Gay male slavery

The history of black resistance then led the Katz family to research and publish books that highlighted this history. In response to the uprising in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, William Katz published Eyewitness: A Living Documentary of the African American Contribution to American History, which was an anthology of testimonies by iconic African Americans from Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King Jr., offering an historical corrective to myths about black dependence and inferiority.

William’s brother Jonathan also became enamored with black history and wrote two works based on archival evidence, Black Woman: A Fictionalized Biography of Lucy Terry Prince (Pantheon, 1973) and Resistance at Christiana: The Fugitive Slave Rebellion, Christiana, Pennsylvania, 1851 (Crowell, 1974), which signaled to him, as he later recalled, “the importance of resistance.”

By 1976, Jonathan Ned Katz, who had been trained as a textile designer, had come out of the closet and become involved in the gay liberation movement, which officially commenced in 1969.

Broader Implications
The idea that an enslaver could be “attracted” to a “dirty, smelly slave” underscores the perverse logic of slavery, where human beings were reduced to objects of exploitation. His statement, nonetheless, illustrates the ways in which the influence of black civil rights had begun to disappear from the narratives about the origin of gay liberation.

During the 1970s, the mostly white gay press continued this erasure of people of color by presenting their coverage of minorities as groundbreaking.

In the 1970s, the emergence of gay history, like black history, began on the streets and then eventually made its way into the academy.

While Katz’s book remains a leading contribution to the field and scholars continue to study the history of gay liberation, for many LGBT people of color and transgender people the story of liberation proves to be incorrect.

Boston’s Fag Rag collaborated with San Francisco’s Gay Sunshine for a special joint issue on the fifth anniversary of Stonewall in 1974 and featured an article titled “Personal Reflections on Gay Liberation from The Third World.” The contributor explained, “There is much in the organized gay liberation that non-white people are unable to identify with.

European colonizers imposed their Christian beliefs, which viewed homosexuality as sinful, exacerbating the stigma and violence against such behaviors.

Homosexuality During Slavery in Other Contexts

Islamic Slave Systems

In parts of the Islamic world, where slavery also existed, same-sex relationships were not uncommon.

Dirtiness or odor, far from being a deterrent, may have even heightened the sense of degradation for the enslaver, as it underscored the enslaved person’s lack of agency and humanity in their eyes.

2. This erasure reflects broader societal stigmas surrounding LGBTQ+ issues.

Modern Scholarship

Contemporary historians and researchers are beginning to uncover and analyze the nuanced dynamics of homosexuality during slavery, contributing to a more inclusive understanding of history.

Conclusion

Homosexuality during slavery is a multifaceted topic shaped by cultural, social, and power dynamics.

While it often existed in contexts of coercion and survival, it also reflected the resilience of enslaved individuals who sought connection and solidarity. During the era of slavery, same-sex relationships and behaviors existed but were shaped by the socio-economic, cultural, and power dynamics of the time. While many professional historians did not appreciate his book, the gay community embraced it.

She offered a candid account of the racism and sexism that women of color faced in the black freedom struggle in the United States and across the globe, offering examples from the then recent Algerian War of Independence. The description of a “dirty, smelly slave” reflects the deliberate neglect and degradation imposed by the slave system, where enslaved individuals might go days or weeks without bathing due to lack of access or opportunity.

For enslavers, the physical state of an enslaved person—whether clean or unwashed—was secondary to their status as property.

Historical evidence, such as court records from 19th-century Louisiana, occasionally references sexual violence against enslaved men in contexts where their physical state was described as degraded, suggesting that hygiene was irrelevant to the act. Treating Cornwell as an outsider to a movement that people of color played a major role in forming unwittingly conspired in whitewashing the origin of gay liberation.

Other queer papers from the period also highlighted people of color and “third world people,” which was popular parlance for subjugated people across the globe, as revelatory.

These relationships could be emotional, romantic, or sexual, providing solace amidst the brutality of slavery.

Exploitation by Enslavers: Enslavers, primarily men, sometimes forced same-sex interactions on enslaved individuals. He had witnessed how, with the exception of a single pamphlet, there were few documents about the persecution and murder of thousands of gay men and women during Hitler’s reign.

Historical accounts, such as those in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), describe how enslavers viewed enslaved people as objects to be controlled, not as individuals with inherent dignity. In the U.S. South, for instance, enslaved people on large plantations might share cramped quarters with no sanitation facilities, as documented in plantation records and archaeological studies of slave cabins.

A prominent transgender woman, Griffin-Gracey was not pleased with the recognition.

Katz immediately drew analogies between black resistance and the rise of gay liberation. He eventually uncovered a range of primary source documents from colonial court cases on sodomy to anecdotes about Willa Cather to political slogans from the lesbian activist group Radicalesbians to then contemporary news reports of gay men being arrested for “disorderly conduct.”

Katz initially decided to present his findings as a play in order to reach the largest audience.

There, historians who had been blacklisted from the academy taught working-class adults about the history of slavery. Yet, their interactions with enslaved people were not deterred by these disparities. The brutal conditions of slavery, where enslaved people were denied hygiene and dignity, only amplified their vulnerability to abuse.