GLR November-December 2024

laws) and a general tolerance brought about by freedom and sheer space con spired to ensure that the colonies did not make such a big deal about what men did with one another. As for Reverend New burgh, was he even gay? Historians are helpless without records, and at a certain point after the court-martial in New York, our hero simply fades from the page. On

somehow an elusive figure no matter how much sympathy one feels for what he had to endure. But the pleasures of Vicious and Im moral do not depend on what we think of Newburgh. McCurdy’s slice of history is written with an eye for detail that puts us back in an era that is largely ignored these days. It’s not just the central story that en

VICIOUS AND IMMORAL Homosexuality, the American Revolu ti on, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh by John Gilbert McCurdy Johns Hopkins Univ. Press 376 pages, $34.95

grosses us; it’s the wealth of detail, the re-creation of a time in American history when Britons were turning into Ameri cans. When Newburgh arrived, the British clergy was already associated with same-sex activity, and so was the Army. Sol diers stationed in London were known to sell their favors to the rich and entitled (a practice that, as readers of J. R. Ack erley’s classic memoir My Father and Myself already know, lasted to the late 19th century, when Ackerley’s father was kept by a Belgian aristocrat who later gave him his start in business). Then there was Isaac Bickerstaff, who served in the Royal Marines during the Seven Years’ War—an Anglo-Irish lieu tenant who, upon retiring, moved to London and started writing comic operas like Thomas and Sally and Love in a Village . In 1772, at the height of his success, newspapers reported that Bickerstaff “grew enamoured, the other night at Whitehall, with one of the Cenitnels and made love to him.” Newburgh would have understood, McCurdy writes, that the gravity of this inci dent was not just that Bickerstaff had committed buggery but that he had made the Army an object of ridicule. A piece of dog gerel mocking “these enlighten’d times” in which Bickerstaff did “for grenadiers imprudent burn” even asked: It’s nice to know there were all levels of response to the charge of buggery, including mocking and sophisticated ones, though Newburgh’s accusers were not among the latter. After the court martial’s mixed verdict, they tried to get him transferred to— where else?—Illinois. As for Newburgh, one hopes he found happiness, but we shall never know. McCurdy never takes a definitive position on his subject’s homosexuality. Reading this book, one is hard pressed to say; but I suspect he was. That’s based in part on the way McCurdy ends his book with what happened to the various characters in this legal donnybrook. Newburgh’s detractors, Batt and Chapman, got married to women, rose through the ranks, and served in other theaters. But, McCurdy writes: “the former chaplain’s life after the l8th Regiment took a different route than either the captains or the subalterns. He never married or had children; he neither settled down in England nor pioneered a new life on the American frontier. Instead, Robert Newburgh’s manhood was queer, and it followed a separate path.” Like Bickerstaff—or Lord Byron, for that matter—he ended up an exile from his own country. Newburgh wound up off the coast of Brittany, taking his secrets with him. He wandered off the pages of the historical record into oblivion, from which Vicious and Immoral has now rescued him. Of manly love, ah! Why are men ashamed? A new red coat, fierce cock and killing air Will captivate the most obdurate fair.

May 13, 1775, Newburgh (who had previously expressed a dis like of America) sailed to London, switched his commission from the 18th to the 15th Regiment, and sailed back to Amer ica in time to participate in the British invasion of New York. After that, he saw duty in the Caribbean, where, after the British defeat in Grenada, he resigned his commission and took a post as a hospital chaplain on the island of Belle-Île-en Mer, a French territory off the coast of Brittany. And there he re mained until his death in 1825. In the end, one doesn’t know what to make of him. Was there something narcissistic about the clothes, even the insis tence on clearing his name? Was he just a drama queen? One can only imagine what General Gage thought of his case; pre sumably he wished it would disappear. The transcripts do not make everything clear. For instance, the court-martial found that Newburgh had lied when he said that Captain Chapman had offered to settle their case out of court. But what was the meaning of the comments the chaplain made about the awful child abuse trial that preceded his own litigation? He remains

taking the city by storm An art midst of the Queer Craze that i Adams lands in New York in the Twenties Paris, Henrietta“Henri” Fresh off the boat from Roaring s e ” g Hamilton Lodge Masquerade Renaissance luminaries at the stars rub elbows with Harlem and the Cotton Club. Broadway performers at the Astor Hotel the party, flocking to see queer binary. Jazz-age revelers crash from the tyranny of the gender and drag balls, which free her clandestine worlds of speakeasi night, she ventures into the critic by day and lady lover by taking the city by storm. An art era crackdowns, Henri calculate forever. Faced with Depression Ball. But the revelry can't last g q r r reaching consequences. prompting a decision with far the risk of fighting back,

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l li Margaret Vandenburg is a , a An American in Paris include essayist whose previous books novelist, playwright, and i h d marg , a portrait of a family Front TheHome Natalie Barney, and salons of Gertrude Stein and romp through the sapphic

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