Sodomites and Gender Transgressors in 1840s New York: An Interview with Marc Stein
Today on Gotham, Katie Uva interviews Marc Stein about his new project, a digital exhibition that analyzes commentary on “sodomites” in New York newspapers of the 1840s.
“The Falsetto Singer,” The Whip, 15 January 1842, 1. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Can you tell us a bit about the structure of the project: how did you settle on a digital exhibit, what is Queer Pasts, and how can a person access this material?
Queer Pasts is a new digital history project that I have been coediting with Lisa Arellano for the publisher Alexander Street/ProQuest since 2021. It’s available primarily through college, university, and public library subscription, commonly bundled with other Alexander Street and ProQuest databases such as Women and Social Movements. We publish six peer-reviewed exhibits per year. Each exhibit features an introductory essay and 20-40 primary sources (scanned and converted into searchable texts). My first Queer Pasts exhibit focused on a groundbreaking 1968 study of prison sexual violence in Philadelphia; the 1840s New York sodomites project is my second. These types of digital primary source projects encourage readers to develop their own interpretations, guided by the questions, frameworks, and recommendations of the project editor. For teachers who like to work with students on the craft of history and the challenges of interpreting primary sources, these types of projects can be useful. As a historian who has worked primarily on the 1940s through the 1980s, I challenged myself by turning in this project to a much earlier period. In a sense, the primary source documents genre allowed me to do so with greater comfort, since we do not necessarily expect our project editors to provide fully-developed analytic conclusions.
What are the newspapers you worked with, and how do they fit into the broader world of 1840s New York periodicals?
In doing this project, I was greatly influenced by Jonathan Ned Katz’s work on the 1840s sodomites (published in his book Love Stories), but also by the work of Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz on that era’s “flash press,” a collection of provocative, sensational, nativist, racist, and anti-Semitic newspapers, aimed primarily at young white men and focused in many respects on entertainment, sports, leisure, prostitution, and vice (see their book The Flash Press). My exhibit features twenty-seven items originally published in three sets of New York City newspapers from October 1841 to October 1842. Eighteen were published in The Whip or The Whip and Satirist; six in The Flash or The Sunday Flash; and three in The Weekly Rake. The majority of the items were previously discovered and discussed by the four historians just mentioned, but I found several additional items about sodomites, added a set of articles about trans subjects, and suggested some new avenues of investigation and interpretation in my project introduction.
What exactly is meant by “sodomites,” and were there other terms coming in and out of fashion at the time for people whose behaviors or identities we might recognize as “queer” today?
“Masquerading,” The Whip, 5 March 1842, 1. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Sodomites were people who engaged in sodomy, and the word “sodomy” is derived from the biblical story of the city of Sodom. Religious scholars have long debated the nature of the evils of Sodom that led to its destruction, but the nineteenth-century term sodomy commonly referenced anal sex, oral sex, and/or same-sex sex. European historians (including Randolph Trumbach and Charles Upchurch) have identified communities of sodomites, and repressive campaigns against those communities, in large urban centers such as London, Amsterdam, and Paris in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but U.S. historians have not. We have ample evidence of queer acts and desires, but not gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans identities and communities, in colonial America or the United States before the late 1800s. That’s part of what makes this set of documents from the 1840s so interesting and so significant — they might allow us to push back the clock on when such identities and communities emerged in the United States. I find the term “sodomite” fascinating in part because it’s suggestive of both act and identity — it’s an identity based on an act. It’s also fascinating because while in theory the term could reference men, women, and people who engaged in cross-sex oral or anal sex, in practice (at least in this set of documents) it was commonly used for older and aggressive men accused of abusing and coercing younger men and boys. That’s quite different from the contemporaneous “female husbands” recently explored by Jen Manion or the somewhat later “drag queens” explored by Channing Joseph, the fairies by George Chauncey, the lesbians by Lisa Duggan, or the homosexuals and inverts by multiple scholars.
How does the flash press’ condemnation of “sodomites” reflect changes that were going on in New York City at the time? Do concerns about sodomy tend to center on particular locations, professions, or demographics?
