I saw a couple of young gentlemen gallanting him. A witness testified, “I saw him dressed in women’s cloaths. Pitts had mistaken Gray for a woman, and when he learned of his error gave Pitts a beating. President John Adams wrote in his diary of a deacon who was “discovered to have been the most salacious, rampant, Stallion, in the Universe …,lodging with this and that Boy and Attempting at least the crime of Buggery.” In 1771 Adams was the defense attorney in John Gray v. Two incidents involving same-sex sexual behaviors among members of Boston’s elite, however, achieved notoriety. Both areas were viewed by law enforcement and the growing middle classes as centers of brothels and dens of vice. The North End and West End (Beacon Hill) were inhabited by the town’s small African American population as well as by white poor and working-class residents. Transformations: The Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuriesīy the middle of the eighteenth century, Boston had grown significantly as a seaport with a population of over seventeen thousand. Deborah Samson, alias Robert Shurtleff, joined the Continental Army in 1782 and served until 1783, when she was discharged honorably. She was quickly discovered to be female, and for wearing male apparel was arrested and charged with fraud. Ann Bailey enlisted in the Boston Regiment of the Continental Army in February 1777 under the alias of Samuel Gay. (Some of these laws continued to be enforced into the 1960s.) Some Boston women may have chosen to disguise themselves as men in order to work in male occupations or join the army. By the early nineteenth century, appearing in public in masquerade (hiding or altering one’s appearance) was also against the law. Following the prosecution of several women for wearing men’s clothing, the Massachusetts General Court enacted a law in 1695 prohibiting the wearing of the apparel of the opposite sex. 264).Ĭolonial leaders also attempted to control nonnormative gender practices. Shepard wrote about “secret Whoredom, Self-pollution, and speculative Wantonness, men with men or woman with woman” (quoted in Godbeer, p.
Wigglesworth kept a diary in which he recorded his feelings. Some Puritan leaders, including Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705) and Thomas Shepard (1605-1649), wrote of lustful feelings toward male students. Berry later testified that he had made a false accusation and was sentenced “to be whipte at the poste.” Three years later both men “and others with them” were ordered to “part theire uncivell living together” (The History Project, 18-20). In 1649, Sarah Norman was brought before the Court in New Plymouth Colony “for misdemeanor and lude behavior with Mary Hammon uppon a bed, with divers lasivious speeches by her allso spoken.” In another case that came before the same court in 1649, Richard Berry accused Teage Jones of sodomy. More commonly, men and women were prosecuted for lewd and lascivious acts or unnatural behaviors. Few individuals were successfully prosecuted for sodomy in Boston and its surrounding towns. Unless the defendant in such cases pled guilty, there had to be at least two witnesses to the act, an important modification of English law. The 1649 Province Laws of Massachusetts classified sodomy as a capital crime. By the end of the seventeenth century, the region’s native population had been decimated by disease, slavery, and war.Īt the same time, Boston’s Puritan leaders were devising laws to govern their colony by combining elements of British common law with Old Testament law. Native Americans lived in close proximity to colonists, but when colonists were not successful in converting natives to Christianity, they pushed the natives into outlying areas of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Some local Native American men, including those from tribes related to the Wampanoag and the Iroquois, dressed, worked, and spoke as women and may have been shamans or spiritual leaders. The belief systems of Puritans and Native Americans were antithetical. The native population called the area Shawmut.
Puritan settlers established the town of Boston in 1630.
Such transgressions were punishable by fines, whipping, and standing in the pillory. Same-sex sexual acts were regarded as sins, as were sexual relations between a woman and a man outside of marriage. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004.īoston’s European colonial founders lived in a world circumscribed by political and religious attempts to regulate behavior that did not conform to the Puritan belief system. Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered History in America.