A Queer History of the United States (15 page)

This metaphysical explanation, accepted as scientific (at this point of the emergence of psychology as a science), had a substantial effect on the public imagination for the next fifty years. It became how many people understood the phenomenon of same-sex desire. Theories of inversion were published widely, and sexologists were understood by the average person to be the experts on a “new science.” The idea of the “invert,” or “third sex,” also quickly and profoundly informed two popular and lasting stereotypes: the mannish lesbian and the effeminate homosexual man. (Although there were preexisting stereotypes of the effeminate male, sexological taxonomy invented him as a
homosexual
man.)

Anthropologist Esther Newton notes that the concept of the masculine woman who loves other women made emotional sense to both homosexuals and heterosexuals, because it played into the popular idea that if sexual desire is masculine, then a woman who desires a woman must be mannish.
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Lillian Faderman argues that the mannish lesbian was a break from the concept of romantic friendship, because her masculinity gave her access to sexuality. This new step in how mainstream culture understood sexual attraction between women made the concept of the romantic friendship—so integral to personal and social acceptance of both female and male same-sex relationships—impossible.
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The mannish lesbian was also used in the popular imagination to “explain,” as well as demonize, the new twentieth-century woman who was active in the public sphere, including the suffragette. The mannish lesbian was not, however, conflated with the well-known concept of the “passing woman”—a woman who dressed to pass as a man, like the Civil War soldiers—which was understood as a masquerade, not an identity.

The early sexologists created a space for homosexuals to tell their stories. This new form of “scientific” autobiography allowed women and men to clearly describe their sexual histories. The following autobiography of a patient was included in “Sexual Crimes,” an 1894 article by Charles Gilbert Chaddock, a leading American neurologist:

The knowledge that I am so unlike others makes me very miserable. I form no acquaintances outside of business, keep mostly to myself, and . . . do not indulge my sexual feelings. . . . I do not want to create the impression that my feelings for my own sex are weak, for they are strong; but I have heretofore had sufficient will-power to restrain them. . . . My desire . . . has always been to handle the genitals of those for whom I feel affection and to have them do the same to me.
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The existence of forthright personal narratives that overtly admitted to same-sex desire was a major advance toward a public homosexual identity. The link between medical discourse and openly pro-homosexual literature is clear in this excerpt from Edward Prime-Stevenson’s 1906
Imre: A Memorandum.
Prime-Stevenson wrote the novel under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne and had it privately printed in Naples. Here Oswald, the main character, tells his life story to his lover:

From the time when I was lad . . . I felt myself unlike other boys in one element of my nature. That one matter was my special sense, my passion for the beauty, the dignity, the charm, the—what shall I say—the loveableness of my own sex. I hid it, at least so far as, little by little, I came to realize its force. For, I soon perceived that most other lads had no such passional sentiments.
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In his widely read 1912
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist,
Alexander Berkman, who was Emma Goldman’s lover, offers an example of how same-sex desire need not be explained through sexological language. In the book, he wrote at length about male homosexuality in prison. His series of portraits of intensely emotional male-male relationships, some of which include sexual intimacy, are extraordinary for the time. In the chapter “Passing the Love of Woman” (the title is a common literary reference to the relationship between the biblical David and Jonathan and to male homosexuality), after Berkman relates his own experience of a passionate male-male friendship, a friend and fellow prisoner named George tells Berkman about his relationship with a younger man:

For two years I loved him without the least taint of sex desire. It was the purest affection I ever felt in my life. It was all-absorbing, and I would have sacrificed my life for him if he had asked it. But by degrees the psychic stage began to manifest all the expressions of love between the opposite sexes. I remember the first time he kissed me. . . . Never in my life had I experienced such bliss as at that moment. It’s five years ago, but it thrills me every time I think of it. . . . From then on we became lovers.
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Berkman’s
Memoirs
brought anarchist theories, as well as radical sexual ideas, to a wide range of readers. Unlike others who wrote about sexuality at the time, Berkman explicitly discussed the reality and importance of masturbation. His was also one of the first books to discuss the homosexual behavior of young men, who as a group would not be acknowledged until later in the century.

True-life accounts could easily reinforce ideas about gender and defined categories of sexual orientation.
Autobiography of an Androgyne
was a 1919 memoir by Earl Lind, who also called himself Ralph Werther and went by the name Jennie June when dressed as a woman. In this remarkable book, the author understands his condition as being congenital:

As to my own feminine characteristics, I have been told by my intimate associates from boyhood down to my middle forties—when this book goes to press—that I markedly resemble a female physically, besides having instinctive gestures, poses, and habits that are characteristically feminine. My schoolmates said that I would make a good-looking girl and that kissing me was “as good as kissing a girl.”
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Lind identifies himself as a “fairie,” an “invert,” a “homosexual,” and an “androgyne” and compares himself to the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, the famous Greek sculpture that inspired Julia Ward Howe’s
The Hermaphrodite.
But in contrast to Howe’s use of the image, which opened up an imaginative and expansive space for being sexual, Lind’s use was based in a scientific typology that medicalized his sexuality. For the time, Lind’s medicalization of himself was extreme: in his early thirties he had his testes removed because he feared that his “emissions” were causing him health problems.

