Sexuality and Deviance in DitV

[Neal]

Hi folks,

I'm new here, and in the course of reading up on some of the older threads, I stumbled across a rather contentious engagement about homosexuality as a sin in DitV.  I figured, rather than trying to pry that older topic open again, I'd spin it off in a new direction, one that might give others some food for thought.

I should say first that I'm a student of nineteenth-century American literature, working on my PhD dissertation right now, but that doesn't make me any kind of supreme authority.  It just means I've tripped over some out-of-the-way sources that others might not have seen.  I'd like to see if I can enrich some folks' understandings of nineteenth-century sexual culture with a few comments.  Here goes.

The first thing that occurred to me when I saw the homosexuality-as-sin debate was that folks here seem to be thinking in twentieth-century terms about a nineteenth-century culture.  That's understandable, I suppose; the gay/straight binary has become so much a part of our language that we don't even think anymore about alternative schema.  But it might interest some of you to know that the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual" didn't enter our vocabulary until the very late nineteenth-century, and they didn't become common coinage until the century turned.

This is not to say there weren't "gays" and "straights" before the psychoanalytic invasion.  Sure there were.  I'm just saying folks didn't think about such things in the same terms we use today.  Just based on what I've read in the historical record (people's letters, newspaper stories, novels, etc.), sexuality was less about "identity," more about "activity."  No one in the middle nineteenth century would have explained his tastes by saying, "I'm gay/queer/homosexual/whatever."

Add to this the uneven terrain of gendered culture and you have a very different situation from what we're used to seeing.  By this, I mean a man could be called a "dandy" for dressing in silks and lace, but that didn't mean anyone would think him feminine.  If, on the other hand, he expressed emotion in writing, he might be considered feminine, but probably not "gay."  Likewise, a woman who expressed her opinions forthrightly might be considered masculine.  If she wore plain clothes and did physical labor, she might even be "mannish."  But that wouldn't necessarily lead folks to conclude that she was "lesbian."  Gender roles and sexuality were not so slavishly linked then as they are today.  There were still taboos, but they didn't necessarily cause folks to leap to the same conclusions.  [Folks interested in such things should consult a book called Intimate Matters: a History of Sexuality in America]

It gets more complicated still when you consider the (to us) loose continuum of affections and "sentiments" in play from about the 1820s through the 1880s.  Women could express emotions and feelings toward one another back then in ways which, today, would cause some to label them lesbian.  I've read long exchanges of personal letters between women who seemed to be deeply in love with one another, only to discover that the two women were both married with children, and had never (so far as anyone can tell) shared a physically intimate moment.  Some historians put this down to the literary/cultural forms in use at the time, ways of expressing emotion which we would now classify as erotic, but which were, back then, just the way a lot of middle-class folks wrote. [There are scads of books on this subject, too, and you can probably find more than you'll ever care to read, just by researching under keywords like "sentiment," "dandy," and Library of Congress subject headings dealing with sexual culture in the U.S.]

All this is just to say, it's harder to spot the "queer" in the documentary history of the nineteenth-century, and it means less when you do manage to spot one.  It is also to say that it makes less sense fretting over the "gayness" or "straightness" of a PC or NPC in such a historical setting.  As far as I've been able to tell, common wisdom to the contrary, America was actually less homophobic in the nineteenth century than it is today.

Now, does this mean a frontier settlement would find it hunky-dory for two women of childbearing years to carry on an exclusive erotic relationship?  Probably not.  I mean, reproduction is a big issue when you're trying to populate a new Eden, and someone, somewhere, is going to have something rather cutting to say about two women removing themselves from the mommy pool.  But maybe they would have less to say about two mothers who spend a lot of private time together.  Would their activities still be a sin in the eyes of the Faith?  According to the DitV rulebook, yes, if they were physically intimate with one another.  And this could be the meat of a rather sympathetic story, where two women, faithful to their familial duties but deeply in love with one another, bring on demonic attacks by following their hearts.  They feel their love is higher and purer than the love they bear their husbands.  This is pride, and the injustice might be that the husbands feel slighted, even emasculated.  Or perhaps one of the women decides to remove herself from the Faith and go back east, taking her lover and their children with them.  Who knows what could happen?  But the problems have more to do with abandonment of duty than they do with sexuality.

