Against American Cistory

The most controversial of the performers who blew into the Windy City for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was a woman known as “Little Egypt,” who performed the Danse du Ventre (or what we today call “belly dance”) while fully covered from head to toe. The eroticism that emanated from Little Egypt’s undulating hips and abdomen caused a national sensation. The nation’s censor of the mails, Anthony Comstock, proclaimed the dance “distinctly and disgustingly obscene” and threatened to get the whole fair shut down if it was not censored. To him, Little Egypt’s show—with its overt sexuality—threatened the family, the home, “the pure dignity of woman,” and the very foundations of civilized life itself.¹

By this point, Comstock had been the nation’s prude in chief for 20 years. After lampooning him for his histrionics over the Danse du Ventre, the New York World published an article by Ida Craddock, a Chicago-based tantric “sex therapist,” wholeheartedly embracing the dance. The dance didn’t threaten womanhood, Craddock argued (in an extended version of her defense she published later as a pamphlet). In fact, it represented the recovery of ancient “Phallic or Sex Worship,” which had been lost in the rise of Christianity, and whose disappearance had caused sex—the wellspring of life—to be considered impure. The dance was “distinctly uplifting” to those who watched it, for it taught a practice “advocated alike by the ancient Sex Worship and by the most advanced sexology of today,” allowing for the “prolonged satisfaction of husband and wife for an hour or more, prevented the waste of nervous tissue resulting from the orgasm, conserved their physical and mental energies, and united them more closely in bonds of affection and mutual respect than is possible by any other method.”² The regular practice of prolonged sex without orgasm, wrote Craddock, would lead to the perfection of “the human race,” allowing parents to choose when they would have children and thus to produce fewer, higher “quality” children, “under the best conditions.”³

In Rebecca Davis’s landmark Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America, she pitches the battle between Comstock and Craddock as representative of a struggle between patriarchy and liberalism. Well before the Chicago dance that caused him to square off against Craddock, Anthony Comstock rode a national sex panic into becoming the nation’s first vice censor in 1873. A sexual conservative, Comstock saw unruly sexuality as “the road to hell.” In Davis’s denunciations of Comstock, we see some of the few places where her moral judgment seeps through. Comstock was bad. His vision was explicitly racist, moving from “civilized Anglo-Saxon Christians to the depravity of darker-skinned heathen people.”

Craddock, on the other hand, emerges as a sympathetic feminist who saw the “sexually liberated woman as the ideal sexual partner for a man, prepared not only for receiving but also for conferring pleasure.” She interviewed dozens of people about their sex lives, recording frank answers about “fucking” and masturbation. She also taught “an oriental method of ideal coition” meant to give particular pleasure to women. Hers is a tragic story: hounded out of the US under threat of censorship, Craddock was finally arrested and prosecuted in 1902. As a last act of defiance, she committed suicide before she could be imprisoned.

What gets lost in this telling is how both the prude and the sex magician (for this is what Craddock became) sought the redemption of the white race.

The Promise of Polyvocality

Davis sets out to tell a narrative history of polymorphous sexuality that meets our current moment, emphasizing at once the range of other orderings—political, sexual, gendered, and otherwise—that defined the past, and demonstrating that “those challenging draconian anti-abortion and anti-trans law have real antecedents to call on.” On its face, this work has the potential to actualize the promise of a range of new scholarship in queer and trans history that has demonstrated the ahistorical and contingent natures of heterosexuality and the gender binary.⁴ Yet Davis does not seem to understand the need to foreground polyvocality precisely to help contemporary organizers. Instead, she opts to tell a wishful history of the late 19th century (including Comstock, Craddock, and “Little Egypt”), full of easy, liberal victories. Such a narrative not only undermines truth and marginalized people but also actually hinders the larger argument about a polyvocal past that she otherwise advances so compellingly. Ultimately, then, Fierce Desires fails to fully grapple with the implications of sexual and gendered diversity.