In the 1840s, New York was dynamically growing and changing, with important implications for class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexuality. Immigration, urbanization, and industrialization unleashed contradictory forces, including celebrations and condemnations of transgressive genders and sexualities. As Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz point out, the “flash press” was produced by and aimed at a broad cross-section of young white men, many of whom enjoyed the city’s new commercialized amusements while simultaneously criticizing particular aspects of the new urban milieu. The condemnation of sodomites is a classic Foucaultian nineteenth-century sexual discourse — repressing and inciting, silencing and speaking, rejecting and reproducing. The “villains'' tended to be white “ethnic” immigrants — English, German, Italian, French, Jewish, Portuguese, Spanish, and others — and they were described as using their financial advantages to target young and vulnerable white men. In this respect, these sources capture widespread cultural anxieties about the genders and sexualities of young white men and the new pleasures and dangers of life in urban America.
Could you speak a bit to the gender dynamics of this press coverage? Were women mentioned as either aggressors or victims or is the focus largely on men? What gender roles or gender identities appear in these articles?
The “sodomites,” as depicted in the flash press, were overwhelming male, but my exhibit considers these representations alongside contemporaneous depictions of masculine women and feminine men who were not described as sodomites. Many of these arguably trans people were objects of fascination and ridicule, but some were not, and I don’t see the same level of condemnation that we see directed toward the sodomites. All of this isn’t to say that the flash press didn’t present women as sexual aggressors or victims — female prostitutes were commonly presented in these ways. Sodomites, however, were overwhelmingly male. As for the genders of the sodomites, the exhibit suggests that they were represented as both aggressively masculine and deviantly feminine, while their “victims” were presented as feminized before, during, and after their encounters with “sodomites.”
What do you perceive as the flash press’ objective in offering this coverage? Were they tapping into a broader appetite for sex and scandal? Were they hoping to bring about criminal convictions?
Their motives were mixed. They wanted to sell papers, which sex and scandal could do. They wanted to provoke legal and political action. They wanted to settle personal scores and exact personal revenge. Above all, they wanted to remake the city in their image — a city in which young white Christian men could pursue their new pleasures and possibilities and purge the city of those they perceived as ethnic, religious, and sexual "outsiders.”
What do you glean from these articles about the presence of queer identity or queer communities in 1840s New York? Were “sodomites” understood to be people with immutable, innate characteristics? Or was it more of an acute, behavior-specific label that might be jettisoned at any time? Do we get any sense from these articles of how the accused “sodomites” understood themselves or felt about themselves?
This is the central question posed by the exhibit and I deliberately avoid offering definitive answers. Some of the language can be read as suggesting a more behavioral conception — that the sodomites were individual sinners who operated independently — but some can be read as suggesting that the sodomites had distinct sexual identities, were members of distinct sexual communities, and were willing to defend themselves and resist oppression. I also try to suggest that even if these identities and communities did not exist or only existed in nascent form prior to the flash press campaigns, the campaigns might have incited their emergence and growth.
An often commented-upon challenge of queer history is that so many of the sources, especially as we go further back in time, are from people or institutions that are explicitly condemnatory of or hostile to queer communities (police records, doctors, insane asylums, etc.) What challenges and opportunities arise from a focus on these kinds of sources?
This, too, is a central question posed by the exhibit. Unfortunately, these sources do not allow us access to the perspectives and voices of the sodomites themselves. We can read against the grain, speculating about their perspectives and voices, but we always need to be conscious of the possibility that the authors of these articles were misrepresenting the social and sexual realities of the people they condemned. We can ask the social historian’s questions (what were the underlying material realities), but the exhibit recommends doing so with the mindset of the cultural historian, always conscious of the fact that these are representations and discourses, not material realities, except to the extent that representations and discourses can be materially real and socially powerful.
Marc Stein is the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History at San Francisco State University, the coeditor of Queer Pasts, and the director of OutHistory. His recent books include The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History (NYU Press, 2019); Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism (University of California Press, 2022); and Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, 2d edition (Routledge, 2023).