history of gender and sexuality Archives

A visceral turn: Dr. Zeb Tortorici and queer alterities to the archives

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference focuses on archives with Latin American perspectives in order to better visualize the ethical and political implications of archival practices globally. The conference was held in February 2022 and the videos of all the presentation will be available soon. Thinking archivally in a time of COVID-19 has also given us an unexpected opportunity to re-imagine the international academic conference. This Not Even Past publication joins those by other graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. The series as a whole is designed to engage with the work of individual speakers as well as to present valuable resources that will supplement the conference’s recorded presentations. This new conference model, which will make online resources freely and permanently available, seeks to reach audiences beyond conference attendees in the hopes of decolonizing and democratizing access to the production of knowledge. The conference recordings and connected articles can be found here.

En el marco del homenaje al centenario de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, la Conferencia Lozano Long 2022 propició un espacio de reflexión sobre archivos latinoamericanos desde un pensamiento latinoamericano con el propósito de entender y conocer las contribuciones de la región a las prácticas archivísticas globales, así como las responsabilidades éticas y políticas que esto implica. Pensar en términos de archivística en tiempos de COVID-19 también nos brindó la imprevista oportunidad de re-imaginar la forma en la que se llevan a cabo conferencias académicas internacionales. Como parte de esta propuesta, esta publicación de Not Even Past se junta a las otras de la serie escritas por estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. En ellas los estudiantes resaltan el trabajo de las y los panelistas invitados a la conferencia con el objetivo de socializar el material y así descolonizar y democratizar el acceso a la producción de conocimiento. La conferencia tuvo lugar en febrero de 2022 pero todas las presentaciones, así como las grabaciones de los paneles están archivados en YouTube de forma permanente y pronto estarán disponibles las traducciones al inglés y español respectivamente. Las grabaciones de la conferencia y los artículos relacionados se pueden encontrar aquí.

…Soy ese amor que negarás para salvar tu dignidad
Soy lo prohibido…
(Roberto Cantoral, 1970)

The first time I engaged with the work of Dr. Zeb Tortorici was in 2019, at the end of a Texas fall when the idea of a worldwide emergency as COVID-19 seemed improbable, if not impossible. At the time, I was meeting with my future PhD advisor, Dr. Laura Gutierrez, at UT Austin, to explore research into queer disgust, the performance of pleasure, excess, and queer rejection to LGBTT+ hegemony in México. Dr. Gutierrez told me about a book she considered helpful for my research. The book was Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (2018). This book would become my introduction to the work of Dr. Tortorici, his affective approach to archived documentation, and the methodological shift to queering archives in the search for possibilities for censured queer alterity.

Once I had the book in my hands, I examined it with care and attention. A medium-sized book, not too heavy, yet not insubstantial. A black and red cover showcased an image of what looked to be a winged devil speaking to various demonic creatures. Navigating the book’s pages was as fascinating as exploring the aesthetic composition of its exterior. Dr. Tortorici introduces the book by re-telling an event from my hometown, Monterrey, in 1656. Lorenzo Vidales, a local thirteen-year-old, was found engaging in bestiality with a goat, an act the civilian and religious courts punished by having Lorenzo whipped and expelled from the city of Monterrey. The death penalty served as a warning and promise for him if he ever thought of returning to the city. Even when the event belongs to the municipal archives of Monterrey and, therefore, to our national and regional historical memory, it is, in no way, part of the collective knowledge of those of us who grew up at La Sultana del Norte, as Monterrey is known. It was too repulsive, too nefarious; and simply too deviant to have a place in the official narrative of the city, a space constructed around industrial myths where the will and determination of the industrial catholic bourgeoise made the desert fertile.

*State Archive of Nuevo León. Images taken by the author.*

Having the opportunity to speak to Dr. Tortorici in person shortly after encountering his work doubled my excitement and curiosity about his research into excess and memory. The start of that conversation, which I hope to continue over the years, was marked by what I felt to be a meeting of kindred spirits of a sort who haunt archived excess and academic curiosity. These spirits surely welcome gracious archival accidents. So are the questions and conceptual possibilities that archival accidents allow. What I found most valuable, however, as I venture into my own research on the possibilities of excess in performance art in Monterrey, were the questions of embodied viscerality and excess, and its trans-temporal archival presence.

