Americans Have Been Panicking About Queer People Since Before America Existed
As a trans person, I have watched in horror as the latest “groomer” panic has enfolded. I have observed moral entrepreneurs such as Matt Walsh and Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik whip up a frenzy against queer people based on lies about my community, alleging that we are all child predators.
I have spent a lot of time refuting these allegations over the last few years. And as I have learned more and more about history, it’s become abundantly clear that this is not a unique moment— neither in queer history nor the history of moral panics more broadly.
In fact, the seed for this latest panic is rooted in a type of thinking that existed even before the United States did as a concept.
“Before” Queerness
The definition of a moral panic is debated in the literature, as many phrases tend to be. Scholar Chas Critcher has argued that a moral panic is a term that should be exclusively reserved by elites who reinforce the status quo or, more specifically, “dominant regulatory practices.” Elites do this by scapegoating outsiders and otherized groups as “folk devils” who personify all that is wrong with society.
How long have we been turning queer people into folk devils?
The traditional answer is the tail end of the 19th century. There is a familiar story told in academic circles that before the advent of modern biology and psychology, homosexual acts were lumped into the conversation surrounding sodomy (or “buggery”) laws, which banned “nonprocreative sex” such as bestiality, anal sex between men and women, and for our purposes, sex between men and between women (although the later was rarely acknowledged in these early laws).
The enforcement of these laws in the early American period was allegedly rare and fell harder on bestiality than between the sexes. As Margot Canaday writes in her book review of William Eskridge’s Dishonorable Passions:
Punishment–which included death–was draconian, but the laws were very rarely enforced. Historians know of less than ten executions for sodomy throughout the seventeenth century. Of those few, almost all involved assault or sex with animals. These laws were not directed in any particular way toward homosexuality. Indeed, they couldn’t be–the idea that there was a type of person who was a homosexual didn’t even emerge until the late nineteenth century, a result of urbanization, industrialization and the development of medical/sexological discourse.
And so if the concept of homosexuality, transness, and queerness doesn’t exist, can you even have a panic around it?
Yet this narrative is harder to square away the moment you expand your analysis to non-white people and non-cis-gendered people. Before colonialism and the (cultural) genocides that followed, Indigenous Americans had a diverse array of gender presentations. And from what I can tell, same-sex relationships were often normalized, too. Though, it’s important to note that they did not operate under the same Western framework of queerness.
This fluidity with sex and gender was a reality settlers hated. As Pierre Liette writes bigotedly in 1702 of Two-Spirit people amongst the Indigenous Miami in modern-day Illinois:
The sin of sodomy prevails more among them than in any other nation…There are men who are bred for [the purpose of sleeping with other men] from their childhood. When they are seen frequently picking up the spade, the spindle, the axe, but making no use of the bow and arrows, as all the other small boys do, they are girt with a piece of leather or cloth which envelops them from the belt to the knees, a thing all the women wear. Their hair is allowed to grow and is fastened behind the head. They also wear a little skin like a shoulder strap passing under the arm on one side and tied over the shoulder on the other. They are tattooed on their cheeks like the women and also on the breast and the arms, and they imitate their accent, which is different from that of the men. They omit nothing that can make them like the women. There are men sufficiently embruted to have dealings with them on the same footing.
This settler-colonial hatred of this tribe’s acceptance of two-spirit folks didn’t stop merely with disgust. All throughout this period, colonists and missionaries were trying to destroy this fluidity and impose a rigid binary onto the indigenous people of the Americas. In the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, recapping one of the more heinous examples of anti-queerness in Canada in her book, As We Have Always Done:
Joseph-François Lafitau was a French Jesuit missionary and ethnologist working in Rotinonhseshá:ka territory in the early part of the 1700s. In his major and often cited work published in Paris in 1724…Lafitau ‘congratulates’ missionaries for ‘suppressing’ Indigenous queer relationships. He describes the missionaries’ success in prompting many queer Indigenous people and their relations to see their identity as ‘shameful.’ He was pleased to report that after seventy-five years of missionary work, people once ‘regarded as extraordinary men,’ had now, ‘come to be looked on, even by the Indians, with scorn.’
If moral panics are framed as turning a particular group of people into folk devils so elites can uphold the moral order, then anti-queer moral panics were a foundational part of the cultural genocides against Indigenous people in the Americas.
And as we shall soon see, it doesn’t seem as though such panics started and ended with Indigenous Americans.
The Case of Thomas(ine) Hall
Gender norms were strictly enforced in the colonies, with there being rigid domains for men and women. Indentured servant Thomas(ine) Hall is often cited as an example of a possible intersex person in the early colonial period whose “confusing” gender presentation (i.e., transitioning back and forth between male and female identities) became a scandal among their community for “flaunting” traditional gender roles.
Part of the complication was that their owner, John Tyos, was planning to sell Thomas(ine)’s contract to community member John Atkins, and their gender would have had a huge impact on the work they could do and their overall price.
Furthermore, the specter of buggery laws played directly into this panic when it was rumored that Thomas(ine) may have had sex with a maid. If they were a man, legally speaking, then they would be charged with fornication (i.e., premarital sex), but not as women, as sex between women was then not recognized by the state of Virginia’s buggery laws.
Three women inspected Thomas(ine) and determined they were a male, but their owner, John Tyos, disagreed — potentially to avoid the scandal of a fornication trial. The matter became increasingly more hostile, with much of the community coming to weigh in on the issue of their gender. Thomas(ine) was inspected during their sleep, in the middle of the road, and even had a documented instance of (at least one) hate crime for “pretending” to be a woman.
Ultimately, the issue was litigated by the Quarter Court in Virginia in 1629, ruling them to be “both and neither” binary gender. Thomas(ine) was legally required to wear clothing that had elements of both sexes, which was undoubtedly meant to shame them for their behavior. They dropped out of the historical record immediately after, so we do not know how they (or their community) reacted to this punishment.
It’s important to note that if Thomas(ine) had been convicted for their unconfirmed “dalliance” with a maid, it would not have been considered sodomy or buggery but fornication, i.e., premarital sex. It’s only because of their unapologetic nature that we have such an example of colonial queerness in the first place. As historian Richard Godbeer writes of identifying queer relationships in such trials, “We rarely glimpse in the surviving court records any feelings that defendants may have had for one another.”
Even when we do have a historical record, we often have to further parse the flawed assumptions of the colonizer historian documenting it. Plenty of queer people are persecuted and then forgotten, their deaths filed away under something else — if they are filed away at all.
Yet as we see with the Thomas(ine) case, panics over queer sexuality and gender did indeed happen in colonial America.
A panicky conclusion
I have focused on the period before the formation of the United States because it says something important about the present moment.
Anti-queerness was here in the beginning, and it never went away.
As history progressed, my fellow queer people would come to be victims of a vicious healthcare system that would castrate and lobotomize them. They would be lynched and demonized so severely that being open about their identities would get them fired, evicted, or worse.
Yet, this current trans panic we are experiencing has its roots in the settler-colonialism foundational to this country’s development. Our nation’s hatred of queer people was an outgrowth of the gender binary and heterosexism that was (and continues to be) rigidly enforced by both those on the periphery of the colonial project (i.e., Indigenous people) and those inside of it.
This history does not justify people’s hatred of queer people but rather is my attempt to contextualize just how intertwined anti-queerness is with settler-colonialism — and it’s both that we need to eradicate.