queer masculinities

11
‘Sodomitical Actings’, ‘Inward
Disposition’, and ‘The Bonds of
Brotherly Affection’: Sexual and
Emotional Intimacy Between Men
in Colonial and Revolutionary
America
Richard Godbeer
Jamestown, the first permanent British settlement in North America,
was initially an all-male colony. Though women did migrate to the
Chesapeake in subsequent years, they remained relatively few in
number: male colonists outnumbered women by roughly six to one in
the 1620s and by four to one in later decades. The Chesapeake’s
skewed sex ratio made it extremely difficult for men to find wives and
establish conventional family households. It also meant that most
colonists did not have access to sexual relations with English women
during the initial period of settlement. There seems, furthermore, to
have been little sexual contact with Indians during these years. 1 It is
difficult to believe that a group of young and notoriously unbridled
men remained celibate for an extended period of time. Early settlers
often paired off to form all-male households, living and working
together. As Mary Beth Norton has remarked, ‘it would be truly
remarkable if all the male-only partnerships lacked a sexual ingredient.’
2 Some men may have engaged in sexual relations with each other
out of desperation; others may have taken advantage of an unusual situation
to form relationships that would have been more controversial
under normal circumstances. But whatever their motives, men who
coupled sexually with other men are unlikely to have been anomalous
in such an environment. It seems reasonable to assume that much of
the sex that took place in the first few years of settlement in the south
was sodomitical.
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