John Gilbert McCurdy's "Vicious and Immoral"

John Gilbert McCurdy is a professor of history at Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States and Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution.

McCurdy applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh, and reported the following:

On page 99, we learn that Reverend Robert Newburgh’s penchant for flamboyant clothes led British army officers to observe “the parson is a buggerer.” Newburgh was chaplain to the Eighteenth Regiment and was accused of having sex with a man. Suspicion of buggery was enough for captains in the regiment to try to force Newburgh out of the army. Unable to find physical evidence of buggery, they looked at his appearance, ultimately concluding that a new green coat was proof that the chaplain was a homosexual.

The Page 99 Test works well for Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh. On this page, testimony from Newburgh’s trials recounts claims about what Newburgh was wearing and what officers said about it. The book argues that ideas about homosexuality in the eighteenth century were more similar to the present than we might assume. Although historians have argued that sexual identity was created in the nineteenth century, here, in 1774, we have proof that British army officers were making assumptions about a man’s sexual preferences based upon how he looked. A buggerer was not the same thing as a homosexual, but he embodied a unique character marked by his appearance in ways not that dissimilar from a modern-day gay man.

In addition to exploring male-male intimacy in the eighteenth century, Vicious and Immoral puts homosexuality and the American Revolution into conversation with each other. The trials of Robert Newburgh occurred in Philadelphia and New York less than two years before American independence. The officers who sought to evict Newburgh from the army feared that a buggerer could spell doom for the British Empire. For them, a buggerer was a social contagion that linked to the gathering colonial rebellion. Conversely, Newburgh borrowed the language of revolutionaries to argue that what he wore was irrelevant to his ability to perform his duties; he had rights that could not be denied to him based solely on rumor. A few officers in the Eighteenth Regiment backed his claims, and when the war ended, they became citizens of the United States. In this way, Vicious and Immoral suggests that the ideals of the American Revolution implicitly contained the seeds of sexual liberalism.

Learn more about Vicious and Immoral at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States.

The Page 99 Test: Quarters.

--Marshal Zeringue