A Queer History of the United States (12 page)

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,

They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,

They do not think whom they souse with spray.
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Boston-based photographer F. Holland Day, considered by art historians to be one of the founders of American photography, also worked with the male nude at this time. Day’s publishing company, Copeland and Day, printed works by the English Decadents, including works by same-sex-loving Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. In 1898 Day’s nude portrait of Thomas Langryl Harris,
Study for the Crucifixion
, was the first frontal male nude to be publicly exhibited in Boston. Day, like von Gloeden, was interested in men of color. Some of his most noted works were of his chauffeur, Alfred Tannyhill, as an Ethiopian chief and in other poses that combined a forthright sexuality with dignity.
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Renowned society painter John Singer Sargent, also in Boston at this time, was exploring the male nude in his public art and private albums. His use of Thomas E. McKeller, an African American elevator operator he befriended, as the model for many of his black-and-white nudes speaks to Sargent’s impulse to rethink racial paradigms, even as he is caught in them. Day, von Gloeden, and Sargent are part of a tradition of negotiating sexuality and race through art, one that stretches back to Thoreau, Melville, and Stoddard. Art historian Trevor Fairbrother points out that Sargent’s male nudes have a sensuous quality, often reclining in positions associated with the female nude.
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This pose is in direct contrast to patriotic statuary.

Technology and consumer capitalism helped bring some of these artists’ images to a broader public. Inexpensive and easily available photographic prints—called studio cards—were now available through mass reproduction, and copies of artworks could be easily obtained by middle-class and even working-class people. This meant that art, once owned only by the wealthy, was becoming democratized and democratizing in a new way.

Most art historians agree that von Gloeden had sexual relationships with men and that Day, Eakins, and Sargent had romantic, if not physical, relationships with men. Women and men who desired their own sex had not found a significant level of freedom in America. But these female and male artists were able to live with a certain amount of visibility, with privileges the ordinary person did not have.

Politics and Poetics

Walt Whitman, now internationally famous, had become the most visible advocate of “manly attachment” or “adhesiveness,” two of the words he used to describe male same-sex desire. As such, he was a focal point for other men who felt similar desires. Whitman received many letters from the common man, as well as from noted American figures such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Charles Warren Stoddard; English writers such as Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and John Addington Symonds; and Edward Carpenter, a socialist and political organizer who, in an interview much later in his life, claimed to have had sex with the poet. The connections between the intellectually and artistically adventurous Whitman and his British counterparts, Symonds and Carpenter, are a vital link in LGBT history.

Carpenter and Symonds were politically and socially animated by developments in Germany. There, some thinkers were articulating a new way to think, legally and socially, about women and men who desired their own sex. In 1862, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who had trained as a lawyer and a theologian, published (under a pseudonym)
Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe
(
Researches on the Riddle of Male-Male Love
), a collection of essays that explained same-sex attraction through the lens of philosophy and medicine. In these essays Ulrichs coined the term “urning” to describe a man who is attracted to other men. By 1867 he was boldly arguing in the German courts to abolish laws that forbade consensual same-sex activity.

In 1869, Karl-Maria Kertbeny argued in a series of pamphlets that Prussian laws punishing same-sex sexual activity contradicted the “rights of man” and a natural human desire. In these pamphlets he coined the word “homosexual.” The invention of this word—which quickly gained currency in European legal, cultural, and medical circles—was a turning point in American LGBT history; but it was a turning in a particular direction. “That horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians” was given a “scientific” name that grew out of a legal reform movement. The new name emerged as the primary tool through which homosexuals in Europe would try to alleviate many of the social problems they faced.

Sexology, which emerged from the writings of Ulrichs and Kertbeny, was one of the main impetuses of the legal reform movement addressing homosexuality. This nonjudgmental science was a new way of understanding sexual desire and activity. It attempted to explain sexual desire in a variety of ways, largely as a science of taxonomy. Viewing different forms of sexuality as scientific classifications allowed reformers to claim that homosexuals must be treated as full citizens, since they were born that way.

In 1870, Ulrichs published
Araxes: A Call to Free the Nature of the Urning from Penal Law
.
Using Enlightenment language, he mixes legal rhetoric about natural rights with moral arguments about the responsibilities of the state:

The Urning, too, is a person. He, too, therefore, has inalienable rights. His sexual orientation is a right established by nature. Legislators have no right to veto nature; no right to persecute nature in the course of its work; no right to torture living creatures who are subject to those drives nature gave them.

The Urning is also a citizen. He, too, has civil rights; and according to these rights, the state has certain duties to fulfill as well. The state does not have the right to act on whimsy or for the sheer love of persecution. The state is not authorized, as in the past, to treat Urnings as outside the pale of the law.
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The rhetoric of Ulrichs and Kertbeny is antithetical to the universality of Whitman’s concept of emotional and romantic wholeness. Whitman’s vision included female and male desire, but he emblematically wrote about male-male relationships as being at the core of sexualized citizenship:

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble;

I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon;

I will make divine magnetic lands,

With the love of comrades,

With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies;

I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks;

By the love of comrades,

By the manly love of comrades.