Another thing I wanted to bring up, especially for those looking for slight deviations on the standard DitV setting, is the larger background of "utopian" movements around mid-century.  Mormonism wasn't the only faith/movement/cult that was fed up with the state of things and sought to form a new Eden.  It may have been the best-organized and most dedicated, but it was hardly unique.  There were Fourierist communes, wellness retreats, free-love communities, and all manner of other "reformist" ventures during these decades.  And anyone who things polygyny seems strange has clearly never read the writings of Oneida's founder, John Humphrey Noyes, whose commune practiced a blend of Fourierist communism and early eugenics.  Noyes (and other elders) would arrange matings between the male and female members of Oneida based on those folks' characteristics, hoping to produce more perfect offspring.  And if Noyes and his fellow leaders felt a couple had been together long enough, they could split the pair up and reassign them.  There was no such thing as marriage in the modern sense among Oneidans; they practiced "complex marriage" because, as Noyes and his followers saw it, marriage was nothing more than state-endorsed prostitution. [There's a cool book by a guy named Kern, called An Ordered Love, that deals with millenialist and perfectionist movements that sought to control sexuality in the name of a higher cause.  It takes up not only Noyes's Oneida community, but also other groups, including the Shakers.]

Then there was Brook Farm, a Fourierist commune attended by (among others) Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller.  Read Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance for a clever satire of such an experiment.  Brook Farm was intended to "harmonize" labor and intellectual pursuits, but it couldn't turn loose of its middle-class affectations and desires, so it collapsed under its own weight.  In short, the well-to-do artistes discovered that labor involved actual work, and that just sucks.  (Actually, it was more complex than than, and had to do with the same thing that kills off most new ventures -- economics.  Still, the writers were kind of whiny.)  You can still find a book called Autobiography of Brook Farm which tells the story of the experiment through the actual letters of folks who were there.

And of course, there was the Cult of Single Blessedness, an elaborate and spirirted defense of "confirmed bachelors," "spinsters," "maiden aunts," and so forth.  Single Blessedness went beyond defending the personal choices of the unmarried.  It actually put forth a variety of arguments intended to blacken the reputation of marriage itself.  Marriage, the cult asserted, was all about money and power, not love.  And they did a good job holding their own for a while.  You can still get their book, called (you guessed it) Single Blessedness, at a few university research libraries.  It's a hoot.

I bring these other utopian movements up because I think it would be very cool to have a group of Dogs deal with such folks.  Maybe a group of Fourierists from back east have plopped themselves down near a local branch of the Faithful.  Maybe someone in one of the branches has been reading Charles Fourier and decides that the way labor is divided in the branch is not as just as it could be.  Maybe a group of husbands and wives in a remote branch have decided to take up free-love practices (even eugenic wife-swapping).  Or maybe a branch finds itself home to a pair of Shaker sisters with strange ideas about marriage and sex, and maybe those ideas are filtering into the young women of the community (especially young Sister Berenice, who is not happy about her impending marriage to Brother Olaf, and thinks she would be better off with a vow of celibacy).  I think it would be fun to build a town where the demonic attacks stem from the off-kilter holiness of a pair of Shakers; after all, one man's doctrine is another man's sin.

Just some ideas I thought I would toss out into the mix.  I don't know if this will generate new conversation, but at least it might give some GMs (and maybe players) a few ideas.

Thanks,
Neal

[Vaxalon]

Sex, money, and power are, it seems to me, the core of sin.

And in a small town, there really just isn't enough money or power to generate much sin.

[lumpley]

Neal! This is awesome stuff. Thank you!

-Vincent

[Sydney Freedberg]

And in a small town, there really just isn't enough money or power to generate much sin.

