「经济学人」Fierce Desires

A new history of American sexuality argues that it is

Fierce Desires. By Rebecca Davis. W.W. Norton; 480 pages; $35

The first time the lads slept together was in 1864. Teenage soldiers in the Union army, Hubbel Pierce and Alonzo Choate met on the march to the South and fell for each other, brothers in arms. When they returned to their lives as homesteaders in Michigan, Pierce gave Choate a ring. In letters they called each other “beloved husband” and joked about their sex life. Relatives joined in the teasing. In one letter, Choate’s sister wrote a postscript in which she referred to her brother as Pierce’s “wife”.

If they had lived in modern times, Choate and Pierce might identify as gay, and people might refer to them as such. Today sexuality makes people who they are: straight and gay, the stripes in a rainbow flag, she/her/they/them. Some argue that is the way it has always been. Many on the left believe that “Today’s sexual identities are authentic because they are eternal,” writes Rebecca Davis, a history professor at the University of Delaware.

Poppycock, Ms Davis writes in “Fierce Desires”, a chronicle of American shagging from the colonial era to the present. The idea that sex defines people did not emerge until, roughly, the turn of the 20th century. If Choate and Pierce had met just a few decades later, their contemporaries would have seen them as categorically different from heterosexuals. Meeting as they did in the 1860s, neither they nor their relatives appeared to believe that their intimacy made them different. And their romance did not stop them from going on to marry women.

In the 19th century sex was something you did, not who you were. Sex among young men was “common and mostly unpunished” because it was seen as a passing phase in the transition to marriage. Before the 20th century identity was not intrinsically sexual, Ms Davis argues. People were gentlemen or servants; free or enslaved; bad Christians or good (or non-believers); indigenous, English and, later, American. Those identities shaped their sex lives and ideas about the morality of sex. For the Pueblo of New Mexico, intercourse between an unwed native woman and a foreign man was an act of diplomacy. Christians saw the same act as sinful. (Luckily for Christians prone to slipping up, God is often a forgiving sort.)

A slew of historical forces gradually pushed sex to the centre of the self. Gays and lesbians flocked to cities and, as they found each other, began to pinpoint their sexual orientation as “the defining aspect of their difference”, writes Ms Davis. As gays became more visible in the 1920s, particularly on stage in cabarets and speakeasies during what people once called the “pansy and lesbian craze”, those who were not gay began to define themselves in opposition to homosexuals. These people began to call themselves “heterosexual”.

The idea that sex formed the cornerstone of identity was just emerging; it would be popularised by intellectuals, activists and the state. In the late 1800s doctors came to understand same-sex desire as an illness of the mind rather than an aberrant act of an otherwise normal person. The government agreed and purged homosexuals from the army and civil service in the 1940s-50s. At the same time, thinkers including Herbert Marcuse, a German-American philosopher, laid the intellectual groundwork for the sexual revolution of the 1960s when they wrote that sexual liberation was a prerequisite for the political kind. By this point, no matter whether one favoured sexual repression or freedom, everyone seemed to agree: sex was more than an act. It defined the person.

Ms Davis is an engaging guide to the past, especially when she upends assumptions. But as the book builds to a climax, her account stops just short of satisfaction. She chronicles the emergence of sexual identity but does not adequately explain how it arose. Why, exactly, gay urbanites identified sexual orientation as the source of their difference goes unanswered. “Fierce Desires” is therefore an entertaining romp but ultimately frustrating. Ms Davis is a tease.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Sexy time”(Oct  24th 2024)

我没有译文，仅供拓展阅读

LearnAndRecord

2015年2月8日

2024年10月30日

第3553天

每天持续行动学外语