ABSTRACT
The intertwined histories of race and sex in the United States come together in the history of sexual minorities in fraught and complicated ways. Throughout the history of the United States, race has been central to Americans’ thinking about sex, and vice versa. In the decades that followed, expressions of same-sex intimacy and gender nonconformity would flourish in the very same social and sexual spaces where the color line was blurred. Colonial leaders further used laws governing sexuality to shore up white supremacy by cementing the link between blackness and bondage. Sexual violence against men and women alike was a fixture of American slavery, and in the century that followed emancipation, lynch mobs murdered thousands of African Americans, many of whom were Black men who had allegedly violated the strict prohibition against sex with white women.
