GLR November-December 2024

relative to the two ambitious captains, Batt and Chapman, who had classified Newburgh as a buggerer before he even got off the boat in Philadelphia—makes for a story as gripping as The Children’s Hour or even Othello . The heart of Vicious and Immoral is the sequence of trials initiated by Newburgh to clear his name. In those days, if someone called you, say, a witch, and you did not respond, it was taken for granted that you were a witch. Failure to contest the charge was an admission of guilt. And so, Newburgh sued

of Enlightenment, as were the French Revolution and English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s argument that there was no rea son to punish homosexuals. (Thomas Jefferson disagreed, and recommended castration.) In a fascinating epilogue, McCurdy traces the parallel tracks of homophobia in English and Amer ican culture. There were no polls at the time of the American Revolution, but he makes the case that in the 1770s and be yond, the new nation did not really care about buggery in the way the English did. There were more important things to deal

Captain Batt for what we would call defamation. Then Captain Chapman sued Newburgh for perjury and other charges that went back and forth and culminated in two court-martials, one in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, the other in New York City. There was also a trial of an enlisted man whom Newburgh, as his chaplain, had tried to help, giving rise to homosexual innu

with, which led to a vaguely tolerant and more relaxed attitude toward homosexual relations. It’s remarkable that England executed men for homosexuality for many years— unlike France, for instance—and remained virulently homophobic until and beyond the trial of Oscar Wilde. English noblemen had to live abroad if they were suspected of

Robert Newburgh, fond of fashionable clothes, was rumored even before becoming the Royal Irish Company’s chaplain to be a “buggerer.”

endo, and still another for child abuse that somehow involved Newburgh because of a remark he allegedly made about it. At a certain point the trials begin to blur. One, for instance, was about a captain’s refusal to assign Newburgh the rooms in the barracks that the chaplain felt he deserved—rooms that hap pened to be near the outhouse, which was rumored to be a pick-up spot (does anything change?). This book contains both transcripts of the court proceedings as kept by the British Army and McCurdy’s commentary on them. At first Newburgh’s legal strategy was to track down the particulars of a sexual act he was accused of so that he could re fute it. When that went nowhere, he switched to a defense of his moral character, which should have cleared his name as well, since it was assumed that a person of good character could not be a sodomite. All this was happening, it should be mentioned, on the eve of the American Revolution. General Gage, the man who prom ised King George III that he would keep the colonies in Britain’s hands, had many things on his mind, so it’s remark able that he responded to Newburgh’s petitions for a full court martial while having to decide where and when to move his troops to suppress the nascent uprising. Newburgh was con cerned with clearing his reputation, the general with keeping the colonies in British hands. It is a wonder that he answered Newburgh’s letters at all, but he did—with admirable patience and courtesy. This moment in time leads McCurdy to expand his inquiry with the question: Did homosexuality have anything to do with the American Revolution? It seems at first a stretch to link the two, but McCurdy has a case. The two men who befriended Newburgh were both subalterns. One of them, a man named Fowler, insisted that Newburgh clear his name, because only then could they remain friends. But one wonders if Fowler was not using this challenge to Captains Chapman and Batt to tor ment his superiors. Fowler not only testified in Newburgh’s de fense; he married an American woman and became an American after the Revolution, which raises the possibility that Fowler was just using his testimony to challenge the British occupying force. And there’s more. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, McCurdy stresses, were both products of the Age

same-sex desires. In the U.S., it was more “Come back to the raft, Huck honey” (the title of Leslie Fiedler’s famous essay on the homoerotic strain in American literature). The frontier meant that you could always go west. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when Senator McCarthy conflated homosexuality and Com munism, that the two countries began to share the same level of homophobia, though the U.S. never made sodomy a capital offense. So, although it’s hard to say that homosexuality impacted the Revolution directly, anger against the British (and their

“ Worldwise sheds a long overdue light on one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century.” Brian James Baer, author of Queer Theory and Translation Studies: Language, Politics, Desire

Paperback | $32.95 | 288pp

M Q McGill-Queen’s University Press mqup.ca @McGillQueensUP

November–December 2024

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