Slavery & The Making of the Black Heterosexual

The trans-Atlantic slave trade marked the violent introduction of people of African descent into the Western world. Throughout the trade and chattel slavery, enslavers intended to reformulate the African person into the ideal, subservient, western human. This hegemonic process constituted the destruction of African culture, language, kinship, and futurity. Another process that has not been fully explored throughout historiography and discussed within our Black activist and nationalist movement is the erasure of African queerness and Black queer potential. Acknowledgment of the historical erasure of Black queerness is important due to the often violent homophobia and toxic masculinity that is unfortunately prominent in the Black community.

Under this framework, challenging homophobia, toxic masculinity, and heteronormativity becomes an anti-racist cause because it reclaims the queer legacies lost within the slave trade. Enslavers and slavery enforced a violent heteronormativity and gender binary that persecuted and punished Africans and Black Americans for deviating away from it. The practices employed by slave traders and enslavers during the transatlantic slave trade mandated heteronormativity and gender distinctions by partitioning the sexes and punishing those for participating in what in contemporary terms we would see as homosexual relations. Furthermore, following the abolition of the slave trade in the United States, enslavers in the Antebellum South forced enslaved people to heterosexually reproduce with each other.

Ships carrying enslaved people through the middle passage physically functioned to create gender boundaries between the sexes from its beginning to its abolition. Testimonies from white enslavers such as John Atkins indicated that it was an important strategy for them to partition the sexes, where it was “a rule always observed” to keep the “males apart from the women and children,” and to keep the men barricaded on the quarter deck of the ship. Atkins’ observations indicate a partition amongst the genders that discouraged interaction and cooperation amongst men and women. The rule that Atkins illustrates is part of a strategy that human traders employed to prevent organized resistance amongst enslaved people by implementing strict binary divides between the genders to limit cooperation. In one of the most famous diagrams of these ships used by early 19th-century abolitionists, the ‘Brookes’ slave ship diagram illustrates and describes how enslaved men and women were divided within it. In another diagram from 1814, women can be seen at the top of the ship, including one giving birth, whereas men were kept at the bottom hull of it. These diagrams show the construction of a gender binary intending to limit cooperation, solidify the boundaries between them, and provide enslavers with easier access to sexually abuse enslaved women and children. Enslavers, of course, violently enforced this divide through shackles, chains, and any other method of carceral harm at their disposal, which illustrates the cruel extent they went through in order to preserve a strict gender divide on their ships.

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade granted access to slaveholding societies to persecute enslaved African men for what the European Christian imperialist worldview saw as sodomy. The historian James H. Sweet has written that there was a specific category of homosexual men that “played a crucial role” in African spiritual life for hundreds of years. Sweet uncovered this conclusion after examining records from the Spanish Inquisition, revealing that there were enslaved Africans from Angola who were persecuted and punished for participating in what we would see in contemporary times as homosexual relations. According to his overview, there was a class of transgender homosexuals existing during the span of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in Angola who were respected spiritual leaders who conducted traditional burial ceremonies. António de Oliveira de Cadornega, a Portuguese soldier and chronicler, wrote in 1691 about this class of people, referring to them as “sodomites” who “shar[e] with the other their dirtiness and filth, dressing as women.” Cadornega’s observations represent the interaction between two opposing worldviews, where the European imperialist one saw this spiritual practice as offensive sodomy. Referring to homosexuals in Angola as “sodomites” was crucial in creating a Christian ideological justification for the persecution of those who deviated outside of the European heteronormative structure.

This laid the basis for the persecution of Africans who entered the European worldview through the slave trade that participated in practices opposing imperialist heteronormativity.

Records from European Inquisitions demonstrate how the slave trade granted European enslavers the power to enforce heteronormative Christianity against the people they kept as property. They used this to target those who deviated outside of their sexual norms, mainly for same-sex practices they saw as sodomy. On August 21, 1591, Sweet writes that two enslaved African men, Joane, and another man, consented to have same-sex intercourse with each other at the Jesuit College in Bahia, Brazil. As a result of being forcefully relocated to European territory and heteronormative worldview as a result of slavery, the men were denounced in the name of sodomy. The same person who testified against Joane and the unnamed African, Mathias Moreira, also denounced other Africans who violated the Portuguese heterosexual gender binary. Moreira testified against Francisco Manicongo, stating that he had seen Francisco on the streets of Bahia dressed as a woman as well and accusing him of having a reputation as a “sodomite.” Francisco’s denunciation in this inquisition represents how Africans who were stolen onto the land through the slave trade were persecuted for having sexual and gender behaviors that did not adhere to the cisheteronormative imperialist colonies.

The system of the slave trade and slavery here is crucial because only through their access to African lives were European colonizers able to impose their heterosexual worldview, which condemned samesex penetrative sex in the name of “sodomy,” on captured Africans who deviated outside of it.

The European/American heteronormative binary thrust upon enslaved Africans continued in the slave markets as well during the Antebellum period. In these markets, enslaver merchants would separate men and women from each other and then provide them with minimal costume to match the gender identity they had to present themselves as. Narratives from enslaved people sold at these markets confirm this, where Solomon Northup stated that men sometimes wore a “hat, coat, shirt, pants,” while women on the auction block wore “frocks of calico” and handkerchiefs. The women were then separated from the men. William J. Anderson’s narrative also displays this, where their “best clothes” were put on and men and women were separated from each other. WPA narratives also confirmed that enslavers lined men and women up on opposing sides based on their sex. Contrary to the obfuscation of gender, where scholars have suggested that enslavement had reversed and complexified the gender roles of enslaved people, it appears that gender boundaries became stricter rather than neutralized in the market.

