Most people associate the history of fagdom with the Greeks and Romans, followed by Oscar Wilde and little else in between except maybe that lez Elizabeth I.  There are, of course, many unwritten chapters on the dark, secretive days of pre-Liberace man-sex–ever hear of Henry VIII’s Buggery Act of 1533?–and such scholars as Jonathan Ned Katz have ferreted out records of early American sodomites in his book Gay American History. 

As Michael Bronski writes in The Guide:

In 1624 the Virginia colony hanged Richard Cornish, a ship’s master, for sexually assaulting a younger shipmate.

In 1629 Reverend Francis Higgins notesi n his diary during his trip to the Massachusetts colony that ‘5 beastly Sodomiticall boyes’ were caught engaging in sexual activity and sent to be punished, potentially by death, in England.

In his book Sexual Revolution in Early America, Richard Godbeer relates the case of Nicholas Sension of Windsor, Connecticut. Sension was married, though childless. From the 1640s to 1677, when he was brought before the colony’s general court on sodomy charges, Sension had a fairly well-known history of propositioning men for sex, offering to pay men for sex, and sexually assaulting male servants. Although the town elders, responding to complaints, had admonished Sension in the late 1640s and again in the late 1660s, he was not formally charged for another decade [and then only mildly].

So, yes.  The next time someone tries to say that civil disobedience for gay sexual freedoms only date back to the 1970s, you can throw Nicholas Sension in their faces and tell them there were Puritans having brazen, buckle-shoe’d, back-alley gay sex back in the 1670s.

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