Dr. Tortorici’s research has a particular connection to my own work on the visceral and excess and to my analysis of queer possibilities in the face of hegemonic normalcy. For context, two special issues of A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (to which Dr. Tortorici contributed) give theoretical weight to embodied and archival vicerality by defining it as “a phenomenological index for the logics of desire, consumption, disgust, health, disease, belonging, and displacement that are implicit in colonial and postcolonial relations.”^[1] Tortorici’s contribution adopts a microhistorical lens to show how vicerality can structure and baffle archival impulses. Incidents of necrophilia, fellatio, masturbation, and erotic religious visions from colonial Mexican archives reveal the layered and complex “gut feelings” of historical actors – including the archivists and historians who registered these events.^[2] In short, although Dr. Tortorici’s work covers an earlier period than my scholarly interests, I was eager to engage in dialogue with him—especially when it comes time to sort out affective approaches that queer the archives and confront the excessive elements that have been intentionally overlooked.

Let me zoom out briefly from my first reading of Sins Against Nature and my exciting first conversation with Dr. Tortorici about our shared research interests, to offer a brief overview of his research trajectory. From there, we can begin to explore how his understanding and work with the archives of “No” are opening up archival possibilities for radical alterities to institutional respectability. By archives of “No”, I refer to that which is too excessive to be archived, or even remembered by institutions; therefore rejected on a “anti” archive category, a “No” category .

Manuscript text of a sodomy trial in Monterrey — *Archivo Historico Monterrey / Causas Criminales Vol 10 B Exp 958 / 1704 / Contra Lorenzo Aspitia por haber cometido el pecado Nefando.*

Dr. Tortorici is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature at New York University. His research interests center around queer colonial history and archives in Latin America, with particular attention to pornography, dissident sexualities, pleasure, desire, and censorship. In addition to several prestigious fellowships and visiting professorships, Dr. Tortorici also has a remarkable publication record. Sins Against Nature won the John Boswell Award from the Committee on LGBT History and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize. Dr. Tortorici’s work recognizes the value of intellectual community building for advancing valuable scholarly projects. This includes his co-editing different volumes on Ethno-Pornography, Centering Animals in History, Trans*historicities, and Medical reproductive knowledge in 18^th-century Latin America.

Dr. Tortorici’s work in many ways represents a navigation of the archives of the “No.” As a historian of the “No”, his focus and methodology have centered on looking for different moments of non-history, non-citizens, and undesirable non-humans.^[3] He hopes to guide academic curiosity toward that which has been historically silenced and those who have been double censured by the creators and the user-researchers of archives. A methodological turn toward the “No” should not be understood within the limits of orthodox archival order and logic but rather as queer interruptions to academic normalcy. His approach to queering the archives is not reserved solely for diverse expressions of gender and sexuality. The implications of his questions around archival materials productively open broader alterities to the colonial order, which, in turn, make the “nefarious” episodes of the “no” histories he reconstructs transcendental.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, “pleasure,” despite the positive affect it connotes, nevertheless overlaps with the realm of the “No.” I’m fascinated by Dr. Tortorici’s work on pleasure for presenting a platform to speak of something that has been purposefully ignored, surveilled, and exoticized, and as a response to imposed contemporary archival respectability. Dr. Tortorici’s research opens a space for queer pleasure, embodied desires, and the erotic. His efforts are even more admirable precisely because they must work against the structural limits imposed by institutions holding archival traces of these pleasurable moments.

