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unsupported by surviving evidence.” It is surely disingenuous to claim that we face a stark choice between doing so and leaving topics such as this “unexplored.” There is a middle way that involves circumspect presentation of evidence. Acknowledging that the language used by Wirt might indicate sexual attraction on his part is one thing, but to conclude that this “impl[ies] sexual relations” is quite another. Benemann, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships (New York: Haworth, 2006), 16.
40. John Randolph to Henry Rutledge, quoted in William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773–1833, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 1:127, 135; Cheever to Paine, July 27, 1749, 1:58; Wirt to Carr, March 19, 1802; Virgil Maxcy to William Blanding, January 1, 1800, Blanding Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Recent scholars of early modern England and Europe have also uncovered examples of male friendship in which love and sexual attraction intermingled. See, for example, George Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Guido Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
41. Most biographers of Alexander Hamilton, for example, either ignore suggestive passages in Hamilton’s correspondence with John Laurens, some playfully flirtatious and others deeply loving, or simply insist that their friendship must have been entirely nonsexual. As William Benemann points out, while there is “no irrefutable proof that Laurens and Hamilton were lovers,” there is “sufficient circumstantial evidence to render indefensible any unqualified pronouncement that they were not” (Male-Male Intimacy, xii–xiii). Unfortunately, Benemann goes on to claim that other male friendships probably did have an erotic component even when there is no evidence at all to suggest sexual attraction, let alone that sexual relations were taking place.
42. Cassandra Good, Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Historians such as Lillian Faderman (Surpassing the Love of Men) and Caroll Smith-Rosenberg (“Female World of Love and Ritual”) have uncovered a world of female friendship that incorporated a broad range of possibilities for emotional and physical intimacy.
43. Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 6; Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 6. David Halperin makes a similar point in his introduction to Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800, ed. Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 8–11.
44. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 18.
45. See also Kathryn Wichelns, “From The Scarlet Letter to Stonewall: Reading the 1629 Thomas(ine) Hall Case, 1978–2009,” Early American Studies 12 (2014): 523: “In seeking to bring in from the margins those whose experiences were suppressed or ignored for so long, we must avoid the temptation to make them seem too familiar.”
2
The Strange Career of Interracial Heterosexuality
Renee Romano
In 1603, long before there was any category we now know as heterosexuality, William Shakespeare penned Othello, which famously features a love affair and marriage between the beautiful white Desdemona and the “Moorish” Venetian general Othello. That love affair ends badly, as interracial relationships often do in cultural representations, when a jealous Othello kills his wife after being misled by the duplicitous Iago into believing that she is having an affair. In Shakespeare’s tale, Othello’s passionate love and desire for his wife does not make him manly. It does not make him “normal.” Instead, as the literary critic Rebecca Ann Bach has shown, at the time when the play was written, a man’s unbridled desire for a woman made him weak, even effeminate. Othello’s excessive desire for his wife marked him as racially other in the seventeenth century, a degraded Moor who did not exhibit the kind of self-control suitable for a proper man.1
Heterosexuality, Hanne Blank writes in Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, is “like air, all around us and yet invisible.”2 It is the task of this volume to make visible what has been elusively invisible, to make historically specific a category, identity, and norm that have remained stubbornly ahistorical. The changing reception to the character of Othello offers one small clue to the early emergence of what Bach calls the “heterosexual imaginary” over the course of the eighteenth century. If in Shakespeare’s day, Othello’s excessive desire for his wife marked him as a racially inferior man, by the eighteenth century, commentators on the play had begun to laud Othello for his passion as an emerging heterosexual order recoded male sexual desire for women as a key marker of masculinity. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Bach argues, “what was originally part of Othello’s racial stigma became part of the dominant male identity.”3
That transition of course did not reach completion in the eighteenth century. Even in the early twentieth century, a medical dictionary still defined heterosexuality as “abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex.”4 And while this new category might have helped Othello’s reputation with theater critics, did it really, as Bach’s analysis seems to imply, somehow help legitimize the idea of interracial love? Shakespeare’s problematic characterization of his overly jealous Moor reflected what scholars have recognized as an extraordinarily powerful aspect of the emergence of race: the ways in which ideologies about racial difference and especially the supposed inferiority of nonwhites drew on portrayals of sexual difference and deviance. As race cohered as an ideology for categorizing the people of the world in a hierarchy (especially in slave societies like that which developed in the United States), hypersexuality—or supposedly illicit and excessive, uncontrollable sexual desire—became a key marker of racial inferiority. The changing reception of a character like Othello makes one wonder, might the acceptance of sexual desire signaled by the emergence of heterosexuality somehow diminish the stigma of sexual racism and undercut the opposition to cross-race relationships that served as a foundation of the United States’ racial/sexual system?
Or would history show that as the sexual system evolved in the United States, middle-class whites could legitimate their own more passionate sexual desires as respectable and properly heterosexual by defining them against a stigmatized other, an other that would include not only the new category of “homosexuals,” who engaged in same-sex acts, but also interracial couples, who too engaged in sexual acts with what most saw as an improper object choice? As heterosexuality became decisively normative, shifting from its turn-of-the century definition of a “perverse” desire for the opposite sex to its 1934 dictionary definition of “normal sexuality,”5 was it in part because same-race couples could go to a “black and tan” club, watch interracial mixing, and craft their own more respectable heterosexual identity in opposition to a deviant margin? Othello’s story did not end in the eighteenth century; instead, black men like him who desired and married white women would again end up as outsiders, heterosexuals perhaps but certainly not heteronormative, at least not in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries and, arguably, still not today.
This chapter asks