Native American LGBTQ+ Americans, 1528-1976, by Jonathan Ned Katz

These documents about LGBTQ+ Native Americans present years of testimony from a wide variety of observers: military men, missionaries, explorers, trappers, traders, settlers, and later, medical doctors, anthropologists, homosexual emancipationists, and LGBTQ+ activists. In a few rare instances the voices of LGBTQ+ Native Americans are heard. This is adapted from Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (NY: Crowell, 1976). The notes to these documents contain numbers of additional sources. Published originally on OutHistory in 2011; last edited in 2021.

Keating's "Numerous stories of hermaphrodites," 1823

Keating's Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of St. Peter's River ... in the Year 1823, ... under the Command of Stephen H. long ... reports the religious beliefs of a Native named Wennebea.

He believed the sun to be the residence of a male Deity, who looks placidly upon the earth ... The moon, on the contrary, he held to be inhabited by an adverse female Deity, whose delight is to cross man in all his pursuits. If during sleep, this Deity should present herself to them in their dreams, the Indians consider it as enjoined upon them by duty, to become cinaedi; they ever after assume the female garb. It is not impossible that this may have been the source of the numerous stories of hermaphrodites, related by all the old writers on America.[1]

References

Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (NY: Crowell, 1976) pg. 299.

William H. Keating, Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of St. Peter's River ... 2 vols. (Phila.: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1824), vol. I, p. 210-11.