Book cover Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America

The good news is that visceral rejections of queer pleasure hold the key that can free over-silenced stories. Queer embodied conversations with archived pasts must be understood primarily as that: conversations. Dr. Tortorici leads us towards these conversations, which must necessarily turn towards careful coded dialogues that those queering archival research can affectively understand. These embodied visceral conversations inherently involve provocations, consumptions, and reactions. In this sense, Dr. Tortorici reveals how queering colonial archives means showing how archives hold and censure stories of consumption that have provoked disgust within those who created the archive. These visceral tensions open a “beyond time” affective encounter with those who study and translate queer codes of the archive and engage in visceral dialogues with the present, past, and future. Dr. Tortorici is careful to point out the need for accurate translations of queer viscerality. The provocation censured, persecuted, and archived during the colonial period does not have the same affective meaning for contemporary audiences. These conversations, therefore, are very much in the translation.

I keep returning to a term Dr. Tortorici brought into our dialogue: imagination. In order to affectively navigate and queer the archives there is a need for radical imagination. Radical imaginaries permit deeper explorations of the “what if?” These historical possibilities, in turn, contribute to queer contemporary life beyond utopia. In this sense, Dr. Tortorici’s radical imaginaries regarding the archive contribute to a greater genealogy of academic shifts toward radical archival work. I am thinking here of Black feminist scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, and Riley Snorton, who have opened up radical affective possibilities for queer archives of color.

Dr. Tortorici was featured in the panel “Histories of Collecting and Collecting Stories” for the 2022 Lozano Long Conference, titled “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” It is my sincere hope that this introduction may help situate his work as it continues to expand discussions of radical queer archival alterities.

Cuir norteño from Monterrey (México), member of the House of Majesty. PhD student at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. Currently, he’s a Student Resident at CIESAS Noreste (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social). He is interested in the possibilities for cuir radical futurity-building via excess, cuir rejection, and alternatives to hegemonic LGBTT+ respectability. He is the father of Carmela, a calico cat.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

[1] Sharon P. Holland, Marcia Ochoa, Kyla Wazana Tompkins; On the Visceral. GLQ 1 October 2014; 20 (4): 391–406. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2721339

[2] Zeb Tortorici; Visceral Archives of the Body: Consuming the Dead, Digesting the Divine. GLQ 1 October 2014; 20 (4): 407–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2721375

^[3] For the history of the “no,” I am referring here to the work of “unthinkable” histories like those examined by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.

Bibliography

Collections, F. L. (2017). Fales Video Archive . Obtenido de Sex in the Archives: Seeking Sex, Procuring Porn: https://vimeopro.com/nyutv/fales-library/video/208568051

Tortorici, Z. (2014). Visceral Archives of the Body: Consuming the Dead, Digesting the Divine. GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 20(4), 407-437.

Tortorici, Z. (2018). Sins Against Nature: Sex & Archives in Colonial News Spain. Duke University Press.

University, N. Y. (s.f.). Zeb Tortorici. Obtenido de https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/zeb-joseph-tortorici.html

A (Queer) Rebel Wife In Texas

In 2001, many of Lizzie Scott Neblett’s diaries and letters were published in a volume entitled A Rebel Wife In Texas. The text provides a harrowing glimpse into the desperation, brutality, and minutiae of everyday life in antebellum Texas from the perspective of a landed, slaveholding, Southern wife. Letters written to Neblett prior to her May 25, 1852 wedding to aspiring attorney William H. Neblett, however, lend an entirely different type of insight into the “rebel wife’s” intimate affairs, one that unearths a wealth of decidedly queer complexity.

Book cover of A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864 edited by Erika L. Murr — *A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864* edited by Erika L. Murr

The bulk of these missives were penned by sisters Sallie and Amanda Noble, childhood friends of Neblett residing at the time in Houston. Much of the correspondence between the Noblewomen and Neblett gestures toward an increasingly sapphic sociality. On September 12, 1851, for instance, Sallie writes to Neblett to divulge that she “was feeling in a funny mood [that] morning [and] could think of no better business than to trouble [Lizzie] with a few of my funny thoughts . . . . I told Amanda a few minutes ago that . . . I was going to do just as I pleased [and] I did not care what people said [or] thought…Did you ever have such feelings Lizzie?” Noble does not elaborate on just what kinds of things she intended to “do . . . as [she] pleased,” but later in this same letter, Sallie assures Neblett that despite persistent rumors that she is soon to be wed, “I have not the most distant idea of getting married soon.”