For you these, from me, O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme!

For you! for you, I am trilling these songs,

In the love of comrades,

In the high-towering love of comrades.
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Whitman’s inclusive, utopian vision was more liberating from political and legal structures and understandings than the views of Ulrich or Kertbeny, who argued for explicit legal changes. It is notable that Whitman wrote extensively about same-sex desire and garnered only a modicum of criticism. Perhaps this is because he did not use scientific terms such as “homosexual.” Whitman’s vision of erotic justice depended on ideas of sexual and legal equality as much as Ulrich’s and Kertbeny’s did, but Whitman’s term “comrade,” like “manly attachment” and “adhesiveness,” drew on the American transcendentalist strain of individualism and freedom.

Carpenter and Symonds were also influenced by Whitman’s conflation of sexual freedom and citizenship. Symonds’s first major work, privately printed in 1883, was a historical analysis of same-sex male love titled
A Problem in Greek Ethics.
It was followed by a contemporary political analysis,
A Problem in Modern Ethics
, in 1891. As a critic, Symonds was interested in manifestations of same-sex desire in classical art and literature and how they could be used to argue for personal freedom under the law. Along with Symonds’s work, Edward Carpenter’s 1894 pamphlet
Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society
and his 1908 book-length
The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women
were fundamental in constructing a language and a mode of political thinking that would eventually form the modern LGBT movement.

Carpenter, a committed socialist, saw sex-law reform as part of a much larger project to address the social and legal inequalities faced by women, nonwhite people, the poor, prisoners, and anyone denied full citizenship. He conceptualized sexuality as a powerful, progressive political force and argued—in a clear articulation of what Melville and Stoddard demonstrated in their fiction—that same-sex desire, because of its outsider status, could help facilitate solutions for social problems. Carpenter writes in
The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women:

Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society. It is noticeable how often Uranians of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions, customs and political tendencies.
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Carpenter’s political theory of same-sex eros as a force for social equality was informed by both Whitman’s poetic vision of sexual liberation and Ulrich’s legal arguments. Whitman’s profound impact on Carpenter and Symonds is a prime example of how American thinking about sexual freedom, intimately connected to uniquely American concepts of democracy and citizenship, influenced European political thought.

Whitman greatly influenced Carpenter and Symonds, but as famous as he was, his views on sexuality did not change America. Perhaps Whitman’s liberatory philosophy was so expansive and radical that it was difficult for large numbers of people in America to accept it on its own terms. It might have been, in a counterintuitive sense, too deeply American in its view of citizenship and sexuality. Whitman himself was purposefully ambivalent. In 1889, Symonds finally, after hinting at it for years, forthrightly asked Whitman whether “comradeship” actually referred to the love between men. Whitman dodged the answer with a near-hysterical retort, claiming that such an interpretation was “terrible,” “morbid,” and “damnable.” He went on to state, highly implausibly, that “tho’ always unmarried I have had six children.” While same-sex desire is articulated beautifully in his verse, Whitman could not vocalize about his own life. Perhaps he felt that his grand ideas about sexuality, citizenship, and democracy could not actually exist in an America that, even with the progress it had made, was still splintered by deep social divisions and violence.

But his ideas had other champions, such as free love advocate Victoria Woodhull, who in 1872 was the first women to run for president of the United States. Her arguments are sustained philosophical attacks against the state’s regulation of sexuality and affection. In an 1871 speech cowritten with anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews, “And the Truth Shall Make You Free: A Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom,” she states:

Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but as a community, to see I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing else.
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The free love movement in America tried to realize these ideas about individual freedom and freedom from the state, but could do so only within small utopian communities.

As the century was drawing to a close, tensions surrounding the question of what it meant to be an American dominated the political sphere. The devastation and trauma of the Civil War had profoundly shaped the social and political issues of the century. Ironically, the war both codified and reshaped existing gender roles, and both heightened and lessened the role of religion in public life. It made possible the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves, but also set the stage for new manifestations of the persecuting society. They would include the continued violent persecution of the descendants of the enslaved Africans—historian Sherrilyn Ifill estimates that five thousand African Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1960, over one lynching a week for sixty years—as well as a new wave of attacks on European and Asian immigrants.
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In the end, the Civil War maintained the Union—uniting, to use Lincoln’s domestic metaphor, a “house divided against itself.” But it was difficult in this context to realize a larger sense of equality, let alone liberation. America was about to enter the Progressive Era, yet in many ways its culture was to became even more divided and more persecuting as it grew.