A Queer History of the United States (8 page)

But as the presence of immigrants grew, so did strong anti-immigrant sentiment. In the 1850s there was organized mob violence against people from Latin America. Anti-Chinese sentiment led to the passage of the federal Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which was enforced until 1943. Miscegenation laws were frequently enforced. Institutionalized racism against some groups was integral to social interactions, but was constantly being negotiated. In San Francisco, individual freedom was both enhanced and hampered by community structures. Its hospitality toward nonnormative sexual and gender expression had much to do with its constantly changing social structures.

A second reason that nonnormative sexuality and gender was relatively acceptable in San Francisco after 1849 was its thriving economy. The presence of large businesses such as Wells Fargo and the city’s position as a major seaport made San Francisco a center of commerce, a status enhanced in 1869 by the completion of the transcontinental railroad. John D’Emilio argues that historically, LGBT communities benefit in societies predicated on free labor—that is, a non-family-unit-based economy in which unmarried women and men are able to sustain economic independence.
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The boom economy of San Francisco in the second half of the nineteenth century is a prime example.

A closely connected idea is historian George Chauncey’s argument that gay and lesbian communities found their earliest manifestations in poor and working-class cultures, because wealthier classes could maintain a greater degree of personal privacy.
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For LGBT people, the luxury of privacy was antithetical to forming communities, which are, by their nature, public in bringing similar people together.

Even as it prospered economically, late-nineteenth-century San Francisco insisted on maintaining its identity as an outlaw culture. But not all San Franciscans embraced the idea of a wide-open town. In response to rising crime in 1851 and 1856, vigilante committees were formed to combat vice. These groups wielded, often by violence, enormous social and political power in efforts to curb what they saw as social anarchy and excessive sexuality. This tension between social and sexual freedom and the demands of mainstream society to control and contain these actions—essentially demanding that they remain private, often by use of violence—contributed to the shifting terms in the national debate about sexual behavior and gender. San Francisco provided, for the first time in U.S. culture, an idea of how a community of “outlaws” can form and what can happen when concepts of private and public become more integrated.

Writing a New National Culture: The East

Paradoxically, as westward expansion made the country geographically larger, new technologies—the invention of the telegraph in the late 1830s, the growth of a national railway system, and the telephone in the 1870s—facilitated travel and communications, making the country smaller and more cohesive. In these conditions we see the eventual flourishing of a distinctly American intellectual and literary culture. Washington Irving’s 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” promotes the ideal of robust, decidedly heterosexual masculinity, as embodied by “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, over that of the lanky, effeminized schoolteacher Ichabod Crane. Both men are courting young Katrina Van Tassel until Brom Bones frightens Crane out of town. Irving’s gender and sexual message is clear. Crane’s first name means “inglorious” in Hebrew, which Bible-literate contemporary readers would know. And as literary critic Caleb Crain points out, much of the action of the story takes place by “Major André’s tree.” This is a reference to Major John André, the British officer—generally thought to be a lover of men—who collaborated with Benedict Arnold and was hanged by George Washington as a spy in 1780.
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For Irving, nearly four decades after the Revolution, the new, clearly heterosexual American man was an imperative.

In contrast to Irving, also in 1820, nineteen-year-old Harvard student Ralph Waldo Emerson was writing entries in his journal about Martin Gay, a fellow student three years younger to whom he was attracted. Two years earlier, when he had first seen Gay, Emerson wrote:

I begin to believe in the Indian doctrine of eye-fascination. The cold blue eye of [Emerson deleted the name here] has so intimately connected him to my thoughts & visions that a dozen times a day & as often . . . by night I have found myself wholly wrapped up in conjectures of his character and inclinations. . . . We have had already two or three profound stares at one another. Be it wise or weak or superstitious I must know him.
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Crain notes that Emerson’s attraction to Gay was a form of the nineteenth-century ideal of “sympathy.” In this context, sympathy—a form of empathy that, as Crain writes, “allows us to feel emotions that are not ours”—is an expansive form of romantic friendship. The deeply felt connective emotion of sympathy allows one to not only value a friend for his or her emotional sincerity, but to take imaginative leaps toward understanding and sharing the emotions of another. This new understanding of the possibilities of shared emotion was likely inflected by the new America of wide-open western spaces, natural landscape, and the outlaw.

In 1837 Emerson published “Nature,” an essay fundamental in defining transcendentalism: the distinctly American philosophy promoting individual spiritual transcendence through experiencing the material world, especially nature, rather than through organized religion. The next year, in his “American Scholar” speech, he urged his audience to rethink the idea of the American man (by which he meant humans) and to create an independent, original, and free national literature. Animated by the ideal of an expansive sympathy influenced by the “naturalness” of America, Emerson argued for an egalitarian society that values all of its members’ individual contributions to a whole: the doctrine “that there is One Man,—present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.”
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Emerson’s vision of American equality, the basis for his strong antislavery and pro–women’s suffrage beliefs, has roots in the Enlightenment and in his radical, nature-based vision of Christianity. But it is especially rooted in his ability to admit and emotionally explore his attraction to—his sympathy with—other men. Same-sex affection was integral to understanding the mutually beneficent dynamics of the individual in society. This egalitarian same-sex affection placed the rugged individualism of the Revolutionary man into a new context, not of conquering an American landscape but of emerging from it and being at one with it. This was the cornerstone of a new way of understanding gender, desire, and personal and social liberty.