Ten days later, Sallie’s sister Amanda sends Neblett a note inquiring “what [had] become of [the] Angel of a beauty you [Lizzie] described to us some time since. Is she up there [in Anderson] still?” before adding, “I am happy to know that you have some one or two up there with whom you can be intimate, girls I mean.”

Civil War envelope showing bald eagle with American flag and Confederate stars and bars flag and sailing ships in the distance ca.1861-865 via Library of Congress

While both messages suggest something of a queer kinship between long-time companions, with the Nobles detailing their own disinterest in the prospect of marriage and asking after Lizzie’s Anderson dalliances, Amanda’s letters, in particular, indicate that she and Neblett’s relationship may have constituted what we might now term a romantic friendship. This is evident beginning with Noble’s July 14 admission that “many many have been the times that I’ve wished myself in Anderson with you [Lizzie]—how we would ramble and frolic through the woods—leave our clothes off of us, and many other amusing things, which would be a sunny spot in our lives.”

The tone of Noble’s dispatches becomes more clandestine near the close of 1851. On November 8, Amanda wrote to report that, “when Pa gave me your letter, I was all anxiety to know the contents, so much so, that I could scarcely contain myself. Having hid myself where none could disturb or molest, I sat me down, and there silently and alone communed with my Lizzie.” This desire for seclusion is reflected in Noble’s decision to sign this letter simply “A.,” though similarities in handwriting and content between this and previous writings confirm Amanda as its author. The rest of the missive seems to reveal that the two women have had some kind of falling out. Noble writes “As I perused line after line [of Lizzie’s last communication], thoughts of the past came washing with violence, and in a few moments tears came trickling down my cheeks…It pains me when I think that I ever offended one that I love so much as you Lizzie.” Amanda admonishes her friend to “dwell on the pleasures of happiness we’ve had together” rather than her bouts of temper, and adds that “the past, though [infused] with the bitter, has also its share of the sweet.”

Image of part of the "Dear Lizzie" letter from Amanda Noble to Lizzie Neblett (1851) — “Dear Lizzie” letter from Amanda Noble to Lizzie Neblett (1851)

Revisiting her earlier fantasy, Noble tells Neblett that “it appears to me if I were with you that something would quicken my languid imagination. We would ramble over the woods, build fires, and roast potatoes again, and perform many wondrous exploits. Lizzie, I so sincerely wish I were with you, but how I shall get there, I know not . . . I will not ‘give it up so’—perhaps fate will yet smile on [us].”

It is unclear, though, whether that was to be the case. Shortly after the writing of this letter, Lizzie was wed and embarked on a new, ultimately trying chapter of her life—marked by war, motherhood, violence, and loss. And, despite earlier protestations to the contrary, the years following Lizzie’s marriage found both Sally and Amanda Noble following suit, with the former marrying a John Kennard in 1855 and the latter marrying Henry White in 1856. Years later, however, Neblett still seemed to maintain a nostalgic fondness for the confidantes of her maiden days, journaling of a sick and seemingly dying Amanda in 1863, “she is not long for this world—[but] she ought to live, for she has always managed to extract much sweetness from life.”

Gallery of Neblett and Noble’s Letters via the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

Bibliography

A. to Lizzie Scott, November 8, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Benowitz, June Melby. “Neblett, Elizabeth Scott.” Handbook of Texas Online. Accessed February 11, 2020: https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fne28.
Neblett, Elizabeth Scott, and Erika L. Murr. A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
Noble, Amanda to Lizzie Scott, July 14, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Noble, Amanda to Lizzie Scott, September 22, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Noble, Sallie to Lizzie Scott, September 12, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.

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Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (2016)

By Tiana Wilson

After reading this book in three different graduate seminar courses, I can confidently argue that Marisa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is one of the most important texts of our time, and a must read for anyone interested in overcoming the limitations of archival research. For many scholars of marginalized groups in the U.S., there remains a challenge in finding materials on our subjects because most of their records are not institutionalized. However, Fuentes offers a useful analytical method for extracting information from sources bent on erasing their existence.

