She travelled across America raging against sexuality of any kind and saying nobody should ever have sex again. She should no longer be called male or female she was now neuter. In 1775 a young woman called Jemima Wilkinson had a chronic fever and announced that Jesus Christ had entered her body and stopped her from being a woman. But it remained a fiercely sexually repressed society. Between 17, the population almost doubled to 470,000. The Puritan spirit was soon diluted by a flood of new immigrants who weren't drawn by their religious vision, but by economic opportunities. (History doesn't record what they did with the phallus.) Morton was deported back to London, where he became one of the most eloquent critics of the genocide of the Native Americans in Europe. In 1629, after a five-year-long prefiguring of life in South Beach or West Hollywood, the local Puritans invaded the town and dismantled it brick by brick. But the conflict that runs through American history – between fundamentalism and sexual freedom – mowed down Merrymount.
Merrymount sounds as quintessentially American as Salem – and a lot more fun. But then, in 1677, he was convicted of attempted sodomy, publicly whipped and had his estate seized. The prohibition, it seems, wasn't absolute. He was admonished by the town elders in the late 1640s and in the 1660s, but there was a general consensus against legal charges. From the 1640s to 1677, he had a long history of propositioning men for sex, offering to pay men for sex and sexually assaulting male servants. Look at the court records of a man called Nicholas Sension of Windsor, Connecticut, for example. Yet he also uncovered cases that suggest this isn't the whole story. As the research of historian Jonathan Ned Katz shows, they meant it: many people were executed for sodomy. The Puritans came to America to shun all this, and to build instead a pure theocratic homeland. Christopher Marlow could even go around semi-publicly saying: "St John the Baptist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodom." Although homosexuality was illegal in Elizabethan England, the culture allowed it to be represented and discussed. They had fled Britain because they felt it had become a syphilitic brothel. The Europeans who arrived in North America had a ferociously fierce sense of how gender and sexuality should be expressed. Pansexuality: What does it mean and how is it different from being bisexual? They were among some of the country's great icons, from Emily Dickinson to Calamity Jane to perhaps even Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt. In his new book, A Queer History of the United States, the cultural critic Michael Bronski runs the film backward, through 500 years of American life, showing there were gays and bisexuals in every scene, making and remaking America. For people who talk incessantly about honouring American history, they have built a historical picture of their country that can only be sustained by scrubbing it clean of a significant part of the population and everything they brought to the party (if not the Tea Party). The statements of Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, or Mitt Romney insistently hint that the fag does not belong under the flag. The American right presents homosexuality as something alien to the American experience – an intruder that inexplicably gate-crashed America in 1969 in the form of a rioting drag queen clutching a high heel in her fist as a weapon.