While enslaved people could not legally marry, they developed their own commitment rituals and family cultures. Evidence of male-male and female-female bonds appears in various forms:
The history of same-sex intimacy and romantic storylines among enslaved people is a burgeoning field of study that moves beyond the traditional focus on heteronormative family structures. Scholars are increasingly "queering" the archive, finding evidence of same-sex desire and deep emotional bonds in slave narratives, court records, and colonial observations. Historical Evidence of Romantic Relationships
Same-sex bonds are viewed as an expression of autonomy and a refusal to have one's body entirely commodified for reproductive labor.
Recent scholarship emphasizes that sexuality was a "core terrain of struggle" between enslavers and the enslaved.
Early Pennsylvania sodomy laws differentiated punishments based on race, suggesting that same-sex encounters among Black men were a recognized social concern for authorities. Scholarly Interpretations and Intimacy
In his autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom , Frederick Douglass describes a "band of brothers" as being profoundly loving, which some scholars interpret as a form of homoerotic affiliation.
Since historical records of consensual queer love are often obscured by trauma or social stigma, modern authors use fiction to imagine these lost stories: