Fierce Desires

From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three decades.

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.