Free A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski Page A

into the freedom of natural wilderness. 20
    Sexuality and race are about bodies. In the nineteenth century, when both of these categories were hotly debated, they were inextricably bound with one another. 21 Firm categories of race were disrupted by the shifting lines between indentured servant and slave and between slave and freeman, and by the children of interracial couples. Intense same-sex friendships blurred the line between the romantic, the platonic, and the erotic. The categories of same-sex and opposite-sex relationships were consistently being redefined in relation to the categorization of race. Film historian Richard Dyer notes that same-race heterosexual relationships reproduce racial similarity. 22 Different-race relationships do not. Fear of mixed-race offspring led to a variety of legal statutes designed to control individuals’ behavior connected to race, especially sexual behavior. These statutes included miscegenation laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races; the first American miscegenation law was passed in 1664 in the colony of Maryland. They also included a wide range of Jim Crow laws, passed mostly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that mandated segregation.
    The joint construction of the categories of race and sexuality had implications for people who desired those of the same sex. Because same-sex couples could not have children, their relationships, while illegal under sodomy laws, were less scrutinized under race laws than heterosexual relationships and could often go unnoticed if the parties involved were discreet (as was always mandated by the sodomy laws). Because it was not reproductive—and thus, ironically, was safer—same-sex interracial coupling was often the subject of certain genres of fiction or travel literature. These works set a cultural standard in gay male writing and iconography in which interracial erotic relationships were a central theme. As an embodiment of the “sympathy” of social equality, as well as erotic desire, that is evident in Emerson and Thoreau, this literature became a place in which ideas about citizenship, especially in relationship to sexuality, gender, and race, could be publicly articulated and discussed.
    Many of these homoerotic novels are considered canonical to American literature (even as the same-sex eroticism is rarely discussed). Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), as well as Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), are discussed in high school and college English classes. Charles Warren Stoddard’s books, such as South-Sea Idyls (1873), A Trip to Hawaii (1885), and Island of Tranquil Delights (1904), popular when published but infrequently read today, also contain explicit homoerotic content. These same themes, to a lesser degree, can be found in works such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826), Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840), and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The prominence of these titles indicates that homoerotic themes continue to be part of a vital discussion in American culture.
    Melville’s novels, partially based on his South Pacific whaling ship expeditions, contain passages describing erotic feelings between sailors and island men. In Omoo, Melville writes:
    In the annals of the island are examples of extravagant friendships, unsurpassed by the story of Damon and Pythias: in truth, much more wonderful; for, notwithstanding the devotion—even of life in some cases—to which they led, they were frequently entertained at first sight for some stranger from another island. 23
    In the next chapter, the narrator describes how he became the object of one native’s affections:
    Among others, Kooloo was a candidate for my friendship; and being a comely youth, quite a buck in his way, I accepted his overtures. By this, I escaped the importunities of the rest; for