Sexology generated a broad-based public discussion about the need for sex education and legal birth control, both of which helped bring reproductive choices to women. It is not a coincidence that the emergence of an affirming, clearly defined homosexual identity coincided with social changes that gave women freedom over their bodies. The connection between the advance of widespread sex education and birth control and the acceptance of homosexuality was clear to Mary Casal. Her 1930 autobiography (which describes events three decades earlier),
The Stone Wall
, is one of the few written accounts by a lesbian in the early twentieth century:

People are now daring to talk about birth control, and important provisions are being made for the execution of such methods. . . . There is no suffering comparable to unsatisfied sex desire, not any condition that brings about such dire results. . . . The time is coming when a man’s love for a man and a woman’s love for a woman will be studied and understood as it never has been in the past.
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The dissemination of information about sexuality and reproduction, almost all of which was in a heterosexual context, was an important development in a culture in which sexuality had not been discussed openly. The emergence of a homosexual identity that increasingly refused criminalization and discrimination—what Prime-Stevenson called “any intelligent civilization’s disrespect”—related directly to the newly emerging reproductive rights movement. Both embodied a social ideal that reflected the integrity of the human body and the integral importance of sexuality to the citizen. Most important was the radical idea, literally embodied in homosexual activity, that sex and reproduction can be completely separate, that sex can be enjoyed without the fear of pregnancy.

This distinction between sexual activity, pleasure, and reproduction threatened the social purity advocates, who prized motherhood and the family. Ironically, even those who advocated sexual freedom were often not immune to social purity ideology. Margaret Sanger, for instance, who was highly influential in forging a national movement for birth control and family planning, held racist, eugenicist views about nonwhite people. And while a firm believer in women controlling their bodies, she was not a sexual liberationist. She believed that “every normal man and woman has the power to control and direct his sexual impulse. Men and woman who have it in control and constantly use their brain cells thinking deeply, are never sensual.”
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Like the staunchest advocates of the social purity movement, she was against masturbation, which she saw as a “revolting disease.” And physical masturbation was not the only menace:

In the boy or girl past puberty we find one of the most dangerous forms of masturbation, i.e., mental masturbation, which consists of forming mental pictures, or thinking of obscene or voluptuous pictures. This form is considered especially harmful to the brain, for the habit becomes so fixed that it is almost impossible to free the thoughts from lustful pictures.
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Sanger’s views on masturbation, seemingly at odds with her more progressive stands on sexuality, were intimately connected with the gradual formation of a “pure” race through eugenic practices. Sanger’s objection arose from her claim that masturbation can, especially for women, be physically addictive and replace sexual intercourse, thus harming the chances of genitally sound and racially pure reproduction.

The emergence of sexology as a public way of discussing sexuality increased the anxiety about the rise of urban culture. Moral guides for young women and men were increasingly popular at the turn of the century, when many youths were moving to cities. Such guides were often published by church groups, with a religious message complementing the sex advice. They turned sex education into sex regulation. Their messages echoed social purity ideologies about what made sexuality dangerous: women were susceptible to it, and men were irresponsible with it. (Implicit in these warnings was that sex was dangerous for women because it “ruined” them for marriage, which was the only condition within which they could survive economically.) These books, while concerned with the dangers of intemperate drinking, gambling, public dancing, and music halls, were often obsessed with sex.

The 1929
Helps to Purity: A Frank, Yet Reverent Introduction on the Intimate Matters of Personal Life for Adolescent Girls
by Rev. Fulgence Meyer, OFM, was explicit in its warnings against masturbation. Meyer noted that “this unnatural and abominable sin of self-abuse is committed by a girl when she voluntarily excites and stimulates her sexual nature in a degree to bring on complete sexual satisfaction.” He went on to note that “sexual gratification is allowed only in the virtuous sexual conduct between husband and wife” and that “sinful lovemaking, or. . . immodest touches by oneself or another, of the same of the opposite sex, or even of animals, or by some other unjustified method, is always a mortal sin.”
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Meyer was careful to stipulate that immodest actions are possible with either the same or the opposite sex, indicating that the possibility of homosexual behavior was commonplace and easily articulated by religious instructors.

Medically based marriage guides of the early twentieth century, such as the 1926 best seller
The Doctor Looks at Love and Life
by Joseph Collins, MD, gave similar messages. Collins was in favor of less sexual repression and rejected religious morality in favor of scientific fact. He was sympathetic to the struggles women faced, arguing that the “problem” of frigidity may well be caused by male selfishness. He also viewed “natural homosexuals”—those born that way—as “victims of fate,” but his arguments were complicated:

There are many persons who indulge in unnatural sexual relations who are not homosexuals. They are the real degenerates. There are many potential and actual homosexuals whose intercourse with persons of their own sex is confined to emotional and intellectual contacts. . . . They are not degenerates. . . . They are victims of Fate, the only ones who do not excite our compassion; and all because we cannot distinguish between the work of God and Satan.
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In contrast to men, women, in Collins’s view, more often fell into homosexuality through “bad habits, kisses, embraces, tender intimacies, feeblemindedness and evil companionship.”
30
Echoing the earlier religious instruction books and their concerns about leisure time, Collins believed that homosexuality in women “flows from idleness, boredom and loneliness, and its victims are as a rule under- or oversexed.”
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Despite his relative (for the time) tolerance, he ultimately believed that “we should rid ourselves of the notion that we are the keepers of the natural homosexual, but we should hearten ourselves to prevent and cure those who accidentally or deliberately acquire vicious sexual habits.”
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Collins devoted forty pages to discussing homosexuality, an indication of its importance in 1920s culture.

Marriage manuals were best sellers because the average American wanted to read and think about sexuality. Americans discovered that the changes wrought by the sexology movements allowed them to have discussions not possible before. Changes in book distribution, the low cost of mass book production, and increasing literacy rates made this information easily accessible to a huge, diverse readership. Not all Americans could agree on the specifics of sex education, but most agreed that the topic should be discussed. As Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio point out, “[B]y the 1920s circumstances were present to encourage acceptance of the modern idea that sexual expression was of overarching importance to individual happiness.”
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