Early Queer History
Queer history is difficult to trace before the late nineteenth century, both because evidence is scarce and because the shifting meanings, forms, and interrelations of gender, same-sex desire, and homosexual acts over a longer period make the task increasingly complex.
It is often in the correspondence between women and between men that LGBTQ history is found. Historian of sexuality and biographer Martin Duberman writes of the exchanges between James Henry Hammond (Jim) and his friend Thomas Jefferson Withers (Jeff) in the early nineteenth-century United States.
The letters describing James Henry Hammond’s relationship with Thomas Jefferson Withers were written in 1826, just after Hammond left law school. He married the wealthy Catherine Elizabeth Fitzsimmons when she was seventeen years old, and entered the planter class, eventually amassing several plantation houses and more than three hundred enslaved persons. An attorney and outspoken supporter of slavery, Hammond served as a member of the US House of Representatives from 1835 to 1836, the Governor of South Carolina from 1842 to 1844, and as a US senator from 1857 to 1860.
These erotically charged and at moments explicitly sexual letters between these two “respectable” elite white southerners seem to suggest that same-sex sexual relationships might have been, if not common, at least somewhat unremarkable for some during this period. Here again, it might not be the lack of evidence of an LGBTQ presence that explains a general absence from the historical record but rather scholars’ concealment of that evidence and unwillingness to interrogate the possibilities of alternative or nonnormative sexualities and gender expressions in their interpretations of this history.
The oft-used theoretical concept, “romantic friendship” offers a somewhat ill-fitting category to frame women’s same-sex intimacies in seventeenth through early twentieth-century America. Some scholars have used this term to describe intimate relationships between women characterized by declarations of love for one another expressed in poetry and passionate letters replete with references to kissing, cuddling, and sharing a bed.
Some historians have defined these relationships, especially during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the United States, as marking almost a lesbian “golden age.” According to this perspective, during this period women’s abiding affection for other women, especially in the emerging bourgeoisie, was not perceived as threatening to either heterosexual marriage or dominant standards of sexual morality.
In fact, by the eighteenth century, the cultural norm of intense female friendships among white native-born women of the middle and upper classes was well established in the United States and rested on the white, middle-class assumptions that women were by nature virtuous and predominantly asexual.
Thus, the acceptability of these relationships resided in their ostensibly nonsexual nature. Women in these relationships characterized their feelings for one another as “love,” yet did not proclaim, and often disclaimed any erotic attachment. There are numerous examples of romantic friendships that conform to this platonic model, while others suggest relationships of a more explicitly sexual nature.
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