The occurrences here, the separation of the sexes and dressing them according to gender, represent the theatrics at play that reinforced a gender binary that enslaved people must adhere to which limited potential queer expression. Enslaved people were given no choice but to be confined within American society’s gender conformities.

Sexuality is intrinsically tied within these sales as enslavers measured enslaved people’s worth, primarily women, based on their aptitude for heterosexual reproduction. Following the end of the United States’ participation in the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, enslaved women became increasingly valuable as they were the only remaining source to reproduce more humans for enslavers. Slavery exacerbated into an institution that systemically demanded the forced reproduction of enslaved women with other men, enslaved or enslaver. Heterosexual reproduction was their marker of value. In some cases, enslavers would prioritize younger women on the auction block based on whether they were “a good breeder” or not, and even purchase young enslaved men to reproduce with each other. Decisions like these by enslavers enforced a dominant heterosexuality on enslaved women that mandated reproduction with men.

Practices of arranging enslaved women and men based on heterosexual relations, sometimes with enslavers themselves, for reproduction continued on the plantation. Enslavers coerced their enslaved people into forming intimate, even violently nonmonogamous relations between men

This became an underlying current for reinforcing a heteronormativity built by forcing men and women together for reproduction through violence. During the domestic slave trade, most prominently at the beginning of its inception, enslavers coerced enslaved men and women to reproduce with each other through force. Forced marriages have been estimated to affect one out of ten enslaved unions, and moreover, bell hooks has concluded that slave reproduction as a practice itself was widespread. These reproduction practices were of course built from a desire to produce as much human property as possible for economic efficiency and success through the artificial construction of heterosexual relations. Testimony from enslaved people subject to reproduction practices represents the familial and psychological destruction resulting from it. Referring to the reproduction between men and women on her plantation, enslaved woman Polly Shine stated that the practice “never suited us much” but they had to do it anyway to avoid ”whippings” and “mean” treatment. Polly’s grandmother became blind, unable to fulfill her normal duties as an enslaved laborer, but was still kept on the plantation for reproduction. Economic gain through heteronormative reproduction between enslaved people became the norm on the plantations, and humans were arranged like chattel and chessboard pieces for enslavers' gain.

Enslavers took these heteronormative arrangement practices and pushed them to their extremes. Enslavers forced enslaved men to have intercourse with as many women as possible to maximize how many humans they could reproduce and enslave. An enslaved woman in Texas mentioned that on her plantation, hardly any of the younger enslaved people knew who their fathers were as enslavers coerced them into massreproducing with the women. Another formerly enslaved woman did not know who her father was, but speculated it may have been the “stock n****r” that was on the plantation. Elige Davison, formerly enslaved in Richmond, mentioned that his enslaver would not let him have a monogamous relationship with an enslaved woman and instead speculated that he had “fifteen women” and “some over a hundred” children. Enslavers attempted to maximize the reproduction of human property by coercing their enslaved men to reproduce with many of the women on their plantations during the domestic slave trade. These mass heterosexual arrangements indicate the extent to which heteronormativity dominated the plantations, pushing enslaved men and women to have intercourse, sometimes against their own wills, to reinforce the slave system and the financial security of their enslavers. Since the concepts of heterosexuality and heteronormativity have arisen in contemporary times, enslavers, of course, were not aware that they were reinforcing and erasing potential queer expression by enslaved people.

Still, however, these couple and reproduction arrangement practices by enslavers create an environment in which heterosexual reproduction and economic efficiency for enslavers became intertwined, leaving queer expression, including its lingering traces in African spirituality brought from the middle passage, out of the picture.

As the domestic slave trade progressed and became increasingly scrutinized by abolitionist reformers, enslavers, their allies attempted to defend and consecrate enslavement by associating Africans and their enslaved descendants with sodomy. Often did enslavers use biblical allusion to justify the enslavement of Africans and Black Americans, such as the Curse of Ham narrative that God punished Ham and his descendants with ‘blackness’ and slavery. In 1823, Frederick Dalcho published a series of considerations justifying slavery by using scripture, and in it, he states that “Canaan’s whole race were under the malediction… Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities of the plain, were destroyed for their abominations.” Dalcho continued the Curse of Ham narrative by associating enslaved Black Americans with homosexual practices, which slavery would rid them of. The domestic slave trade became further scrutinized with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, and a year after, Josiah Priest published the “Bible defence of slavery,” which cited African homosexuality, or in Priest’s words, sodomy, to justify

Priest wrote that the race of Ham, enslaved Black Americans and Africans, had participated in sodomy, citing specifically the Muhotians,” which in his anecdote set in Africa intended to take prisoners to “practice sodomy on them.” Priest remarked that the Muhotians wanted to rape the men they encountered “because they were white… and exceedingly handsome.” This quote is particularly revealing as it demonstrates how rhetoric surrounding sexually predacious Black men were not just targeted towards white women, but also white men as well.

This brief overview between the earliest stages of the transatlantic slave trade and the end of chattel slavery demonstrates the intersection between anti-Blackness and cisheteronormativity. So what’s the importance of all of this? Often Black nationalist movements, primarily the men of the Black Panther Party, have argued that racism has unfairly robbed the Black man of his masculinity. This focus on reclaiming masculinity, as female Panthers such as Angela Davis and Asatta Shakur would note, marginalized many of the women in these Black radical movements as Black men attempted to reclaim the patriarchy as a way of undoing the racism inflicted upon them. What if instead, we considered reclaiming Black queerness as a radical, anti-racist way of decolonizing ourselves? Perhaps if so, there would be more cross-sexuality solidarity in the Black community, and Black trans and queer people wouldn’t have to live in fear of both white racism and Black homophobia/transphobia.