The Importance Of Physical Presentation In Early American Sexuality

From the time of Nicholas Sension in the 18th century to the life of fairies living in New York City in the early 20th century, who men were allowed to have sex with and what their role was in that act depended largely on that man’s age, race, class, ethnicity and gender presentation. For women, sexuality was not often thought of or cared for. However, for both, the way one presented their physical body mattered a huge deal in a society which cared more for one’s gender presentation than their sexual preferences. It was this focus on strict gender roles that led to decades of cognitive dissonance that allowed people of the same sex to be intimate with each other, while still maintaining “normalcy” by presenting as one gender or the other and partaking in all the expectations of that gender’s role in society. Thus, the physical manifestations of a person’s sexuality, as in their race, dress or appearance, were far more important to people of the 18th-early 20th century than any psychological component of sexuality. While the court transcripts from Nicholas Sensions’ trial show he was indeed a sexual predator, coming onto younger men without their consent. However, it was not his presence 1while they were sleeping that was necessarily the issue, but his actions afterwards. As Nicholas Rotundo made clear, it was normal for men to share beds in their adolescence and young adulthood. In short, it was normal for men to be emotionally intimate with each other in their 21 years before marriage. These relationships were public, as is evidenced but the abundance of posed photos of male couples, and were commonplace particularly among men who were on the path to a career and marriage. These romantic friendships, as Rotundo termed them, ended in practice upon marriage but continued in another form: all-male social clubs. It wasn’t until the late 1800s, that this sort of close friendship practice disappeared, due to the paranoia about homosexuality. However, male intimacy continued, as detailed by George Chauncey, in the 20th 3century as members of the “bachelor subculture” engaged the services of fairies and trades for sexual pleasure.

Although men’s sexuality was the only one that was discussed in colonial and early 1800s America, women also formed close friendships that were extremely intimate. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg wrote, women formed these relationships with each other because they were unable to form relationships with men outside of courtship or marriage. In contrast to male relationships, these female friendships lasted for lifetimes, and helped women get through all the hurdles of womanhood: marriage, childbirth and raising a family. These female friendships were never questioned, even when women chose to eschew marriage and instead become life partners. However, no one would assume women who did this were being physically intimate, but that 5they were just something of “good friends. ” In her diaries, Frances Willard clearly knows that her friendship with Mary Bannister is getting close to the line of being inappropriate for women of her time: She pledges to “act like a Christian” and follow through with her plans to marry, rather than devoting herself to Mary. However, it is notable that as close as Willard was with 6Bannister, she wrote of concern that her betrothed would be bothered by it, but expressed no concern that she would be somehow ostracized in the larger community.

In the literature from the Sension trial deposition to Chauncey’s writings on the bachelor subculture of urban northeast cities in the early 20th century, there is an outsize focus on the person’s physical manifestations of gender and sexual identity, both of which eventually become inextricably linked with race. This changes with time, and it is important to note that this focus as it pertains to women was not relevant until scientists began testing women’s bodies in the late 19th century for physical characteristics that could denote sexual tendencies. As Siobhan Somerville detailed, the 8testing of women’s bodies for these telling physical characteristics was based on the Darwinian view that one’s behavior was linked to one’s body, and that evolutionary theory shows that that state of specific things on a body, the size of the clitoris, for example, was indicative of how “evolved” you were.

In the 18th and 19th century, close female friendships that bordered on and often became romantically intimate were dismissed as regular manifestations of femininity. Women may have been persecuted for being witches, but not for having relationships with each other: In none of the readings is there an equivalent for a sodomy charge. Any idea of sexual contact between the women was never a topic that saw daylight. It wasn’t until Katherine Davis’s study in the 1920s of women’s sexual preferences that they became documented under their own reporting. For men, the “rules” of how they could manifest their sexuality changed drastically from the time of Sension, when men were permitted to share a bed but sodomy was a grave crime, to the early to mid 20th century, when, as documented by Chauncey fairies and “trades” frequently were intimate with other men. However, as Chauncey theorized, society at that time kept a sort of cognitive dissonance: fairies were seen to be impure, while the men penetrating them were still seen as “normal, ” as in the perceived masculinity of the act saved them from any moral scrutiny. Thus, those that were physically masculine were fine in society’s eyes, while those who presented more feminine were somehow “inverse. ” At the same time men regularly engaged the services of fairies to get off, authorities were punitive towards men who engaged in sex with other men. This is evidenced by the news clips from the Long Beach trial, which shows that authorities considered receiving pleasure from another man was morally “inverse” and criminal. Although it goes against common thinking on gender privilege, women had much more freedom than men to push the rules of gender norms.

The oversize stigma on men presenting as female is also evident in “The Florida Enchantment. ” When the young woman starts acting like a man, people get concerned, but when her betrothed put on women’s clothes and begins walking in a feminine way, a mob almost instantly forms to chase him away. Although Chauncey made clear that fairies often had a good relationship with the bachelors they interacted with, they were also in a precarious social position. They fulfilled a need for men at the time: who were often living without their female partners or not married, but still seeking sexual gratification. However much society was willing to turn a blind eye to fairies who clearly presented as “more feminine” than other men, they were still policed. What the thinking portrayed by Chauncey, Rotundo and Smith-Rosenberg ignores is the fact that people at any stage of cultural life in America, were attracted to who they were for unphysical reasons. As Somerville noted, sexologists only began relying less on biology and comparative anatomy and more on psychology only after social sciences began to move towards case studies.

So, why did it take until the mid-20th century for sexologists and other thinkers to stop focusing on outward presentation of gender, such as dress or behavior, and anatomy to reason out sexuality? Perhaps because the concept of homosexuality, something that had been seen as immoral in colonial and early America, was not exactly formed : people associated sodomy with 17immorality, but had no such set of descriptors for people who were emotionally, not just physically, intimate with people of their same sex. Also possible is the fact that sexology was, as was everything, dominated by men. Notably divergent from the thinking portrayed in some of the materials are the writings of Frances Willard and the studies completed by Katherine Davis, which, by nature of explicitly, portray the emotional implications of sexual preference and behavior.