Part 1. Establishing order, 1600-1870 : To confound the course of nature ; Sacred possessions ; Under the husband's government ; Slavery's intimate bonds ; A woman of pleasure ; Perfect confidence and love -- Part 2. Redefining sex, 1840-1938 : Then shall they be Gods ; A typical invert ; Obscene and immoral ; Plays too stirring for a boy your age ; A society of queers -- Part 3. Solving sexual problems, 1938-2024 : Scientific methods ; Revolutionary love ; Public masturbator number one ; Irresponsible intercourse ; Sexual advances ; Family's value ; Save the children -- Coda: The ghost of Anthony Comstock

"The first sweeping history of sex and sexuality in America since John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman's classic work, Intimate Matters, Rebecca L. Davis's Fierce Desires presents a story of dramatic and often surprising change. Davis's absorbing narrative takes us across four hundred years, from two-spirit people among the Pueblo Indians in the seventeenth century to the gay rights activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya in the twentieth. At every step, she documents the existence of gender nonconformity, queer love, and abortion--facts of sexual life deemed by the Right to be very recent inventions. At the same time, Davis argues that Americans shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as meaningful but secondary reflections of otherwise nonsexual personal qualities to understanding sexuality as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, essential to what makes a person who they are. Creating a new genealogy of sexual pioneers, Davis writes back into history people and ideas that have been forgotten, ignored, or intentionally suppressed."--