Fuentes’ work contributes to the historical knowledge of early America through her focus on violence and how it operated during slavery and continues today through archives. She cautions scholars to avoid traditional readings of archival evidence, which are produced by and for the dominant narratives of slavery. Instead, she calls for a reading “along the bias grain,” of historical records and against the politics of the historiography on a given topic. In other words, she pushes historians to stretch fragmented archival evidence in order to reflect a more nuanced, complex understanding of enslaved people’ lives. In doing so, her work investigates the sometimes hidden intentions and power dynamics that frame people’s decision-making. Rather than placing our subjects within the categories of victims or victors, Fuentes encourages scholars to examine the “complex personhood” of everyday actions.

Dispossessed Lives provides a portrait of eighteenth-century urban slavery in Bridgetown, Barbados from the perspective of multiple black women. This includes black women’s experiences in public executions and violent punishments, their involvement in the sex economy, and their efforts to escape slavery. Fuentes makes two interventions into the scholarship on slavery in the Atlantic world. First, she challenges the narrative that plantation slavery was more violent than other forms of bondage, and argues that urban slavery was just as brutal. Second, with a focus on the centrality of gender, Fuentes’ study reveals how black women experienced constructions of their sexuality and gender in relation to white women. The main questions guiding this work were: how did black women negotiate physical and sexual violence, colonial power, and female slaveowners in the eighteenth century, and how was freedom defined and what did freedom look like in a slave society?

Map of Barbados, 1767 (via Library of Congress)

Addressing the above questions, Fuentes describes and interrogates archival silences, and then works with these seemingly useless sources to reimagine black women’s experiences, filling in historical gaps in studies of early American slavery. For example, in her strongest chapter, Fuentes works with runaway slave advertisements to narrate the experiences of an enslaved runaway named Jane, as she navigates the colonial-built environments of urban areas that were constructed to terrorize fugitive bodies. Fuentes combines other sources to depict the architectural layout of the city that Jane would have encountered in her journey, such as the Cage (a place that held runaway slaves) and the execution gallows. In doing so, she demonstrates how colonial powers designed urban areas to confine and control black people’s movement.

In another chapter, Fuentes explores how black women’s sexuality was constructed in relation to white women’s identity. In this section, Fuentes discusses the sexual entanglement of a white woman, Agatha, and two white men. The mistress sent an enslaved boy, dressed as a woman to murder one of her sexual partners during the nighttime. Utilizing the trial records of the boy, Fuentes demonstrates what the boy’s attire reveals about black women’s mobility at night. While elite white women were not allowed in public, unaccompanied, Fuentes argues that black women’s ability to cross urban spaces in the night suggests that society viewed black women as sexual agents and therefore as unwomanly. Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how white authorities positioned black womanhood in opposition to white femininity.

Fuentes further problematizes white and black people’s relationship in early America, allowing readers to fully grasp the nuanced meaning of freedom for black people. For instance, in her assessment of Rachael, a woman of color slaveowner, Fuentes challenges the dominant reading of Rachael’s agency in her active role in the commodification of black bodies. Fuentes does not refute Rachael’s agency itself but contends that Rachael was also subjugated to different forms of inequality due to the racial and gendered hierarchies within a colonial context. By questioning Rachael’s actions, Fuentes illuminates black women’s limited opportunities in the slavery era. Readers benefit from Fuentes’ take on freedom because she accounts for enslaved and freed people’s contradictory beliefs and actions.

Fuentes is a beautiful writer, and she responsibly narrates the different types of violence black women faced historically and still face (if we are not careful) through archiving practices and writing today. She intentionally acknowledges her own subjectivity in the work, and readers would appreciate this honesty from a scholar who is passionately concerned with the ethics of history and not reproducing the same historical violence. Dispossessed Lives is a must-read for all historians (professional or amateur), and I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the possibilities for studying subaltern voices and the nuances of historical subjects and events.

