Boston Marriages
Literary critic Siobhan Somerville combined late nineteenth-century legal, sexological, film, and literary texts to point out how the formation of the homosexual/heterosexual identity binary in the late nineteenth-century United States took place at the same time that distinctions and boundaries between black and white bodies were being established. However, Somerville’s elegant study cautions against oversimplifying linkages between race and sexuality through the language of analogy.
Since the late nineteenth century, sexological (the science of sexuality) work had been one of the most influential arbiters in categorizing, describing, and assigning value to sexual and gender deviance—as well as scrutinizing the normal. Religious pronouncements of “sin” and discourses engaging and describing sexual and gendered behavior as binary (homosexual/heterosexual; female/male) were increasingly joined and more than occasionally trumped by the emergence of parallel scientific and medical discourses addressing sexual and gender “deviance” and “normativity.”
Historian George Chauncey, in his pioneering book Gay New York (1994), identified the 1890s as one of the earliest periods when one very specific aspect of the emerging gay male community -- the subculture of flamboyantly effeminate “fairies” -- became noticed by a wider public. By 1890, The Slide, 157 Bleecker Street, was popularly identified as “New York’s ‘worst dive’” because of the fairies gathered there. A “slide,” in prostitutes’ jargon, was “an establishment where male homosexuals dressed as women and solicited men.” Fairies were often entertainers who joined wellpaying customers in their booths. The Slide was attacked by local newspapers. The conservative New York Press in 1890 called it “the wickedest place in New York.”
Murray H. Hall (1840-1901), a Tammany politico, who lived as a man for over 30 years, but after death was revealed to have been a woman, creating an international press furor and attracting the attention of pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis. A member of the Iroquois political club and the General Committee of Tammany, Hall played poker and pool with city and state officials and other political leaders and was often able to secure appointments for friends. According to the New York Times, they regarded Hall as a “‘man about town,’ a bon vivant, all-round ‘good fellow’… never exciting the remotest suspicion as to her real sex.”
Mary Grew and Margaret Burleigh were lifelong companions in nineteenth-century America. 19 Grew and Burleigh were “close companions” from the mid-1850s, and lived together until Burleigh’s death in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1891. In writing of their friendship, Grew characterized it as a “closer union than that of most marriages” while also describing her love for Burleigh as “spiritual” not “passionate” nor “sexual.”
Frances Willard, a white middle-class female activist and creator of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, agonized in her diaries about her love for Mary, her brother’s fiancée. She understood this love to be “abnormal” and reproached herself endlessly for the desires she felt toward her friend. From 1871 through 1874, she served as dean of the Women’s College at Northwestern University. She helped found the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874, and was president of the organization for nineteen years. Her home in Evanston served as an informal headquarters for the WCTU.
One observer of the time noted that in London, many youths were 'kept' handsomely in apartments by wealthy men, "and they are, of course, not always inaccessible to others. Many keep themselves in lodgings by this means, and others eke out scanty wages by the same device—just like women, in fact. Choirboys reinforce the ranks to a considerable extent, and private soldiers to a large extent. Some of the barracks (notably Knightsbridge) are great centres. On summer evenings Hyde Park and the neighbourhood of Albert Gate is full of Guardsmen and others plying a lively trade, and with little disguise—in uniform or out. In these cases it sometimes only amounts to a chat on a retired seat or a drink at a bar; sometimes recourse is had to a room in some known lodging-house, or to one or two hotels which lend themselves to this kind of business."
Among key women of the early United States, there are many stories of lasting relationships, of “Boston marriages,” and of lifelong bonds. Boston marriages were frequently used to describe relationships between women living together without the financial support of a man, during the 1800s and early 1900s. These “female friendships” were mostly ignored or tolerated through much of the nineteenth century as we have seen in the relationship between Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law, but in the second half of the century, the category of “lesbian” (then also called the female sexual invert) was formulated by the medical profession and then moved into popular discourse.
This changed how society viewed intimate relationships between women; they “took on an entirely different meaning…. They now had a set of concepts and questions (which were uncomfortable to many of them) by which they had to scrutinize feelings that would have been as natural and even admirable in earlier days.” In response, women could claim that their attachments to other women were not like “real lesbians”; they could repress their sexuality; they could live in the closet, leading a double life—lesbian in private and heterosexual in public; or she could accept the definitions of sexologists and define herself as a lesbian.
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