GLR November-December 2023

sex in the first place. Some Shaker men could not separate the idea of sex from sin and were willing to live apart from their wives in return for the promise of a heavenly reward. For men who felt little or no desire for women, however, the Shaker life offered the opportunity to live in a community where interaction with females would be only intermittent, and highly regulated. Instead, they would live in intimate communion with other men, fellow seekers who had taken a solemn vow to keep their sex ual desires in check. Constant temptation, but temptation cor ralled behind iron gates of religious resolve. Unfortunately, our understanding of the early years of the sect is handicapped by warped sources. Ann Lee herself was completely illiterate, and she established as the first rule of Shaker life that you don’t write about Shaker life. Maintaining a strictly oral tradition provided some protection against a hos tile response to their controversial beliefs and practices. As a result, documentation about the early period comes mostly from prejudiced outsiders, and from apostates who once professed belief but eventually left the order. The hostile screeds of out siders can be discounted, but many of the apostate writers pro duced nuanced accounts of their time among the Shakers, being careful to correct the misrepresentations of outsiders, acknowl edging the admirable traits that drew them to the communities in the first place, but writing unsparingly of practices that drove them to leave. From a somewhat sympathetic Daniel Rathbun we learn that Mother Lee required her followers to strip naked and engage in wild, ecstatic dancing in imitation of the innocence of Adam and Eve before the Fall, after which she would beat the believ ers’ genitals to punish any postlapsarian randiness. “[T]he mother’s pounding and beating the private parts of both men and women in her discipline—these things have I seen,” Rath bun wrote. Abuse of one’s genitals became an accepted rite, with members believing that they could exhaust their sexual de sire through strenuous exertion. These exercises were particu larly painful and debilitating for the men. Reuben Rathbun, Daniel’s nephew, reported that “in a short time they who were the most zealous and faithful labored into that degree of morti fication that the natural functions of the body were so impaired, and the power of retention so relaxed that they were not able to keep themselves from involuntary evacuations [i.e., ejacula tions], almost continually, which made some almost despair of ever being saved, as the natural seed of copulation was looked upon as the most unclean and hateful of any thing in the natu ral creation.” The men beat on, “but still the flesh lived, though some were so violent in their labors, and brought their bodies under so much weakness that there was not much power of erec tion in the parts of generation.” But it was not all liturgical jerks. To sympathetic outsiders, Shaker communities appeared to be the epitome of utopian har mony. Their buildings were sturdy and practical. Their grounds were immaculate. Their farms employed advanced agricultural techniques, and many were enviably profitable. The function ality and workmanship of Shaker furniture made it highly de sirable. Visitors were invited to observe selected religious William Benemann is the author of Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail and Men in Eden: William Drum mond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade. November–December 2023

services, where they saw, not wild bacchanals, but regimented dances with the women on one side of the room and the men on the other. Participants danced intricate patterns in lockstep, like automatons with blissful smiles upon their faces, singing of the joys of being simple. Reality was a bit more complex. Shaker communities were roiled by the requirement of celibacy, the practice singled out above all others as “bearing the cross.” Whether the issue was unruly lust or just the basic need for emotional intimacy with another individual, it was a hard cross to bear for many believ ers. Shaker life rubbed against the grain of human longing, pre senting a challenge that many found impossible to meet, and difficulty with celibacy was the major reason for desertions from the order. Moreover, at the heart of its theology was an un resolvable conflict. Shaker daily life was built around a binary conception of gender. Being a good Shaker meant knowing which door you should enter, which staircase you should de scend. And yet, the ultimate goal that Mother Ann taught was to become like God: both male and female. For most Shaker men and women, this meant stifling one’s attraction to the opposite sex in order to become both in oneself. For women who desired women, and for men who desired men, the conflict became un bearably complicated. As the 19th century progressed, new converts to the religion attempted to disentangle the rumors they had heard about the Shakers from the theology that was now being preached. For many, the question of naked dancing was a particular stumbling block because it seemed so obviously sexual. Thomas Brown

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