queer masculinities

When the inhabitants of Windsor told court officials about Nicholas
Sension’s long history of attraction toward young men, their remarks
were of little use in proving a legal charge of sodomy unless they had
seen penetration occur (only one witness made this claim and so
Sension could not be executed). Nor did their perspective fit with the
theological paradigm that emphasized a sinner’s inclination toward all
manner of depravity. Yet relating Sension’s male-oriented sexual
appetite made sense to them.
During the years between Nicholas Sension’s trial in 1677 and the
outbreak of the American Revolution, representations of sex between
men in English print culture underwent a dramatic transformation.
The emergence of the ‘sodomite’ as a social category – referring to a
specific cadre of men with a consistent, though not necessarily exclusive,
sexual interest in other men – represented a significant shift away
from earlier typologies. Sodomy was now perceived as a crucial part of
specific personality types; male Londoners attracted to members of the
same-sex could find partners and social camaraderie in recognized
gathering places such as the so-called ‘molly houses’ scattered across
the city. Surviving evidence from colonial cities in North America gives
no signs of a subculture such as London offered. But recent studies by
Thomas Foster and Clare Lyons have begun the task of examining perceptions
of same-sex intimacy in eighteenth-century America and the
degree to which new metropolitan conceptions influenced colonial
attitudes.
Foster’s work on early eighteenth-century New England reveals
‘complex discourses of sodomy’ that combined older conventions with
new conceptions and concerns. Readers of eighteenth-century
Massachusetts newspapers encountered items describing police raids
on ‘molly houses’ in London and the prosecution of those who participated
in that city’s sodomitical subculture. References to such men as
‘sodomites’ (a term hardly ever used in seventeenth-century New
England to describe those who engaged in same-sex intimacy)
amounted to the depiction of sodomy as ‘a feature of character’ or ‘personhood.’
Yet such representations were by no means equivalent to
‘the modern medicalized and psychologized homosexual subject.’
Older religious frameworks that understood sodomy in terms of moral
corruption inviting divine retribution still exerted a powerful influence
in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. One newspaper likened London
to Sodom and Gomorrah, declaring that ‘sodomitical clubs’ in the
metropolis invited the same ‘just judgments’ that had rained upon the
biblical cities. 29 Richard Godbeer: America 201