A Queer History of the United States (14 page)

Willard’s words did not go uncontested. Ida B. Wells, the African American activist who was a central leader in antilynching campaigns of the time, accused the temperance leader of “condoning fraud, violence, murder, at the ballot box; rapine, shooting, hanging, and burning; for all these things are done and being done now by the Southern white people.”
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Wells was decisive in exposing the murderous physical reality that logically resulted from Willard’s political principles. Her words also highlight how the tension between progressive reform and the social purity movement continued to yoke together race and sex as the battlefield on which an American sexuality was defined. In
The Souls of Black Folk
(1903), his defining look at race relations in the United States, W. E. B. Du Bois stated that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of color line.” The problem of the color line had always been intertwined with the problems of sexuality and gender.

The African American and newly identified “homosexual” communities were shaped, in part, in reaction to mainstream oppressive ideologies predicated on ideas about social purity. The terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” which emerged from the European medical-legal discourse, had a firmer claim on the public discourse and imagination than did Whitman’s “comrade.” They fit perfectly into the social purity movement’s increasingly pseudo-scientific thinking that negatively categorized groups and behavior. Jonathan Ned Katz documents how the American medical establishment quickly used these new ideas to pathologize and further criminalize women and men who engaged in same-sex sexual activity.

The word “homosexual” was first used in the United States in an 1892 article by Dr. James G. Kiernan, a noted Chicago neurologist, in which he stated that homosexuals were persons whose “general mental state is that of the opposite sex.” Later in the article he discussed two cases of women murdering their lovers:

Sexual pervert crimes of all types are likely to increase, because of newspaper agitation of the subject, among hysterical females, from a desire to secure the notoriety dear to the hysteric heart. All such cases should be carefully scrutinized, and the mere existence of the alleged perversion should never be admitted as proof of irresponsibility. . . . Each case should be tried on its own merits, and the exact mental state of the accused determined.
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Kiernan’s article was followed by many others on the subject of homosexuality. Kiernan’s messages are mixed: homosexuality is linked to crime, but it may not be the cause of the crime. Cultural historian Lisa Duggan analyzes the racializing of sexuality in one of the cases Kiernan discussed. She traces the practice of lynching to institutionalized violence against perceived deviance from traditional gender and sexual roles.

In 1893 Dr. F. E. Daniel, editor of
The
Texas Medical Journal
,
gave a speech, later reprinted multiple times, titled “Should Insane Criminals or Sex Perverts Be Permitted to Procreate?” He argued that it is more humane to castrate sex criminals than to execute them or spend public money on imprisonment.
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This reasoning is a logical outcome of the social purity movement’s desire to curb all forms of lust and restructure society on an ideal of sexual and reproductive purity. Daniel explicitly placed his arguments in the context of creating a “sanitary utopia” based on both purity and applied eugenics, a theory and practice of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries designed to improve society through elective human reproduction.

The “sanitary utopia” of the social purists was the nightmarish opposite of the utopian visions of the more radical strands of the labor movement and the African American civil rights movement. All three emerged in response to the circumstances of mid-nineteenth-century America. The latter two embraced two different political languages, both of which stood in stark opposition to the ideology of social purity. Some labor organizers embraced anarchism, a wide-ranging political philosophy that espoused, as an alternative to government, the option of self-regulation by citizens. Most African Americans, however, sought more protection from the state against lynching and other forms of racial violence. They also looked for more inclusion in the state to attain equal status with white people.

A similar divide can be seen in the struggle of same-sex-desiring people: the broad project of sexual liberation (which would free people from the bonds of sexual repression) and the legal reform movements (which would fight to change laws that prohibit or repress certain sexual acts, behaviors, or identities). The decisive difference between the two political philosophies affected how Americans constructed political movements concerning sexuality, especially homosexuality. The stark difference between them is evident in two major political events that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century: the 1886 Haymarket riot and the Supreme Court case
Plessy v. Ferguson
. Each event would have political reverberations throughout the twentieth century.

In May 1886, labor organizers planned a week of national rallies in major cities to support the eight-hour work day. (At the time, workers were expected to be on the job a minimum of twelve hours a day.) At least 400,000 women, men, and children went on strike or marched. Most of the rallies were peaceful, but in Chicago, police shot and killed two workers at a local factory. The next day, labor supporters met in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest police violence. During the rally, a pipe bomb was thrown at police officers, who then shot into the crowd. Chaos ensued, leaving eight dead. Eight anarchists were arrested for murder; four were hanged. The case, now considered a miscarriage of justice, created an international furor. It became a symbol of state suppression of legitimate political activism and a rallying cry for grassroots organizing.

In 1892 Homer Plessy, with the support of the Committee of Citizens, an all-black New Orleans group that promoted racial justice, refused to sit in the “colored” car of the East Louisiana Railroad. In a 7–1 decision handed down in
Plessy v. Ferguson
on May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court affirmed racial segregation in the United States through the concept of “separate but equal.” This decision reaffirmed the concept, embedded in slavery, that certain classes of individuals did not have complete equality under the rule of law. Plessy’s actions and the ensuing court case were a harbinger of the future use of civil disobedience to resist unlawful authority, as well as of the limits of the legal system.

