FIERCE DESIRES

Intimacy in America.

Historian Davis draws on a wealth of scholarly and archival sources, from love letters to legal testimony, to create a surprising look at Americans’ attitudes about sex, gender, sexual identity, and erotic practices over the past 400 years. As she proceeds chronologically, Davis centers each chapter on particular individuals who highlight salient issues for the period. In the 1600s, for example, Thomas or Thomasine Hall, who now may be deemed intersex, assumed male or female gender, depending on the circumstances. Hall’s behavior unsettled a community that insisted that gender be expressed in one’s outward appearance. By the late 17th century, those who wanted to live a different gender from the one assigned at birth faced laws banning cross-dressing. Davis examines sex among Indigenous peoples, whose sexual practices were quashed by Spanish Catholic colonizers, and among enslaved people and slavers. “American slavery,” she writes, “created a marketplace for the description and pursuit of illicit sex acts,” particularly the sexual exploitation of women by their masters. Davis recounts the ferocious crusade by Anthony Comstock, in the late 19th century, against “obscenity,” as he defined it, which included mailing information about birth control, and the equally ferocious crusade, a century later, by Suzanne Pennypacker Morris against abortion. Generations of Americans “loved and lusted after one another without a distinct vocabulary to name their desires,” without censure, until the advent of sexologists, who decided that “queer desire was proof of a primitive sexuality” and incited legal and medical condemnation. The Kinsey reports on human sexuality, however, published in 1948 and 1953, offered an alternative to a heterosexual/homosexual binary. In this time of fierce debates over issues such as abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and medical treatment for transgender youths, Davis offers a powerful corrective to a static picture of the past.

Deeply researched and revealing.