Same-Sex Romance and the Retreat from Reconstruction
The following is a guest post from Andrew Donnelly, assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis and author of Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era, which is now available wherever books are sold.
The national retreat from Reconstruction—the abandonment, especially by white Northerners, in the face of white Southern resistance, of the goals of racial equality, civil rights, and expanded democracy—was not merely a political retrenchment but also a cultural phenomenon, which then reinforced the politics.
One emblem of that cultural retreat might be the romances of reunion that populate postbellum fiction, those cross-sectional weddings between white men and women of the North and South. Indeed, one way that postbellum culture made the retreat from Reconstruction, with all of its accompanying disenfranchisement of and violence to Black citizens, not just palatable but desirable was to render it romantic: it could be love, not a racially exclusionary nationalism, that propelled reunion.
In a classic account of these romances, Nina Silber demonstrated how much gender really matters. With a Southern bride, the North was wooing and winning a submissive South; with a Southern groom, the South could reclaim its defeated masculinity. With two parallel couples, the North and South could reunite as balanced national partners.
But what about postbellum romances—which I find, in my book, Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era, to be far more frequent than one might expect—between men?
Certainly, they differ from the romances between men and women. Those heterosexual romances assert the timeless power of love to trump the politics of the moment. The homoerotic romances, by contrast, portray such intimacies within time, confined to the men’s youth and to the antebellum past, not a reunion after the war but a disunion through it.
Many of the stories I examine, written in the decades following the Civil War, feature two youthful romantic friends, often college intimates, one Northern and one Southern. The language of their intimacy follows contemporaneous patterns of romantic friendship: a love “surpassing the love of women,” with bed-sharing and affectionate kisses. The coming of the Civil War dooms their youthful intimacy, and the two men meet on the field of battle, with both violence and a final kiss. If the standard romance of reunion valorizes a love that can triumph over Civil War divisiveness, these homoerotic romances show the tragedy of the sectional conflict over slavery destroying the onetime affection between white men.
These narratives, moreover, draw on a contemporaneous understanding of same-sex affection and intimacy as confined to a period of youth. The world of these novels cannot contemplate a homosexual adulthood for the romantic friends; therefore, the irruption of the Civil War becomes a necessary, fated intrusion into their love. Just as the men must mature away from their homoerotic union so must the nation mature through the war. On the other side, however, is a longing for a past that used to be, a nostalgic antebellum past and a romanticized past when such male intimacies were possible.
These homoerotic narratives of Civil War disunion complement the heterosexual romances of reunion in casting the Civil War as a crucible in the romantic lives of white Americans. Where the latter marshal the force of their romantic plots to assert national reunion, the former lament the comity between white men that was lost in the fight over racial slavery. Even more so than the heterosexual romances of reunion, they long for a nostalgic antebellum past, romanticizing the pre-Civil War and pre-emancipation past as a longed-for time of intimate possibility between white men.
Just as the men must mature away from their homoerotic union so must the nation mature through the war.
Far from a minoritarian subset of storytelling, such stories are at the heart of national culture. They draw upon long-standing imagery of national friendship celebrated during the nation’s founding and play out in the writing of Walt Whitman, Sidney Lanier, Augusta Jane Evans, and others. Such a story of same-sex intimacy even appears, alongside romances of reunion, in the infamous white supremacist film, The Birth of a Nation.
Central to that film’s racist narrative are two parallel romances of reunion, one Confederate veteran with a Northern bride; one Union veteran with a Southern bride. The film’s argument for a white North-South reunion victorious over Black citizenship draws strength from these romances between young white men and women.
The film also features an overlooked cross-sectional romance, one of same-sex disunion. The younger sons of the two respective families, Tod and Wade, are, an intertitle states, “Chums—the younger sons. North and South.” In the film’s antebellum scenes, the pair playfully hug and touch in the manner of romantic friendship. By the middle of the film, they lay dead on a battlefield, a “bitter, useless, sacrifice.” At their battlefield meeting, Tod sees the wounded Wade and stops his bayonet thrust in recognition of his intimate friend. He is shot in the back, falls beside Wade, stretching his arm across Wade’s bare chest. His face leans toward Wade’s in what the film stages as a dying kiss between the pair. If their siblings’ love will consecrate the birth of a new, unified nation on the principles of Black exclusion, Tod and Wade’s love represents the antebellum intimacies between white men destroyed by the war.
Theirs is then an exemplar same-sex romance of disunion. The impossibility of their intense intimacy extending into adulthood makes their Civil War deaths necessary. The war, at the same time, has destroyed a romanticized past that cannot return. Their homoerotic death scene, then, renders the war as necessary for maturation—the birth of a new nation—and a tragedy of a lost antebellum world, the film’s two central themes.
Given the notorious status of Birth of a Nation as a reactionary film, its homoerotic subplot may be surprising—even more so, that the homoerotic subplot accords so easily with the film’s central message of white supremacy and antebellum nostalgia. In Confederate Sympathies, I find much evidence for the reactionary, and white supremacist potential, of homoerotic narratives. Perhaps that should be less surprising. For the culture of racially exclusionary reunion to take such determinative hold of US politics, its saturation must have run very deep—deep enough, I find, to incorporate homoerotic narratives.