171–84; and Clare A. Lyons, “Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 152.
37. Daniel Webster to Thomas Merrill, May 1, 1804, in Writings and Speeches, 17:166; William Wirt to William Pope, August 5, 1803, Wirt Papers, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore; Wirt to Dabney Carr, April 1, 1810, Wirt Papers; Wirt to Carr, June 10, 1814, Library of Virginia, Richmond. Anya Jabour discusses Wirt’s friendships in “Male Friendship and Masculinity.”
38. Israel Cheever to Robert Treat Paine, July 27, 1749, in Papers of Robert Treat Paine, ed. Stephen T. Riley and Edward Hanson, 3 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1992), 1:58; William Wirt to Dabney Carr, March 19, 1802, Wirt Papers.
39. William Benemann castigates Anya Jabour for holding back from the conclusion that the language used in letters written by the southern lawyer William Wirt and his male friends “imply actual sexual relations.” Jabour does acknowledge that a few of these letters “contained erotic overtones,” but as she points out, the letters between these men “give no indication that their prized reunions included sexual intimacy” (“Male Friendship and Masculinity,” 93). Benemann goes on to declare that Jabour’s “reticence stems from a reluctance to make definitive statements about the past which are unsupported by surviving evidence” and that “proper interpretation of ambiguous language” is the only alternative to leaving the subject of male-male intimacy “unexplored.” Others may be disturbed by the claim that one can make “definitive statements about the past which are unsupported by surviving evidence.” It is surely disingenuous to claim that we face a stark choice between doing so and leaving topics such as this “unexplored.” There is a middle way that involves circumspect presentation of evidence. Acknowledging that the language used by Wirt might indicate sexual attraction on his part is one thing, but to conclude that this “impl[ies] sexual relations” is quite another. Benemann, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships (New York: Haworth, 2006), 16.
40. John Randolph to Henry Rutledge, quoted in William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773–1833, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 1:127, 135; Cheever to Paine, July 27, 1749, 1:58; Wirt to Carr, March 19, 1802; Virgil Maxcy to William Blanding, January 1, 1800, Blanding Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Recent scholars of early modern England and Europe have also uncovered examples of male friendship in which love and sexual attraction intermingled. See, for example, George Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Guido Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
41. Most biographers of Alexander Hamilton, for example, either ignore suggestive passages in Hamilton’s correspondence with John Laurens, some playfully flirtatious and others deeply loving, or simply insist that their friendship must have been entirely nonsexual. As William Benemann points out, while there is “no irrefutable proof that Laurens and Hamilton were lovers,” there is “sufficient circumstantial evidence to render indefensible any unqualified pronouncement that they were not” (Male-Male Intimacy, xii–xiii). Unfortunately, Benemann goes on to claim that other male friendships probably did have an erotic component even when there is no evidence at all to suggest sexual attraction, let alone that sexual relations were taking place.
42. Cassandra Good, Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Historians such as Lillian Faderman (Surpassing the Love of Men) and Caroll Smith-Rosenberg (“Female World of Love and Ritual”) have uncovered a world of female friendship that incorporated a broad range of possibilities for emotional and physical intimacy.
43. Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 6; Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 6. David Halperin makes a similar point in his introduction to Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800, ed. Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 8–11.
44. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 18.
45. See also Kathryn Wichelns, “From The Scarlet Letter to Stonewall: Reading the 1629 Thomas(ine) Hall Case, 1978–2009,” Early American Studies 12 (2014): 523: “In seeking to bring in from the margins those whose experiences were suppressed or ignored for so long, we must avoid the temptation to make them seem too familiar.”
2
The Strange Career of Interracial Heterosexuality
Renee Romano
In 1603, long before there was any category we now know as heterosexuality, William Shakespeare penned Othello, which famously features a love affair and marriage between the beautiful white Desdemona and the “Moorish” Venetian general Othello. That love affair ends badly, as interracial relationships often do in cultural representations, when a jealous Othello kills his wife after being misled by the duplicitous Iago into believing that she is having an affair. In Shakespeare’s tale, Othello’s passionate love and desire for his wife does not make him manly. It does not make him “normal.” Instead, as the literary critic Rebecca Ann Bach has shown, at the time when the play was written, a man’s unbridled desire for a woman made him weak, even effeminate. Othello’s excessive desire for his wife marked him as racially other in the seventeenth century, a degraded Moor who did not exhibit the kind of self-control suitable for a proper man.1
Heterosexuality, Hanne Blank writes in Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, is “like air, all around us and yet invisible.”2 It is the task of this volume to make visible what has been elusively invisible, to make historically specific a category, identity, and norm that have remained stubbornly ahistorical. The changing reception to the character of Othello offers one small clue to the early emergence of what Bach calls the “heterosexual imaginary” over the course of the eighteenth century. If in Shakespeare’s day, Othello’s excessive desire for his wife marked him as a racially inferior man, by the eighteenth century, commentators on the play had begun to laud Othello for his passion as an emerging heterosexual order recoded male sexual desire for women as a key marker of masculinity. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Bach argues, “what was originally part of Othello’s racial stigma became part of the dominant male identity.”3
That transition of course did not reach completion in the eighteenth century. Even in the early twentieth century, a medical dictionary still defined heterosexuality as “abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex.”4 And while this new category might have helped Othello’s reputation with theater critics, did it really, as Bach’s analysis seems to imply, somehow help legitimize the idea of interracial love? Shakespeare’s problematic characterization of his overly jealous Moor reflected what scholars