Specifically, Davis abandons the story of multiplicity in the 19th century, opting instead for a somewhat narrow story of conflict—that continues up to the present—between what we might call sexual liberals and sexual conservatives. Across the 19th century, prominent advocates of sexual repression and of sexual freedom committed themselves to the regulation of reproduction and promised the perfection of the white race. Even as they demanded important—if limited—new sexual freedoms for women and sexual minorities, the liberals invested themselves in the reproduction of a notion of healthy sexuality that pathologized and sought to eradicate unruly desire and trans people.⁵

Bourgeois sexual liberals and conservatives all materially benefitted from the contingent political economic project that was cissexuality and spoke in a language of racial regeneration. Ignoring this fact not only distorts history but also fails to help us understand our current moment, brought about not just by the prudery of Anthony Comstocks but also by the illiberal thought advanced by such “radicals” as Ida Craddock. Bill Clinton, just like Donald Trump, liberals and fascists alike, maintained decades-long relationships with powerful pedophilic eugenecists like Jeffrey Epstein. Elon Musk may be a modern-day Madison Grant enthusiast, but in the Make America Healthy Again movement’s esoteric rituals and fascination with the occult (two things that the scientific eugenecists categorically rejected) we can hear the echoes of Craddock’s phallus worship.

Well-intentioned but defensive stories that merely include queer and trans people are not enough. Our existence should shake the foundations of the historiography.

Other Orderings and the Radical Possibilities of Fierce Desires

In the historiography of US sexuality, Rebecca Davis’s Fierce Desires intervenes with a beautifully crafted narrative. Bringing together decades of scholarship, the book centers the array of alternate gendered and sexual ways of being across American history.

Importantly, Fierce Desires supplants the last major synthetic history of sexuality, which came out in 1988. Where that work disproportionately focused on the white middle class and on those at the center of power—so as to tell a reductive Marxism-inflected history of class struggle—here, Davis aims instead to sit with multiplicity. Her stories take us out of just the Northeast and into the lives of a breathtaking array of genders and sexualities across the country. The book is easy to read, engaging, and well conceived, unfolding in a series of microhistories that delve into individual lives across a vast temporal and geographical scope. Beginning with the story of an American servant in the 1600s—who went variously by Thomas and Thomasine Hall—Davis’s work overflows with alternative genders and sexualities over 400 years of history.

The work begins on a note of expansive possibility. Early on, it offers glimpses of Pueblo relationships to sex and gender, in which “pleasure pervaded the natural world and flowed through their benevolent spirits.” The Pueblo were, we are told, among the 155 indigenous nations that understood gender and sex beyond a dual binary. When Europeans began colonizing North America, the vast majority of people on the continent possessed neither a concept of heterosexuality nor one of cisgenderness. Even among Europeans, the modern categories of cis and hetero were slightly foreign. Their medical models taught that all people were fundamentally male and that women were just an imperfect and marred version of men. Early modern medical and religious elites may have believed that God made both men and women. Nevertheless, these same elites were obsessed with the search for the complete hermaphrodite and understood sodomy not as an inherent component of oneself, but as an attribute of nonwhite people growing out of “tropical” and otherwise lust-inducing environs.⁶

In its earlier chapters, Fierce Desires is polyvocal, rejecting a simplistic view of 19th-century reformers. In the 19th century, Davis shows us, middle-class white and black people associated other orderings (to use Jen Manion’s phrase) of sex and gender more with slave masters than with liberation. Many enslaved people sought the right to marry a spouse they chose and to live together in a union recognized by the state. Abolitionists turned this desire into a messaging campaign, tarring slaveholders as loose and “licentious” and the South as a place where the existence of slavery degraded all marriages. In doing so, they portrayed heterosexual monogamy as a radical form of relationship that was necessary to freedom.

This meant that they also often denigrated other forms of sexual and gendered arrangement. Davis offers the example of the formerly enslaved Harriet Jacobs, who in her autobiography tells of Luke, whose enslaver sexually abused him. Jacobs described the enslaver, much as abolitionists generally described people engaged in alternative forms of relationship, as “a mere degraded wreck of manhood.”

“Free Love” had always been an explicitly racist project.

