“Fierce Desires” is billed as the first major history of sex and sexuality in America since John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman published “Intimate Matters,” in 1988. (A third edition was published in 2012.) In their study, D’Emilio, a pioneering historian of gay life, and Freedman, a much lauded feminist historian, wove together a wealth of research about the expression and policing of sexuality in American lives through three centuries, from the family-centered reproductive imperatives of the colonial period to the more romantic model that prevailed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which sexual relationships were taken as a source of personal identity and happiness. The authors made it clear that, for instance, the Puritans were not so pure. In one case of bestiality prosecuted in Plymouth, the perpetrator was required to identify in a lineup the specific sheep that he’d violated, before both the man and the animals were executed for the crime. In the nineteenth century, Western cowboy culture bred same-sex intimacy, along with bawdy doggerel about saddling up and riding. D’Emilio and Freedman sought to complicate the straitlaced fantasies about the past which religious and political conservatives were promoting in the nineteen-eighties, but reproductive heterosexuality was at the center of their narrative—understandably enough, since reproductive heterosexuality is the structure within which most Americans have lived.
Davis, on the other hand, centers marginal identities, whether those of nonconforming individuals or those of whole peoples whose sexualities were vilified and constrained by colonial conquest and exploitation. Davis has not written a history of queer America, or a queer history of America. But, determined to show how unstable the binaries of sex and gender always were, she refers us to the seventeenth-century category of “deputy husband”—a woman who might legitimately take over masculine responsibilities in the stead of a long-absent spouse—and to the tender exchanges of nineteenth-century male friends who addressed each other as “husband” and “wife” while also sharing hopes for future female spouses. When Davis does address reproductive heterosexuality, she’s particularly intent on exploring the long history of women’s efforts to exert control over their own bodies, whether through avoiding conception or inducing abortion. She wants to show how the battles of today—over issues like gender nonconformity and reproductive rights—have antecedents that have been forgotten or suppressed.