From its beginnings in the 1980s, the field of the history of sexuality has been extremely anxious about identity categories, particularly for queer histories. In the 2010s and 2020s, this anxiety shaped a wave of studies of transgender people in the past that did not find any transgender people in the past, or so their authors claimed. This essay examines this trend in the field, tracing its history and arguing that we need a new approach. It does so in part through a critique of Foucault's History of Sexuality vol. 1.
In the mid-1920s psychologists Lewis M. Terman and Catherine Cox Miles conducted a study of 134 homosexual men. Seventy-five of these men were incarcerated in US prisons, jails, and reformatories. This 1936 "Study of Male Homosexuals" sought to provide a tool with which disciplinary institutions could identify and classify homosexual men. Terman and Miles designed and tested their "Masculinity-Femininity Test" to determine potential trends in homosexual "personality" across an array of gendered traits. The Terman and Miles study emphasized the idea that homosexuality was identifiable, and that, through measuring degrees of deviation from hegemonic gender norms, "homosexual traits" were measurable. They did this because they were invested in assisting disciplinary institutions in identifying potential "sexual psychopaths," which was an emerging criminal and psychiatric category then often conflated with homosexuality. Their study reinforced support for a medicocriminal model in the management of homosexual persons that legitimized their confinement in both carceral and psychiatric institutions. This article examines the procedures and conclusions of Terman and Miles' study of homosexual men in US prisons and jails and demonstrates the impact of this study on the cultivation of discourse about homosexuality, particularly as it related to gender deviance and carceral confinement. While many scholars have pointed to the early 20th century as a time of transition between a criminal model of homosexuality to a medical or psychiatric model, this paper argues that sexologists like Terman and Miles took part in coconstructing a medicocriminal era in the history of homosexuality-a period during which homosexual men were thought to be in need of both psychiatric care and carceral confinement. This paper argues that the Terman and Miles study affirmed this entangled carceral and psychiatric model of prisoner management while also bolstering the institutional role of psychiatrists.
At the height of postwar antigay oppression, San Franciscan activist and female impersonator Jos & eacute; Sarria staged a series of gay-themed operas at the local Black Cat caf & eacute;. Reading Sarria's oral histories alongside her neglected performance archive, this article contends that Sarria's shows were as much engaged in creating as in politically mobilizing an incipient gay audience. This fuller reconstruction of Sarria's operas and her unusual vision of an inverted male homosexuality makes three contributions to histories of homophile activism and homosexuality. First, it reveals US homophiles to be more ideologically diverse and open to challenging a conservative postwar gender politics than often assumed. Second, it helps unsettle accounts of the ostensibly smooth transition to the homo/heterosexual binary across the mid-century by revealing the underappreciated ability of homophile activists to develop alternative interpretations of the binary itself. And third, it shows how a currently resurgent gay respectability politics that is based on the rejection of an abnormalized, trans other has encountered imaginative resistance in one of its periods of greatest success.
In February 1903, a sixteen-year-old British boy living in Ceylon disclosed to his guardian that Sir Hector Macdonald, the officer commanding the colony's troops and a celebrity veteran of the empire's wars in Asia and Africa, was sexually abusing him and his younger brother. Further investigation revealed that, for the better part of a year, Macdonald had used the brothers' school for sexual access to boys as young as twelve. The abused boys articulated what had happened to them in startlingly specific, intimate, harrowing, and unflinching statements given to their principal. The students' disclosures are noteworthy for their eloquence and for the fact that they have long been believed not to exist. Acting on the boys' complaints, the British Army prepared to court martial Macdonald, who ended his life before the charges could be announced. In the wake of his death, the authorities remained silent. Consequently, since 1903 speculation has swirled around the planned court martial, and scholars and the public alike have only been able to speculate about what happened in Ceylon. A snobbish conspiracy against the humbly born Macdonald or a homophobic persecution have perhaps been the most frequent proposals. Drawing on the never-before-published statements of the boys, this article demonstrates that the cause of Macdonald's court martial was his serial sexual abuse of elite boys. It argues that some early twentiethcentury children had a vocabulary to articulate experiences of abuse; that archives hold more evidence of child sexual abuse than has been previously acknowledged; and that the twenty-first-century sex abuse scandal has a long history. Finally, it explores the historically and culturally bound circumstances that enabled the boys to speak so directly while the colonial governor who responded to their complaints relied on silence, euphemism, and allusion.