The Problem of Eugenics

Davis’s rich, multilayered narrative fundamentally changes as she turns toward a relatively simplistic narrative of post–Civil War American life. During Reconstruction, sex changed: the federal government took on a “new role as an arbiter of the nation’s sexual morality.” It made heterosexual monogamous marriage the law of the land and empowered Comstock to crack down on people’s private erotic life and communication. Though she briefly mentions indigenous people, Davis focuses this chapter and the rest of her exploration of the implications of the federal regulation of morality (and the struggle against it) overwhelmingly on white people.

This leaves Davis uniquely poorly prepared to discuss the rise of racial eugenics. We learn, for example, that the dream of scientifically directed breeding comes from the vituperative white supremacist Madison Grant and other xenophobic conservatives. And yet, worryingly, we do not hear how the same “dismal science” was first popularized and developed in the US in the Free Love milieu around Ida Craddock.

“Free Love” had always been an explicitly racist project. Before the Civil War, one of its most prominent exponents was a slaveholding Southerner; meanwhile, advocates of Free Love generally held that the worst form of slavery was actually that experienced by white women in patriarchal monogamous marriage. After the war, the movement overwhelmingly denounced the Civil War and Reconstruction, aligning itself with the white supremacist wing of the women’s movement. Indeed, it played a central role in the popularization of dreams of white racial redemption through scientific reproduction, helping lay the groundwork for the emergence, not even a generation later, of racial eugenics.

Take, for example, Ezra Hervey Heywood, who receives a brief nod in Fierce Desires as a pioneering sex-radical newspaper editor. Heywood regularly denounced the “irresponsible power” and danger of granting “negro men and Chinese” the vote before white women.⁷ He held that restraints on sex outside of marriage were “a relic of Oriental customs.”⁸ Heywood was nowhere close to as racist as the first generation of Free Lovers, which included slaveholder Marx Edgeworth Lazarus and the Democrat Thomas Low Nichols, who fled to England because of the persecution he allegedly faced as a supporter of the Confederacy in New York City.

Ida Craddock too was firmly a woman trapped within her times. She was part of a generation of white activists who believed, as she wrote, that “sex attraction” played a central role “in the evolution of humanity from savagery into civilization.”⁹ The “oriental” methods that Craddock claimed to have “gradually adapted” (as the source that Davis cites continues) to “the needs of Americans” were, in fact, a project of scientific racial reproduction developed by a socialist sex cult, Oneida, in upstate New York to perfect the white race. This community held that partners could, through penetrative heterosexual intercourse without ejaculation, build up sexual magnetic energies that would allow them to produce scientifically superior children. In fact, members—who coined the word “stirpiculture,” used interchangeably with “eugenics” for years—saw themselves as a living laboratory for the perfection of the white race. Heywood, like Victoria Woodhull and every other major Free Lover, celebrated the Oneida community for having discovered the path toward the scientific regeneration of the white race. Davis does discuss the Oneida community and its “proto-eugenic experiment.” Yet she minimizes the racist nature of its project and its many ties to later sex radicalism.

Instead, Free Lovers, like the later Birth Control movement, emerge in Davis’s narrative as unidimensional heroes, fighting Comstockian prudery. Thus, we are introduced to Margaret Sanger as a hero—“a nurse, free lover, and, at the time, socialist, [who] made the expansion of contraceptive access her life’s work”—but not informed of Sanger’s outspoken belief that feeble-minded and “unfit” people were the “great biological menace to the future of civilization.” Similarly, we are told that Emma Goldman was a radical defender of “sexual freedom, including equal access to safe contraceptives,” but not that she first came to these ideas (as well as to anarchism broadly) through a reading group studying the nation’s leading Free Love newspaper: The American Journal of Eugenics.

To some degree, this oversight is understandable. If Davis sees her work as a weapon in the contemporary culture war, why give our enemies more ammunition (especially if the right already weaponizes the history of eugenics to impugn birth control and contraception)? Casting free lovers as exclusive advocates of sexual liberation allows Davis to reach the 20th century telling a cleaner and (for contemporary liberals) more usable story.¹⁰ But this wishful misreading of 19th-century reform leaves us underequipped to envision actual liberation or to understand the failures of contemporary feminists. For if Ida Craddock helped bequeath this legacy of women’s sexual liberation, she also helped shape a eugenicist white liberal bourgeois feminism that yoked some women’s freedom to the oppression of others.

