Review of Fierce Desires by Rebecca Davis

The Gay and Lesbian Review, July-August, 2025

(the text here includes a few additions)

THE SUBTITLE of Fierce Desires announces an ambitious agenda: “A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America,” hinting at a challenge to John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s influential book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, first published in 1988 (with subsequent editions in 1998 and 2012), which conceptualizes American sexuality as the historical development of privacy, moving from the primacy of the family toward greater individualism. Rebecca Davis, a history professor at the University of Delaware, has set out to rethink the subject by integrating new scholarship that has widened the scope of attention to include nonwhite Americans and sexual minorities, and has brought to the fore a conceptual distinction between sex and gender.

Davis’ strategy is to recount this four-century history by telling stories. Eighteen generally chronological chapters, each dedicated to one person or a few people of interest, provide the guiding dots the reader is invited to connect. This strategy tends to favor the scandalous and the outrageous or dramatizes the pedestrian– i.e., problematic historiography, which is especially unhelpful when it comes to sexuality. When public attention is cast on this most private domain, it distorts. For instance, when Davis writes about erotic literature in 19th-century America, the account appears unnecessarily sanctimonious. But why should the prevalence of “porn” be a surprise? Only the lack thereof could truly raise an eyebrow.

We begin in Colonial America, with a suggestive episode based on two pages of court proceedings in 1629 in Jamestown, Virginia. Following fornication allegations against an intersex English immigrant named Thomas or Thomasine Hall, the local court ordered that Hall be known formally in the community as both a man and a woman, and be recognized as such by donning a combination of female and male attire. Davis is critical of this ruling—somewhat contradicting her own rule against imposing 21st-century standards on past ages—charging that the court “effectively created a gender category, but in doing so mocked Hall’s identity.” And yet, one could argue that the court actually minimized innovation, resorting to the categories of man and woman, while reducing gender to a matter of clothing worn in public. And Hall’s identity? How little we know about that! Still, I’d reckon that a person who crossed the ocean, shifted not once between places and forms of employment, and, yes, alternated between presentation as man and woman according to fancy or expediency, would not be given to be mocked easily.

The discussion of homosexuality in Colonial and early American law gives rise to some fascinating points: for example, that New Haven Colony, overly zealous even by Puritan standards, was the only Colonial jurisdiction to expressly outlaw sex between women (but only until 1664, when Connecticut absorbed New Haven, expiring the prohibition). Centuries later, the story of gay liberation and AIDS is told through the activist Steve (Kiyoshi) Kuromiya, who was born in 1943 in an internment camp for Japanese Americans in Wyoming. Kuromiya lived through the Civil Right Movement, anti-Vietnam War activism, the pre-Stonewall thrust for LGBT rights, the Gay Liberation era that followed, the advent of AIDS and ACT UP, and the push for medical marijuana legalization in the 1990s. Davis makes a point of Kuromiya being born in the nadir of official discrimination against Japanese Americans, but glosses over the American significance of the fact that Kurimiya turned an activist on campus at Penn, which he attended as a Benjamin Franklin Fellow on a full scholarship. Davis devotes over three pages (in a narrative of a little over 300 pages) to the agony of Kuromiya dying from AIDS complications, in 2000. To be sure, HIV has had an immense impact on sexuality, but is a hospital scene a reasonable way of channelling it?

The book ends with the recent trans culture war (the book came out before the 2024 election). This last item, alas, is a missed opportunity because the detailed discussion of gender affirming care and other trans health medical guidelines seems to be intended mainly as a rebuke of the anti-trans state legislation onslaught. This misses the mark twice over: first, a focus on political cliches distracts from the challenging dilemma of designing a liberal, scientifically-informed medical policy that is mindful of youngsters’ wishes while hewing to the Hippocrates do-no-harm principle. Second, it interprets noise as impact, thus misconstruing the particular and historical role of conservative backlash (awkwardly represented throughout the book by its most boorish and offensive reincarnations) in shaping social and political reality. Time and again, the conservative backlash has been, to be sure, influential, but also defensive and reactive to perceptions of change.

An implicit question lingers as one reads this book. What is specifically American about American sexuality? Would a book about, say, Canadian sexuality—or Mexican, British, European, or global sexuality—be all that different, or is there something uniquely American about it? Davis’ approach is to focus on the racial history of the U.S., rendering the American story one of the interplay between oppression and liberation. Is America truly a “melting pot” when it comes to sexuality? Davis’ focus on power relations quietly replaces the tired old myth of the lingering impact of puritanism, which some people take as an explanation for American men trudging the beaches in baggy swimming trunks while their European counterparts sport revealing Speedos.

In the end, it is perhaps up to every reader to formulate their own answer. The conditions that Davis considers—political control, conservative backlash, the authority of science, medicalization of sex, official authority as the vehicle of and target for impact, among others—are all there for the weighing. One can cook these ingredients in numerous ways to varying effect, but the American sexual story, and our understanding of it, remains a work in progress.