Really? Power (including the power of money) is all relative: in a small town, or even within a family, a little bit can make for a big battle. I know people from middle-class and small-town backgrounds for whom intra-family conflicts over very small amounts of power (e.g. parental power) and money (including, in one case, a 25-cent weekly allowance) are today, decades later, sources of lasting bitterness.

[lumpley]

You'll notice also that in Dogs, every single town has, at its root, a power or money injustice.

But let's not take that any further in this thread, which is about utopianists and "deviant" sex!

-Vincent

[Vaxalon]

I think another thing to consider, with respect to 19th century love and sex, is that they very often don't correlate.

How often does a Faithful young person get to choose who he or she marries?  How often do they marry for love?

[lumpley]

Pride: Sister Martha feels that her love for Henry is more important than the good to their families if she marries old Brother Bartholomew.

vs

Pride: Brother Johns feels that his desire to have his daughter marry old Brother Bartholomew is more important than her love for Henry.

Good stuff.

-Vincent

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Sex, money, and power are, it seems to me, the core of sin.

And in a small town, there really just isn't enough money or power to generate much sin.

Jimminy, Fred, are you serious?

You've got a heirarchy in the literal sense. You have poverty-struck frontier life.

It's just that sex is more interesting.

Neal, this is really cool. Thanks!

To add to the utopians, I'd throw in the Matthians, the Christian Scientists, Johova's Witnesses, and Spiritism as a whole. The mid 19th century was a time bursting with anti-Modernist religious movements. Maybe a town or two that dealt with other similar Faiths would be really interesting... like, maybe they do all the same stuff, but they don't listen to Bridal Falls City, but rather Serpent Mound Parish up north...

[Vaxalon]

Nah, I'm totally off base with the money and power thing.   That post is one of the reasons CN closed off editing... it's to make sure my toenail tonsillectomies are enshrined in electrons for all time.

[two_fishes]

I'm not sure they qualify as Utopians, but having had little contact with Mormons in my life, descriptions of the Faithful had always gotten my mind turning to the Hutterites. http://www.hutterites.org/

[Neal]

Hey, folks, thanks for the warm replies.  And Vincent, thanks for creating one of only two games in the past ten years that have gotten me really fired up (the other is All Flesh Must Be Eaten).

A few things of "deviant" interest to check out:

Ronald G. Walters has two books that really helped me to understand the middle nineteenth century.  One is American Reformers, and the other is Primers for Prudery.  The first deals with all the utopian and non-utopian reform movements going on in the decades surrounding mid-century.  The second deals with American sexual morality around the same time.  They both rely heavily on actual documentary evidence, making them more valuable than the typical academic Op-Ed piece.  And Walters has a sense of humor, too, so check him out, if you can.

As far as deviant sexuality in novels, I can recommend a couple of doozies, by nineteenth-century standards, one a best-seller, and the other unpublished (and unfinished) at its author's death.

The first is Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall by George Lippard.  The man has a tin ear for dialog and the most ludicrous sense of scene I've ever read in my life.  I laughed my rear end off, but I couldn't stop reading.  And the best part is that Lippard captures the outrageous suspicions of his generation in such a captivating way, you can easily understand the fears of those who fled the corruption of the cities.  [Lippard, by the way, also formed America's first labor union, for those interested in such things.]

The second book is called The Hermaphrodite, and its author is none other than Julia Ward Howe, the woman who composed the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic.  She died without finishing this book, but thanks to some academic poking and prodding, we have it in published form now.  Howe was playing around with some contemporary ideas of sexual perfection, most notably the idea that the perfect being is a sexless (and at the same time bisexual) being who remains celibate throughout its life.  Howe wasn't alone in her abstract philosophy; Margaret Fuller shared her belief that the best marriage was a celibate marriage, a marriage of pure souls without all that icky sex.  But Howe did us the service of embodying her ideas in a character who is surprisingly believable and sympathetic, even a little erotic at times, though I'm not sure Howe would have been pleased to hear that.