This question is particularly salient because liberals failed to vanquish Anthony Comstock the first time around. Now his namesake legislation (as Davis discusses in her epilogue) is back, being utilized by Republicans to recriminalize contraception, abortion, and pornography and to eradicate transgender people. In this new era, as Beans Velocci has shown, the right wing has long figured out how to use “good-faith [liberal] historical methodologies … against us.”¹¹ The notion that trans people have always existed, though under other names, for example, was explicitly cited as part of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s ruling that transgender people were excluded from Title VII protections.

Against Cistory

As Davis notes, Ida Craddock’s Free Love rested on a naturalization and commitment to heterosexuality. This led Craddock to being an early explicit opponent of “homo-sexuality,” which she saw as an “unnatural” vice.¹²

Davis has written beautifully elsewhere about the emergence of heterosexuality as a distinct ideology (or rather, an unfolding process) in the late 19th century. As she and Michele Mitchell put it in the introduction to their coedited Heterosexual Histories (2021), the history of heterosexuality is contingent and inseparable from “hierarchies of power; its intersections with ideals of race, class, and gender” and has often been used as a “weapon against marginalized groups.”¹³

At the beginning of the book, Davis usefully defines her terms, arguing for the need to balance the historical specificity of categories (such as the emergence of “transgender” in the 1990s) and the sweeping continuity of phenomena (people living in genders and sexes other than those assigned at birth). Her emphasis is on continuity, challenging those who would say we cannot discuss past people in gender-neutral language (with a singular “they,” for example).

One term that she leaves undefined, which appears throughout especially her discussion of premodern North America text, is “normativity.” Ultimately, one assumption that underlies this work—and which Davis shares with much scholarship in our field—is the notion that relatively stable categories of “normal” and “queer” (and implicitly of cis-genders and others) have defined North American life over time.

But the “association between heterosexuality and ‘the normal’,” as Davis and Mitchell wrote in their introduction to Heterosexual Histories, “may have occurred much later than historians have long assumed.”¹⁴ Heterosexuality is a historical anomaly, as is the notion that it should be everyone’s aspirational ideal.

So too, as many scholars have argued, is cisness (or what Durba Mitra defines as “the forced biologizing of sex”).¹⁵ Medieval European monks, Ottoman eunuchs, South Asian Hijras, for example, were not “trans.” However, they also were not quite “cis”: they made sense of their gender and sexuality not in relation to materialist scripts of masculinity and femininity but, instead, often in relation to a dual-gendered godhead. For most of human history, most societies have had an array of sexes and gendered ways of life that exceeded biologized, reproductive heterosexual masculinity and femininity.

Thus, heterosexuality and cisness are historical contingencies: they emerged—rather than being biologically inherent—at particular times in particular places. Consequently, it is the job of the historian, as Mitra urges, to “critically assess how cisness has insidiously shaped even seemingly inclusive feminist frameworks and movements.” Historical work predicated on this realization of contingencies would tell a new and different story with new heroes and new villains, which subjects ostensible radicals to renewed scrutiny. Instead of defending the existence of queer and trans people, historical works should be attacking the shibboleth of the historical coherence of heterosexuality and (its flimsier cousin) cissexuality. One could imagine a sweeping synthetic history where the subaltern people like Thomasine Hall at the outset of Davis’s work become the center and their erasure the object of significant scholarly inquiry.

Although Davis’s work—so beautifully synthetic and encyclopedic—begins the project of demonstrating historical multiplicity, it ultimately settles, like too many others, for wishful stories that require the obfuscation of history and offer no truly liberatory path out of our fascist present. Both liberals and conservatives—sexual and otherwise—brought us to this MAGA moment, just as both together gave birth to America’s turn-of-the-century eugenic moment.

Thus, if we wish to actually imagine democratic renewal, it is incumbent upon historians to refuse the dichotomy between Craddock and Comstock. To build a world where all can flourish, we must tell the story of the past as it actually was: polyvocal, polygamous, polygendered.