The Haymarket incident and the Plessy case illustrate two fundamental American models for organized political resistance. The labor movement’s model of organizing is grassroots based and relies on challenging state authority with demands for justice. (The violence at the Chicago rally was not part of this model; it was initiated by the police.) This model functions outside of the accepted, legally sanctioned social and judicial system; it claims its authority in a code of ethics based on human dignity and the innate worth of the individual. In 1984 Audre Lorde, a black lesbian feminist theorist and poet, would state this idea as “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The second model of resistance, as seen in
Plessy v. Ferguson
, is predicated in the belief that the existing system can fix itself when challenged through proper channels of social or legal appeal. It acknowledges, however, that the existing system is often constructed to avoid such appeals, and allows for breaking the law—Henry David Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience—in order to correct the injustices. Although Plessey’s civil disobedience was effective in bringing the case to court, it would not be until 1954, in
Brown v. Board of Education
, that the Supreme Court outlawed segregation.

These alternative models have been the bedrock for the LGBT liberation and equal rights movements that began to come into existence in 1950. The structures of racial prejudice and resistance to racism have profoundly shaped how Americans have conceptualized and responded to most problems of social inequality. In this context, questions of sexuality and gender inequality have been fitted into paradigms created to understand racial prejudice. The movement to free homosexuals from oppression has become predominantly a legal, rights-based movement. This approach has largely eclipsed the idea of a sexual liberation movement and narrowed its vision to a simple struggle for legal equality.

Many American anarchist theorists, including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Ben Reitman, Benjamin Tucker, and Leonard Abbott—all of whom drew inspiration from Whitman—were in the forefront of addressing the role of sexuality in U.S. society as a political issue. They believed that it was unethical for the state to have any role in personal affairs. Benjamin Tucker wrote in his 1895
State Socialism and Anarchism
that anarchists “acknowledge and defend the right of any man and woman, or men and women, to love each other for as long or as short a time as they can, will, or may. To them legal marriage and legal divorce are equal absurdities.”
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Tucker’s ideas dovetail with those of Victoria Woodhull. According to Terence Kissack, Tucker believed that “anarchists look upon attempts to arbitrarily suppress vice as themselves crimes.”
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Emma Goldman
wrote several times about homosexuality. Here she describes a conversation with Dr. Eugene Schmidt in Paris in 1900:

I told the doctor of the indignation I had felt at the [1895] conviction of Oscar Wilde. I had pleaded his case against the miserable hypocrites who had sent him to his doom. “You!” the doctor exclaimed in astonishment, “why, you must have been a mere youngster then. How did you dare come out in public for Oscar Wilde in puritan America?” “Nonsense!” I replied; “no daring is required to protest against a great injustice.”
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Margaret Anderson, who with her lover Jane Heap edited the experimental literary journal
The Little Review,
was a close friend of Goldman’s in the mid-teens. Anderson suggested that, as historian Margaret Marsh puts it, “homosexuality might be a more normal form of sexual behavior than heterosexuality” and that “she and her friends represented the link between the anarchist-feminist idea of sexual liberation as one component . . . of a society of freely cooperating individuals.”
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These anarchist writings about homosexuality are a radical break from most thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They argue that sexuality is natural and positive, that sex can be solely about pleasure and, if consensual, should not be the subject of any laws. These basic precepts about sexuality, and homosexuality, that are present today in the LGBT movement—both its liberatory and civil rights sides—find their roots in anarchist thinking.

The labor movement profoundly influenced the LGBT movement by conceptualizing workers not as individuals, but as a class of people who are treated unjustly. The early labor organizations—in particular the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, which had over one million members in 1923—conceptualized a worldwide movement based on identity and group status. This concept is the historical basis for the thinking of Harry Hay (whose membership in the Wobblies was formative to his political education) when he founded the Mattachine Society, an early homosexual rights group, in 1950.

Comparisons of other political movements to the LGBT movement are always inexact. Homosexuals are not a specific racial or ethnic group. They are not a class bound by a type of employment or harmed by a similar economic injustice. In organizing politically, homosexuals predicate their group status on a presumption of shared injustice. As individuals, their experiences are so varied that any all-encompassing type of organizing is difficult or inapplicable. In many ways the LGBT movement is unique; it is able to draw upon, but not totally conform to, other forms of political organizing.

The Politics of Language

If the nascent LGBT movement was to organize itself and be taken seriously by the law, it needed language with authority. Anarchists understood the power of words. In the 1880s Angela and Ezra Heywood, who published the free love journal the
Word
, argued that the use of plain Anglo-Saxon words such as “cock,” “cunt,” and “fuck” would demystify sexuality, reduce individual shame, and liberate women. (In 1873 Ezra Haywood had been sentenced to prison for using the U.S. Postal Service to mail copies of his free love pamphlet
Cupid’s Yokes.
)
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This political position was antithetical to the social purity movement, which sought to suppress sexual speech.

In the midst of these extremes, the new discipline of sexology gained authority through language. (Sexology was, to some degree, an extension of the Enlightenment’s desire to prove everything rationally.) The scientific discovery of “homosexuality” generated language that promoted more open discussion about the subject. Ironically, it immediately led to a clear articulation of negative stereotypes about homosexuals. For the first time in U.S. history, same-sex-desiring people could now feel diseased.

The most common sexological theory of same-sex desire was that it was the result of physical, emotional, or psychological “inversion.” In other words, the gender of persons who desired their own sex was somehow reversed. When a man desired a man, it was actually a woman—presumably existing within the man’s body—who was desiring a man. When a woman desired a woman, it was actually a male essence within the woman’s body who felt that desire.