queer masculinities

198 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
behaviour was virtually unknown in everyday life.’ He explains this in
terms of a roughly even sex ratio that enabled most New Englanders to
marry, official hostility to sodomy, vigilance against its practice, and
the apparent rarity of sodomy in seventeenth-century England, ‘the
culture from which almost all New Englanders drew their basic moral
values.’ Thompson rejects the argument made by Alan Bray, for early
modern England, and by Robert Oaks, for seventeenth-century New
England, that there was ‘undoubtedly much more homosexual activity
than the court records indicate.’ 21 Thompson is doubtless right to
argue that New England’s sex ratio would have militated against the
kind of situational same-sex intimacy that probably occurred in the
early south. But his assumption that official ‘homophobia’ was
reflected in popular attitudes is much less compelling. ‘It does not
seem to occur to Thompson,’ writes Warner, ‘that the scarcity of court
evidence might indicate non-reporting from any of a number of
causes.’ 22
Throughout the colonial period, New England communities preferred
to handle problematic behavior through informal channels; they
resorted to ecclesiastical discipline or the legal system only when
private exhortation or local and informal measures failed to resolve the
situation. In several cases of sodomy that came before courts or church
congregations, it emerged during the proceedings that the accused had
long been notorious for their sexual interest in men and that it had
taken extraordinary circumstances to bring about a formal charge. Any
number of local incidents and controversies involving sodomy may
have escaped record because of this preference for non-institutional
forms of social control. Though most of the surviving information
about illicit sex comes from court records, colonists did not see such
behavior primarily as a legal problem. The rigorous demands of the
legal system may also have deterred some New Englanders from initiating
formal action against offenders. Addressing the situation through
non-juridical channels was, moreover, less dire than invoking capital
law and so would have appealed to those who disapproved of sodomy
but did not want the accused to hang. Many sexual offenses came to
light because pregnancy resulted; in this respect there was less risk for
those engaging in sodomy.
Some New Englanders may have neglected to act against sodomitical
behavior in their communities because they were slow to recognize or
label it as such. Both Colin Talley and I have argued that sex occurring
in the context of a recognized hierarchical relationship, such as
between a master and his male servant, would not necessarily have