Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America by Rebecca L. Davis; W. W. Norton, 480 pp., $35
“You’re writing a history of sex? The whole of it?” Rebecca L. Davis, a professor of history at the University of Delaware, was asked several times in recent years. Her response is Fierce Desires, a chronicle of how cultural forces have shaped America’s understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender expression, from 17th-century Jamestown to the Dobbs decision. Those forces have included race, religion, science, the law, language, economics, publishing, the postal system, the growth of cities, immigration, education, social justice movements, disease, war, the military, the internet. Davis gives us chapters on slavery, Native American kinship structures, Mormon and Oneida communities, homosexuality in the Wild West, the rise of sex work and pornography, and Anthony Comstock’s lifelong crusade against porn and contraception. She covers San Francisco’s queer community in the early 20th century, “free love” (the 1960s and mid-1800s editions), the post–World War II Lavender Scare, Black/queer/women’s liberation politics, AIDS, #MeToo, and contemporary polyamory. So yes, the whole of it.
Davis centers each chapter on the story of a single exemplary character. She begins, for example, with the story of Thomasine Hall, a domestic servant in colonial Virginia who was discovered in bed with a female servant in 1629 and about whose gender the General Court in Jamestown could arrive at no determination. Thomasine had also lived and worked as a man named Thomas Hall, and through Hall’s story we learn how social hierarchies of the time permitted “a surprising degree of fluidity,” as long as the hierarchies themselves were not threatened.
Davis similarly elevates several other compelling but little-known figures. People like Kiyoshi Kuromiya, who was born in a World War II Japanese internment camp and went on to become an activist for racial justice and a highly effective HIV/AIDS advocate, before dying of AIDS at age 57. And Mabel Hampton, who left North Carolina in 1920 at age 17 to spend her life in a Black gender-nonconforming community of “lady lovers” in Greenwich Village and Harlem, unabashed and undeterred by an arrest and a prison sentence for “vice.” And Madame Restell (a.k.a. Ann Trow Summers Lohman), who ran a lucrative mail-order business selling contraceptives and abortifacients, and also a lying-in hospital where she delivered babies, all the while being personally hunted by Anthony Comstock.
Fierce Desires is animated by a central idea and mission: to explore, over the course of four centuries, “how and why Americans came to believe that sexuality was a singularly significant aspect of their identities.” The notion that, prior to this shift, sexuality was not part of a person’s core sense of self—that behavior around sex and gender pertained only to desire, and not to identity—is fairly mind blowing. It can make other eras seem like other planets, and it makes for compelling reading as we wait to see when certain terms enter common usage—for example, heterosexual (1920s), lesbian (1930s)—as revolutionary categories of personhood.
At the same time, Davis dismantles the notion that progress toward individual freedom, and acceptance of sex and gender nonconformity, is inevitable—or even the norm. Women having sex with women, men having sex with men, and people leading gender-nonconforming lives enjoyed broader acceptance before the 19th century than after, when the government began exerting wider control over sexual behavior. In 1837, a young Abraham Lincoln met a man named Joshua Speed. They shared a bed nightly for years, and Davis tells us that “their intimacy fit easily within their era’s norms.” It is unimaginable that Lincoln, elected president in 1860, could have been elected in 1960.
I was struck by another pattern: the backward direction that each new branch of science seemed to take us, in terms of sexual freedom and basic understanding. We learn that the budding fields of sexology, anthropology, and eugenics were steeped in Christian white supremacy (and sheer quackery) and used “scientific authority” to reinforce racist stereotypes and brand queer desire as “primitive.” The American Medical Association, which began its existence with a decades-long campaign to outlaw abortion, was a menace to women; the American Psychiatric Association didn’t de-pathologize homosexuality until 1973. Not until the release of the Kinsey Reports in the late 1940s and early ’50s did we get a reliable assessment of the natural range of sexual behavior of Americans—and the results shocked just about everyone.
Davis’s assertions are carefully measured, her endnotes voluminous, but her book has some blind spots. Nowhere, for example, does she address BDSM culture. Davis also erroneously subsumes trans people into the gay rights and “LGBT healthcare movement” in the latter decades of the 20th century. (In fact, there was no organized push for trans health care at the time, nor did any rights organization of that era employ the acronym LGBT. The exclusion of transgender people by the gay and lesbian community, a sad and salient part of trans history, is skated over here.) I would also have liked to see a fuller treatment of children in America. There’s coverage of age-of-consent laws, and Davis does well to discuss the politicization of child sexual abuse and the smearing of LGBTQ people as pedophiles. (The overwhelming number of child sexual abuse cases have come from within families, churches, and conservative organizations, such as the Boy Scouts.) But I think the subject of children themselves—how they’ve been targeted, sexualized, and mythologized—warrants its own chapter, one that might include the publication and reception of Lolita and extend to Hollywood and Madison Avenue.
But the scope of Fierce Desires remains remarkable, and Davis’s powers of synthesis are impressive. At the end, when we come to the Dobbs decision, readers have already been shown how the push to ban abortion (invariably accompanied by bans on contraception and sex education) has long been a Trojan horse of Christian conservative social control—“a referendum on the sexual revolution, gay rights, and feminism,” Davis writes, “an ardent critique not only of women’s sexual liberation but of the legitimacy of all sexualities and genders other than a heterosexual, marital, reproductive norm.”
