about venereal disease, see Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, “Keep Healthy,” Chicago Defender, October 25, 1913, 4; “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, January 22, 1916, 6; “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, September 21, 1918, 16; “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, April 7, 1923, 12. Significantly, Williams published occasional articles on health—including ones about venereal disease—into the 1930s. See, for example, Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, “The Way to Health,” Chicago Defender, February 16, 1935, 12.
6. See, for example, the following columns: Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, “Keep Healthy,” Chicago Defender, November 8, 1913, 4; “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, November 20, 1915, 8; “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, September 25, 1920, 12; Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, “Keep Healthy,” Chicago Defender, October 4, 1913, 7.
7. A search of other select African American newspapers—namely, the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Atlanta Daily World, and the Philadelphia Tribune—revealed no usage of either “heterosexual” or “heterosexuality” before 1940. In 1933, however, the Afro-American published an article about a religious movement led by a man of African descent who was probably born as George Baker (1879–1965) but who was better known as “Father Divine.” And when reporting on an investigation of Father Divine’s interracial Peace Mission, the Afro-American noted that a committee concluded that Divine’s followers were “deluded into accepting certain social, biological, and economic fallacies”—including the notion that “the human race may be propagated without heterosexual relationship in marital life.” To be sure, the committee acknowledged that Divine’s Peace Mission could have a positive impact on “former criminal[s] or morally loose characters.” The committee took a dim view of the Peace Mission’s advocacy of celibacy all the same. Coincidentally—or not—some of Divine’s black female followers might have embraced “forms of desire prohibited in Divine’s theology,” namely, same-sex desire. If this article ultimately made no direct claims about such women, committee members did note what they considered to be a worrisome congregation of adults and children of the same sex in one Peace Mission dormitory. What do we make of the apparent reality that it was not until investigation of a heterodox movement that a leading black newspaper would invoke the term “heterosexual”? See “Are Father Divine’s Angels Deluded?,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 30, 1933, 12; Judith Weisenfeld, “Real True Buds: Celibacy and Same-Sex Desire across the Color Line in Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement,” in Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States, ed. Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather R. White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 95.
8. “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, April 18, 1925, A12. The literature scholar Mary Zaborskis maintains that one of Williams’s contemporaries, the African American educator and reformer Janie Porter Barrett (1865–1948), focused on the “heterosexualization” of delinquent girls at the Industrial Home School for Colored Girls in Virginia during the late 1910s and early 1920s. It is not clear, however, whether Barrett thought more in terms of encouraging sexual purity, respectability, matrimony, and “home life” or whether she actually embraced emergent notions about “heterosexuality” in a manner akin to Josephine Jackson. See Zaborskis, “Queering Black Girlhood at the Virginia Industrial School,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 45, no. 2 (2020): 373–94, esp. 381–86.
9. On the history of how secular and religious marriage counselors actively taught heterosexuality (and engaged deeply with social scientific and psychological theories about heterosexuality), see Rebecca L. Davis, More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Newspaper searches reveal myriad advice columns that mention and explain heterosexuality in papers throughout the United States. See, for example, “Dr. Brady Says: Did the Doctor Do Right?,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 26, 1939, 25; Dr. George W. Crane (Northwestern University), “Case Records of a Psychologist,” Ogden (UT) Standard-Examiner, March 30, 1938, 4; Dr. George W. Crane, “Case Records of a Psychologist,” Appleton (WI) Post-Crescent, December 10, 1938, 8; Dr. George W. Crane, “Encourage Child to Mix Friends: Case Records of a Psychologist,” Pittsburgh Press, April 21, 1939, 53; Dr. George W. Crane, “The Case Records of a Psychologist,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 15, 1939, 20.
10. “Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams Talks on Preventative Measures . . . ,” Chicago Defender, July 14, 1928, A2.
11. On the need to reevaluate the Victorian-to-modern paradigm for turn-of-the-twentieth-century sexuality in the United States, see Catherine Cocks, “Rethinking Sexuality in the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5, no. 2 (2006): 93–118. For a challenge to Cocks, one that embraces the “Victorian-to-modern framework,” see Leigh Ann Wheeler, “Inventing Sexuality: Ideologies, Identities, and Practices in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” in A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, ed. Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy C. Unger (Somerset, NJ: Wiley, 2017), 102–15.
12. David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 105.
13. Daniel Wickberg, “Heterosexual White Male: Some Recent Inversions in American Cultural History,” Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (June 2005): 155.
14. Robert A. Nye rightly observes, “As an object of disciplinary knowledge, sexuality has never been the monopoly of any single field. It has been a principal subject for ethicists, philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, creative artists, medical professionals, psychologists, and psychoanalysts.” Nye nevertheless stresses that historicizing sexuality is critical: “The idea that tastes and identities appear in particular historical circumstances means that we are unlikely to understand the promise or the limits of our contemporary sexualities unless we understand those of the past.” Nye, “On Why History Is So Important to an Understanding of Human Sexuality,” in Sexuality, ed. Nye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–15 (quotes on 3, 15).
15. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1985), 6.
16. See, for example, Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987). Amadiume’s pathbreaking Male Daughters, Female Husbands is not a work of transgender history but instead challenges hegemonic, Western notions about gender itself. Significantly, Amadiume shows that European colonial powers in West Africa imposed rigid ideas about binary sex differences on indigenous people and that Africans’ own conceptions of gender could be notably flexible. Transgender histories have further prodded us to approach the history of heterosexuality as the effect of historical processes rather than a universal condition. Jen Manion centers the stories of female husbands who “transed gender,” to show that for nearly two hundred years of British and US history, “gender was
