, her subsequent apology for her “masquerade,” and assurances to public audiences that she had not engaged in any sexual transgressions with women or men during her cross-dressing years, suggests the presumption that sexual deviance would accompany her actions.
Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (1730–1794) stands out as one of the more documented examples of a homosexual in charge. He was a major general in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and he is widely viewed as a key tactician who led to the success of the war. Arriving at Valley Forge early in 1778, he imposed order both on the camp and on the soldiers, drilling them in fighting together as a unit. He was also General George Washington’s chief of staff near the end of the war. And under today’s definitions, von Steuben would be considered homosexual because he had documentable relationships with men including his aides, Captains Benjamin Walker and William North; he left his estate to both men.
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