I guess I should also mention George Thompson as a purveyor of "deviant" literature, one of America's premier pornographers of the nineteenth century and the author of Venus in Boston (very tame by our standards, but with some nice indications of what nineteenth-century readers were thinking about when they weren't thinking about money: namely, sex, kink, and kinky sex).  He also used to publish pamphlets containing such gems as the confessions of foreign-born ladies of horizontal refreshment.  The thing back then was to help young working-class men to the fantasy that they could boink a fine lady with a pedigree.  Hey, things haven't changed all that much, now have they?

Finally, I suppose I should give credit where it's due.  I probably wouldn't have discovered any of these books if I hadn't taken a seminar course from Dr. Ben Reiss, a professor of American literature at Tulane University who has not only published a very good book on P. T. Barnum (The Showman and the Slave), but has also done some really fascinating work on the literature of lunatic asylums in antebellum America.  Did you know that lunatic asylums published newletters with inmate fiction in the nineteenth century?  Neither did I!  Cool stuff, and only mildly insane, by comparison with some of the other stuff coming out at that time.

Anyway, that's all for now, but please, keep shooting out those ideas.  I'm going to add some of those "fringe" faiths mentioned by two_fishes and glyphmonkey to my list.  Man, I so badly want to have a head-on encounter between Mormon Dogs and Quaker Abolitionists!

Cheers, all,
Neal

[Vaxalon]

I have yet to inflict a religious Unfaithful on my Dogs, but I definitely see it as an event to be remembered... especially if he starts spouting Ceremony that successfully handles demons!

[Neal]

I have yet to inflict a religious Unfaithful on my Dogs, but I definitely see it as an event to be remembered... especially if he starts spouting Ceremony that successfully handles demons!

I know what you mean.  I'm really anticipating a clash between my Mormon Dogs and a batch of fiery Quaker Abolitionists in the John Brown mold.  Not sure what they'd clash about just yet, but knowing the players I have onboard, there will be a clash.

I'm also looking forward to playing around with Native American spirituality when I deal with the Mountain People.  Skinwalkers, anyone?

As for the link between faith and deviant sexuality, I think I may try to play that one in both directions.  I can easily see the players having to deal with some young buck from Back East who's come out to rescue his female cousin from the "degradation" of her polygamous marriage.  What happens when your Pride is based on a (selfless or self-righteous) decision to save the soul of someone who doesn't feel her soul needs saving?

Oh, and speaking of deviant sexuality, anyone who really wants a good howl should do a little research into nineteenth-century responses to "the solitary vice," beginning with the Ronald Walters book, Primers for Prudery.  Did you know, for instance, that Catherine Esther Beecher (inventor of "home economics" and kin to Harriet Beecher Stowe) once advised mothers with masturbating sons to tie the boys to their beds?  Zoiks!  And one of the most common uses of the strait-jacket in the asylums of the eastern United States was to prevent "self-pollution" by the inmates.  Of course, we shouldn't be too quick to throw stones: a poll conducted as late as the 1960s revealed that a sizable percentage of medical students still believed that masturbation could lead to blindness, insanity, and death.

I'm not sure how (or whether) I'd incorporate that particular sin into a Dogs series, but the temptation is certainly there.  "What do you suppose brought on that plague of horseflies?  And what's young Brother Isaac doing in the hayloft again?"

[lumpley]

Since you mention it...

Brother Isaac's hobby can't cause problems in the town, unless it results in or follows from injustice. Thank goodness. Otherwise, Dogs ride into town, they're like "okay, first thing, we line up all the teenage boys..."

While we're casting stones, or not, here's the text of a sermon by an authority of my native church, from within my lifetime: Boyd K. Packer's infamous "little factory" talk.

-Vincent

[Brand_Robins]

While we're casting stones, or not, here's the text of a sermon by an authority of my native church, from within my lifetime: Boyd K. Packer's infamous "little factory" talk.

Inside my lifetime too. I thank God that I was only 2, and thus did not have to sit through that speach with my father on the pew next to me....