From Criminal Bodies To Criminal Minds: The Texas Sodomy Statutes, Homosexuality, And The Politics Of A Criminal Status In Twentieth-Century Texas

This study shows how homosexuality became a crime in Texas. On one hand, the twentieth-century criminal definition of homosexuality and its applicability in Texas law is informed by centuries of both religious and legal understandings of and proscriptions for sodomy. On the other hand of this centuries-long legacy, criminalizing homosexuality in Texas has more recent connections, too. First of all, the ways in which a sodomitical other was imagined within the sodomy statuteâ??s enforcement and adjudication in Texas during the late nineteenth century was analogous to the deployment and protection of white supremacy in the South. Secondly, the criminalization of same-sex sexual desire was also very much rooted in the mid-twentieth century, specifically between 1943 and 1973. From wartime fears about vulnerable or misguided youth, to cold-war anxieties about secrecy or infiltration, and to the rise of the far right and the politicization of sexual identities, the effort to classify and incorporate a criminal definition of homosexuality into Texas law has been a misinformed endeavor and an injustice at every turn. During this thirty-year period the concept of a sodomitical other was reinvented, inscribed into new laws, and then used to classify and homogenize an otherwise heterogeneous group of people based solely on their individual sexualities. Ultimately, this study offers new insight into how criminal sodomy in Texas came to be reimagined within a heteronormative gaze as â??homosexual conductâ?? and provides a broader context for what is often labeled as a part of queer history. I resist classifying discrimination against the queer community in Texas or any state as queer history, however. This is a study of straight history, of its connections to colonialism, white supremacy, and nationalism at the intersection of antigay discrimination and the law.