The feelings Emerson had for Martin Gay (his journals indicate “sympathy” for other young men as well) did not stop him from marrying twice and fathering four children. Emerson did not easily embrace all aspects of this sympathy. In 1824 he wrote in his journal, “He that loosely forgets himself here & lets his friend be privy to his words & acts which base desires extort from him has forfeited like a fool the love he prized.”
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This is an example of an internal tension that reflected a larger tension between sympathy and overt sexuality: that is, moving from a private emotion to publicly expressing that emotion.

Emerson was not the only person dealing with this conflation of desires, emotions, and political ideas. A wealth of homoerotic sentiments are present in the poems and journals of Henry David Thoreau. Meditations on friendship run throughout his journal, and by the 1840s they became increasingly erotic: “Feb. 18 [1840]. All romance is grounded on friendship. What is this rural, this pastoral, this poetical life but its invention? Does not the moon shine for Endymion? Smooth pastures and mild airs are for some Corydon and Phyllis. Paradise belongs to Adam and Eve. Plato’s republic is governed by Platonic love.”
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Thoreau’s invoking of Endymion, Corydon, and Plato strongly suggests a homosexual subtext; the two mythological figures were iconic representations for same-sex male desire in Renaissance art, and the
Republic
was, in part, an analysis of male friendship and love. Thoreau is using friendship as a metaphor here. However, his attraction to the eroticized male body appears throughout his journals without mythological trappings, but rather with a decidedly transcendentalist bent:

[June 12, 1852.] Boys are bathing in Hubbard’s Bend, playing with a boat (I at the willows). The color of their bodies in the sun at a distance is pleasing, the not often seen flesh-color. I hear the sound of their sport borne over the water. As yet we have not man in nature. What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties! A pale pink, which the sun would soon tan. White men! There are no white men to contrast with the red and the black; they are of such colors as the weaver gives them. I wonder that the dog knows his master where he goes in to bathe and does not stay by his clothes.
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Thoreau’s message is that civilization, with its “severest penalties,” is most unnatural. He is arguing that nature not only allows for “exposure” but is a space for racial equality, one wherein even the idea of “whiteness” is exposed as a lie. Alluding to classical literature and the European culture it inspired was a common method for nineteenth-century American intellectuals to discuss sexuality and sexual behaviors. Used consciously to reinforce ideas about American citizenship and democratic structures, the older culture safely places the sexuality at a distance.

Margaret Fuller, a leading figure in the transcendentalist movement and author of
Women of the Nineteenth Century,
the first major feminist publication in the United States, was also connecting to same-sex erotic intimacy and a new American ideal. In 1843, several years after viewing Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen’s
Ganymede
at a Boston exhibition, Fuller wrote “Ganymede to His Eagle,” a poem about the beautiful boy abducted by Zeus, in the form of an eagle, to be his lover and cupbearer. Here the cupbearer speaks to the eagle:

Before I saw thee, I was like the May,

Longing for summer that must mar its bloom,

Or like the morning star that calls the day,

Whose glories to its promise are the tomb;

And as the eager fountain rises higher

To throw itself more strongly back to earth,

Still, as more sweet and full rose my desire,

More fondly it reverted to its birth,

For, what the rosebud seeks tells not the rose,

The meaning foretold by the boy the man cannot disclose.
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Caleb Crain notes that Fuller is referring not only to the implicit homoeroticism of the original myth but, more important, to the eagle as “the emblem of sovereignty of the United States.” Thus she consciously conflates mythological same-sex desire with the democratic progress of the nation. Fuller is indicating that the longing for freedom implicit in same-sex desire and sympathy cannot be fully expressed—the rosebud cannot tell the rose what it feels—because its power, at root political, emanates from being unspoken. In much of this literature is an underlying assumption that unspoken feelings are stronger than articulated ones. In 1839, at the age of twenty-nine, Fuller wrote to a woman friend of long standing:

With regard to yourself, I was to you all that I wished to be. I knew that I reigned in your thoughts in my own way. And I also lived with you more truly and freely than with any other person. We were truly friends, but it was not friends as men are friends to one another, or as brother and sister. There was, also, that pleasure, which may, perhaps, be termed conjugal, of finding oneself in an alien nature. Is there any tinge of love in this? Possibly!
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Emily Dickinson, who wrote explicitly about intimacy between women in the mid-nineteenth century, showed her large body of work to a handful of people and published fewer than a dozen poems. A member of a well-to-do Amherst, Massachusetts, family, she was unmarried, lived a reclusive life, and was passionately devoted to her friend Sue Gilbert (who later married Dickinson’s brother Austin). The homoerotic content in Dickinson’s poetry is notable for its time. The language breaks from that of romantic friendships and reflects the transcendentalist idea that desire is more powerful and true in its imaginative parameters:

Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night

Had scarcely deigned to lie—

When, stirring, for Belief’s Delight,

My Bride had slipped away—

If ’twas a Dream—made solid—just

The Heaven to confirm—

Or if Myself were dreamed of Her—

The power to presume—

With Him remain—who unto Me—

Gave—even as to All—

A Fiction superseding Faith—

By so much—as ’twas real—
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Dickinson’s directness, like Fuller’s letter, is remarkable; she clearly has complete access to erotic desires for other women. This is also true in her letters to Gilbert, of which over three hundred survive. She wrote the following just as Austin Dickinson was beginning his courtship of Sue Gilbert: