loving same-sex friendships and happily made room for them as a personal, social, and political good.42
Only once we set aside our own assumptions and even our categories of analysis—no easy task—can we appreciate that sexualized love was just one possibility in a rich repertoire of possibilities open to premodern men and women as they expressed their feelings for one another. There must surely have been cases in which that spectrum of possibilities provided a cover for erotic intimacy that would otherwise have endangered the individuals concerned (not only because of the legal penalties for sodomy but also through social and self-inflicted stigma). Some friends may have explored the boundary between physical affection and erotic expression, perhaps occasionally venturing across that boundary and discovering something new about themselves. Yet as the historian Alan Bray has pointed out, “the inability to conceive of relationships in other than sexual terms says something of contemporary poverty; or, to put the point more precisely, the effect of a shaping concern with sexuality is precisely to obscure that wider frame.” The literary scholar Ivy Schweitzer makes a similar point: “Without denying the erotic and sexual potential of friendship,” we should recognize that “a very different logic guided its understandings in this period.” That logic “enabled an array of social and political relations that critics have frequently overlooked.”43
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Alan Bray’s characterization of modern sexual paradigms as obscuring instead of illuminating the past and Ivy Schweitzer’s argument that scholars’ own preconceptions have led them to overlook the logic that framed relationships in the past echo David Halperin’s insistence that words like “heterosexuality,” “homosexuality,” and even “sexuality” constitute “a significant obstacle to understanding the distinctive features of sexual life in non-Western and pre-modern cultures” (emphasis added).44 A short essay such as this cannot hope to provide a comprehensive discussion of the challenges involved in recovering premodern conceptions of gender and sex, let alone a complete reconstruction of what that conceptual world may have looked like. But I do hope to have illustrated through a brief examination of two particular types of relationship, both endorsed enthusiastically by early Americans, just how unhelpful are our most fundamental assumptions and beliefs about what we now refer to as gender and sexuality in making sense of the past. The loving and passionate relationships that early American men were encouraged to develop with Jesus Christ and with one another, even as legal and religious codes condemned sex between men, can seem very bizarre to a modern Western sensibility, because our cultural wiring is so different from theirs. That wiring extends deep inside us. Because most modern Westerners have internalized the paradigm of sexual orientation, it is extremely difficult for us to wrap our minds around a world in which gendered expression and the relationship between love and sex operated according to a different logic. Even finding words that are not freighted with the baggage of modernity poses a huge challenge (as many of us who have tried to write about sexual cultures in the past will attest). Yet try we must. Otherwise, we will achieve little more than to project our sense of ourselves onto the past.45
That daunting yet exciting project of reconstructing the “cultural poetics of desire” by which people lived in the past has important implications for historians of modern sexuality. Scholars working on the experience, articulation, and policing of heterosexuality in the modern United States and Europe should consider that the rest of the world, including large numbers of migrants making their way into Western countries, do not necessarily think about sex in the same way (even as Western values seek to establish cultural hegemony across the globe). In an era of massive migration, the paradigm of sexuality that took hold in the twentieth-century West now coexists alongside very different models for making sense of love and desire. Meanwhile, alternative ways of understanding and evaluating sexuality articulated by theorists, evangelicals, and many young people who embrace a much more fluid sense of their sexual identities are creating an even more variegated and volatile cultural landscape. Heterosexuality is not only a recent and idiosyncratic phenomenon but may also turn out to be much more fragile and transient than we often assume.
Notes
1. John Winthrop to William Spring, February 8, 1630, in Winthrop Papers, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison et al., 5 vols. (Boston, 1929–47), 2:203, 205–6.
2. Winthrop to Spring, 2:206; John Winthrop, “Experiencia,” in Winthrop Papers, 1:166, 202–4.
3. Winthrop, “Experiencia,” 1:202–3; Winthrop to Spring, February 8, 1630, 2:205–6; William Spring to John Winthrop, n.d. [March 1637], in Winthrop Papers, 3:365; John Winthrop to Margaret Winthrop, October 3, 1623, in The Life and Letters of John Winthrop, ed. Robert C. Winthrop, 2 vols. (Boston, 1864–67), 1:193.
4. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 9, 15, 16, 18, 29. Halperin was building on Michel Foucault’s argument that we should seek to understand sexuality not as a biological fact but instead as a cultural production, for which see Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), esp. 127. For other helpful formulations of this approach, see Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 10–11; and Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), viii–ix.
5. See Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), esp. 62–71.
6. For southern planters and their incorporation of sex into their sense of themselves as gentlemen, see Godbeer, 190–93.
7. Theorists have challenged the model of sexual orientation from a range of perspectives, and many young people reject as artificial the clear-cut distinctions on which the homo/heterosexual paradigm depends, invoking instead a more fluid understanding of sexual desire and identity. Meanwhile, some Christian denominations insist that our selection of sexual partners results from moral choice and not an innate sexuality. Yet the basic assumptions underlying this paradigm remain powerful and indeed predominant within Western culture.
8. Edward Taylor to Elizabeth Fitch, September 1674, in The Unpublished Writings of Edward Taylor, ed. Thomas M. Davis and Virginia L. Davis, 3 vols. (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 3:37–41; Edward Taylor, The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 142, 164, 212, 230, 248, 259, 295, 362–63, 448. Taylor drew extensively on the language of Canticles. See, for example, his adaptation of “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth” (Cant. 1:2) in Poems of Edward Taylor (254–55) and of “I am my beloved and my beloved is mine” (Cant. 6:2; 323–25).
9. Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 2:864 (October 19, 1717), 882 (February 6, 1718), 891 (April 4, 1718); Increase Mather, Practical Truths Plainly Delivered (Boston, 1718), 59–60.
