Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [636]
When reports of “buggery” or “sodomy” cropped up in the press they were usually accompanied by traditional abuse. Thus in 1846 the Herald excoriated a respectable storekeeper who had been caught “in one of those revolting and disgraceful acts which are nightly practiced on the Battery or in the vicinity of the City Hall.” City authorities, however, were remarkably unconcerned. Consensual buggery was seldom prosecuted by public officials. There were only five arrests for sodomy throughout the 1850s. Authorities usually intervened only in cases involving force and violence, underage participants (in 1857, a man was arrested for committing sodomy with boys aged eleven to fourteen), or indecent exposure, punishing less the “act” than its visibility. In 1846, when one Thomas Carey alleged that Edward McCosker, a young Irish policeman, had accosted him while he “was making water in Cedar Street” and “commenced indecently feeling his privates,” the mayor, after a hearing, dismissed McCosker from the force but took no criminal action.
Homosexuality wasn’t a crime. It didn’t even exist. The very notion of “homosexuality”—understood as a category describing a person’s sexual being—was not invented until the eighties. And while same-sex acts still fell under ancient proscriptions, “consenting to sodomy” would not be criminalized in New York law until the end of the century. In an era when passionate male bonding was universal, and all-male gatherings the norm, a little buggery between friends might well have been taken as an extension of existing norms rather than a flagrant transgression of them.
What really alarmed critics of same-sex behavior was males who adopted “feminine appearance and manners”—men like Peter Sewally, a.k.a. Mary Jones, a black New Yorker who lived in a Greene Street brothel where he cooked, greeted patrons, and dressed in female clothes because, he explained, he “looked so much better in them.” The unnerving thing about cross-dressing was that it transgressed the frontier between gender domains, which same-sex displays of affection reinforced.
Males were the most vociferous about keeping spheres separate—no surprise, given that the distribution of gender perquisites so heavily favored their sex. But upper-and middle-class women spent much of their time weaving and sustaining densely homosocial associational networks, forming intense friendships, hugging, kissing, sleeping with, and ardently proclaiming their love for one another. They trooped to one another’s homes for visits and teas. They offered extensive support at crucial moments in a woman’s life: marriage, pregnancy, birth, nursing. They spent entire days on joint shopping trips, moved in with one another while husbands were away, shared summer vacations. They apprenticed their daughters in housewifery and motherhood at a time when apprenticeship in the male trades was collapsing. They built together a world that provided the emotional warmth and connection absent from the increasingly stiff relations across the gender divide.
“The Man Monster”—Peter Sewally, a.k.a. Maty Jones (1836). (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
City space manifested these delineations. The downtown worlds of politics and business remained physically off limits to ladies, and many of the civic parades that trooped through lower Manhattan streets were totally masculine events. When genteel women ventured out into heterosexual terrain, they found a network of safe spaces and corridors awaiting them. By the 1850s New York had a Ladies’ Oyster Shop, a Ladies’ Reading Room, a Ladies’ Bowling Alley; banks and post offices had special ladies’ windows. There was even a ladies’ eatery: Taylor’s, at Broadway and Franklin Street, grew from being a humble ice creamery to serving three thousand women on the average weekday at over a hundred black walnut tables (“the restaurant of the age,” the Herald called it). Olmsted made sure that when his Central Park skating rink opened in