A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski

can a feller do?—three years at sea—and hardly any chance to have a woman. I tell you . . . a feller must do so. Biles and pimples and corruption will come out all over his body if he don’t.” 28 The open sea, like the open range, by offering escape from social condemnation, allowed for the articulation of same-sex desire and made same-sex sexual behavior natural and even utopian. Leslie Fiedler rejects the idea that male-male sex occurred because men were isolated from women in homosocial places; he suggests instead that this all-male isolation was “sought consciously as an occasion for male encounters.” 29
    Yet few of these same-sex erotic relationships among men at sea were interracial, furthering highlighting that when authors used the theme of same-sex, different-race eroticism, they did so to discuss the place of race in American society. Clearly, this theme resonated with readers. Melville’s Omoo and Typee had a wide readership ( Moby-Dick was not appreciated until the twentieth century), as did Stoddard’s South-Sea Idyls . While romantic friendship, “sympathy,” racial mixing, and the desire to flee civilization were literary conventions of the time, in Melville’s and Stoddard’s novels these themes becomes explicitly indicative of same-sex desire. In this context, Melville’s allusions in Omoo to Damon and Pythias (common in nineteenth-century writing on male friendship) become clearly sexualized. In the early chapters of Moby-Dick, Melville mentions Sodom and Gomorrah as a clue to his subtext.
    In the United States at this time, there was a strong, growing culture of women writers, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote about race relations; none of them touch on same-sex, interracial erotic relationships. Perhaps social prohibitions against women writing sexually tinged material, or reader’s expectations that subject matter concern the domestic rather than exulting the natural wilderness, prevented them from doing so.
    Although depictions such as Moby-Dick and South-Sea Idyls modeled a progressive view of sex and race relationships, they also carried mixed messages. They were implicitly racist in “othering” men of color, routinely described as savages and barbarians. But they also value and praise these men for being “natural,” untainted by the social and sexual repression that was embedded in American culture. Melville and Stoddard, because they were writing about same-sex couples, actively blurred these boundaries. Kooloo is both a “primitive” and a churchgoer; Queequeg’s “savage” tattooed arm becomes the New England quilt; Kána-aná must be “civilized,” but civilization is hypocritical, not natural. The same-sex-desiring American man feels the pull of freedom and persecution most keenly and is a ripe figure for exploring and understanding that dynamic. Whatever problems Melville and Stoddard betray in how they treat race, their work is clearly more complicated and nuanced than most of the contemporary political, public discussions about race in a country split by the fight over slavery.

Four. A Democracy of Death and Art
    The Civil War
    The Civil War is literally and metaphorically at the center of nineteenth-century American life. In this war the remaining United States fought the Confederacy, states that had seceded from the Union over economic issues closely related to the rights of states to sanction slavery. Even in a century riddled with violence, the amount of death wrought by the conflict was extraordinary. The death tolls from the century’s earlier two wars were 45,170; the Spanish-American War of 1898 would bring 11,570 deaths in battle, another 2,045 wounded, and 15,565 dead from disease. The Civil War eclipsed them all; it claimed 620,000 lives, or 2 percent of the American population at the time. Calculated for the U.S. population today, this number would be six million. Battles were often horrific, combining traditional forms of hand-to-hand combat