Historians on Marriage and Sexuality in the United States

People celebrate the Obergefell vs Hodges decision in front of the Supreme Court in 2015 (Ted Eytan, via Flickr)

by Alexander Taft

In June 2015, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court of the United States resolved decades of debate by declaring marriage a fundamental right regardless of sexual orientation. The Obergefell v. Hodges decision changed the landscape of American marriage law, but what was this landscape in the first place? Two historians of marriage and sexuality in the United States have spent decades taking on that very question. Nancy Cott and George Chauncey have both participated in recent history as expert witnesses, amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief writers, and eminent scholars analyzing marriage and homosexuality. They show us how incorrect we often are when we think of these histories in the United States. These historians have made history a friend to the court as much as any lobbyist or interest group.

Nancy Cott’s Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation lays out centuries of marriage law in the United States. Far from the moral absolute marked by religious teachings that many might assume marriage was, it is a complicated and shifting concept in the history of the Western world. Cott points out that marriage has a national concern that secular governments legislate in order to create the best “civic units” out of the family. Society became concerned with civic character and then tried to improve these norms by engineering a certain type of family. The common practice of unofficial divorce and separation led to a formal legal process for divorces just as much as the legal definition led to formal divorces. We are accustomed to thinking of these everyday things as defined from above, yet our community practices often find their way into law as often as the other way around.

The history of marriage in the United States certainly does not have the kind of unchanging moral character that many opponents to marriage equality claim. “Traditional” families are constantly changing. Two centuries ago, the most important people in deciding a match may well have been the community in which the couple lived. Small rural towns had a deep interest and broad powers in marital arrangements. Cott’s book is full of such examples of unofficial activities that reflected community interests, not the interests of the individuals involved. Marriage today is much more of an individual choice based on one’s own expectations from life, even if still affected by an idea of “normalcy” and pressures to fit into a family, a faith, or some other kind of community. Ultimately, the majority of Americans are free to marry outside of their “tribe,” because whatever social costs that are associated are considerably lower. Similarly, marriage was limited to “consenting” and “free” individuals. This meant that slaves were barred from this institution while also condemned as immoral for engaging in extramarital intercourse; a key aspect of reconstruction was the construction of ex-slave marriage. If marriage is an ever-changing reality, why shouldn’t the court consider homosexuals simply another kind of marriage?

Marriage may be a concept in flux, but what about homosexuality? Today we identify people with their sexual orientation, but was that the case in the past? Many assume that throughout history, these communities were wholly underground — persecuted and kept hidden by families ashamed of their “perverse” siblings. But George Chauncey, along with a wide field of historians, have helped us to reconsider. Rather than being a gay or a lesbian, often individuals engaged in various kinds of sexual behaviors. In fact, Chauncey’s ground-breaking book, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, outlined how urban men who participated in homosexual behaviors often considered themselves to be “normal,” that is, not defined by their same-sex intercourse, as long as they played the “active” role in intercourse. Those men engaging in the “passive” role in intercourse were seen from the outside as primarily a public nuisance on par with prostitution (which they often engaged in). The homosexual subculture of turn-of-the-century New York was visible and defined by specific kinds of sexual activities, not necessarily nature-born identities. In fact, the words we use today, such as “gay,” “lesbian,” and likely even “homosexual” would not have been known by the vast majority of people.

Twelve years before Obergefell, the Supreme Court laid the groundwork for this legal breakthrough. The June 2003 case, Lawrence v. Texas, challenged and then overturned what were commonly known as “sodomy laws” that declared sodomy illegal. Much of the debate surrounding these laws considered them to be expressions of long-standing morals; an accepted societal conclusion that homosexuality itself was illegal. However, Chauncey’s amicus curiae brief (with input from a number of historians) decimated this belief by pointing out that “sodomy” itself was a dubious term that had shifted throughout history. He pointed out for example that famed thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas considered every sexual act that was not direct penetrative vaginal sex to be sodomy. He also explained that the history of sexuality shows that these “morals” were recent inventions and historically changeable. His brief was specifically quoted by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote, whose opinion overturned decades of legal persecution.

Historians have much to teach, but not only to students. Society is improved by their scholarship, often because our collective memories are too short and our ability to see past our biases and preconceptions is often lacking.

Gallery of Neblett and Noble’s Letters via the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

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