fervency in the love of Christ our lord and heavenly husband; that we could delight in him as we do in each other.” Winthrop never referred to William Spring as a spouse (at least not in any of his surviving letters), but he did see their loving friendship as a foretaste of the bliss awaiting the redeemed in the life to come: “if any emblem may express our condition in heaven, it is this communion in love.” Spring evidently felt the same way, depicting his love for Winthrop and for Christ as parallel devotions: he wrote longingly of Winthrop’s “bosom, whither I desire to convey myself and to live there, as we may to [Christ] also that owns that place.” Winthrop saw marital love, loving friendship, love of Christ, and Christ’s love for the faithful as mutually reinforcing devotions that conflated the earthly and spiritual as well as love for men and women. He finished his letter of farewell to Spring by praying that Christ would bless their love for each other and unite them in love for their redeemer: “make us sick with thy love: let us sleep in thine arms, and awake in thy kingdom: the souls of thy servants, thus united to thee, make as one in the bond of brotherly affection.”3
***
It is difficult to make sense of this seventeenth-century romantic ménage using modern categories of sexual orientation or our own assumptions about what it means to be a heterosexual male. Puritan men like John Winthrop who considered themselves quite respectable did not hesitate to express passionate love for other men and for Christ, whom they hoped to marry on the Day of Judgment and by whom they hoped to be ravished in an everlasting ecstasy that they envisaged in literal and explicitly erotic terms. They were able to do so because they inhabited a world in which neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality existed as categories of identification. Early Americans had clear notions of what we now call sexuality and gender, along with strong opinions about what constituted appropriate and inappropriate behavior, but the ways in which they understood and evaluated love and desire were very different from and in some respects much more capacious than our own. This was not simply a question of using different vocabulary to describe universal emotions or drives: because their ideas and assumptions shaped how they processed internally their own feelings and those of others, their actual experience of sexual desire and love was different from ours.
Let me pause for a moment to unpack the last few sentences. Just over a quarter century ago, the scholar David Halperin pointed out in his now-classic essay entitled “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality” that the introduction of the words “homosexuality” and (shortly afterward) “heterosexuality” at the end of the nineteenth century marked “a major reconceptualization of the nature of human sexuality.” Previously, nineteenth-century medical experts had linked desire for members of the same sex to what they called “sexual inversion” (the adoption of feminine roles and traits by an anatomical man or of masculine traits and roles by an anatomical woman). But this new taxonomy shifted attention away from gender performance and focused entirely on the anatomical sex of those who were engaging in a sexual act: those who chose to have sex with persons of the same sex were homosexual, and those who chose instead members of the opposite sex were heterosexual, regardless of whether they seemed manly or effeminate. That paradigm of sexual orientation became the dominant framework used by twentieth-century Westerners to understand sexual attraction. Many people came to assume that this paradigm had a transhistorical validity, so that they could apply it to any cultural or historical setting. Yet Halperin argued that terms such as “homosexuality,” “heterosexuality,” and even “sexuality,” far from being “the basic building-blocks of human identity for all human beings in all times and places,” constitute “peculiar and indeed exceptional ways of conceptualizing as well as experiencing sexual desire” that would have made little sense to people living in the past (emphasis in original). Because people living before the late nineteenth century would not have described sexual desires and behavior using modern taxonomy, they would therefore have understood and even felt such desires differently. It follows that the assumptions embedded within words like “heterosexuality” present “a significant obstacle” to understanding sexual life in the past. Instead, we need to recover what Halperin called “the cultural poetics of desire,” that is, the formal ideas and informal assumptions that people drew on to classify and evaluate sexual desire and behavior, along with the ways in which contemporaries disseminated and enforced those ideas and assumptions.4
If we are to understand what we would characterize as gender and sexuality in the context of British America and the revolutionary period, we need to take seriously the profound implications of Halperin’s essay and recognize that “the cultural poetics of desire” during those periods looked and felt very different from anything we experience today. Colonists, in common with their contemporaries in early modern England and Europe, did not think about their sexual impulses in terms of a distinct sexuality that oriented men and women toward members of the same or opposite sex. Early Americans were taught to believe that all sex outside marriage—whether masturbation, casual fornication, premarital sex, adultery, or sodomy—was driven by innate moral corruption inherited from Adam and Eve; it expressed moral, not sexual, orientation. The most fundamental distinction that colonists made between licit and illicit sex depended on the marital status of those involved, not their biological sex. We know that there were men in British America who found themselves attracted to other men, and women who desired other women, yet the modern category of “homosexual” would have made little sense to them or their neighbors; they had their own conceptual frameworks through which to make sense of their urges and behavior.5
Early Americans understood erotic desires and acts as an expression of moral and social standing, not of intrinsic sexual identity. Consider the seventeenth-century Puritan New Englander who condemned any form of nonmarital sex as a “pollution” of the body that should be kept pure as a temple for the soul and who worried constantly about succumbing to “unclean” impulses; or the eighteenth-century southern planter who characterized sex as a demonstration of his cherished identity as a gentleman, referring to intercourse with his wife as a “flourish,” or courtly gesture, to extramarital sex as “promiscuous gallantry,” and to venereal infection as a “polite disorder.” The first individual categorized sexual acts as part of a larger moral and spiritual endeavor, the second in terms of social identity. Both gave meaning and value to sex using categories that were not themselves intrinsically sexual. Strictly speaking, men who practiced sodomy during this period did not engage in homosexual acts, any more than the planter who gave his wife “a flourish” was engaging in a heterosexual act.6
In addition, and crucially, early Americans experienced love and sexual desire in the context of gender roles that adhered less rigidly to either men or women than in a modern Western setting. As we will see, women and men assumed both feminine and masculine roles, depending on the context in which they found themselves. The expectation that men could assume a female persona in certain circumstances and women a male persona reveals a culture of intricate possibilities, including the ways in which colonists enacted gendered authority. The use of spousal imagery to describe relations between savior and saved, for example, reinforced a gender-based hierarchy within the family. But Christ was much more than a masculine role model for men, who developed a range of social capacities by relating to him as brides as well as emulating him in the role of bridegroom, just as women performed the role of husband in the absence of male spouses and adopted masculine characteristics in a spiritual context that would astonish modern Christians.
Setting aside our own assumptions about sexuality is not easy. Consider the insistence by many otherwise astute and careful scholars that we should read expressions of love between male friends living in the past (such as John Winthrop and William Spring) as at least implicitly homoerotic. These scholars assume that expressions of loving devotion must necessarily imply a desire for sexual intimacy or, to put it another way, that people who are in love with each other must want to have sex. That many modern readers would make this assumption is perhaps not surprising: the paradigm of sexual orientation teaches us that romantic feelings
