Rape of Enslaved Men

Same-sex sexual relations were legally prohibited in the Americas during the period of slavery, but these interdictions were not enforced. Until the end of the eighteenth century in Latin America, the Inquisition persecuted enslaved men who were denounced for sodomy practices, even when they were raped by their owners.

In 1741, the slave owner João Durão de Oliveira of Sabará, Minas Gerais, in Brazil was also denounced for the “abominable sin of sodomy.”⁶⁶ During the first phase of Durão’s investigation, the parish priest heard eight male witnesses. In the second phase, sixteen witnesses were heard, including one enslaved woman, one freedwoman, and several of his victims.

During the same period, many other cases of enslaved men raped by their owners are documented in the Inquisition records. Take the example of Luiz da Costa, an African-born enslaved domestic servant, who worked in Vila da Boa Vista, in the captaincy of Pernambuco, Brazil. In 1743, he accompanied his owner, Manoel Alves Cabral, in a hunting excursion. Threatening him with a musket, Cabral raped Luiz, who described the act as “penetration and ejaculation in his posterior orifice.”⁶⁹ In 1761, Francisco Serrão de Castro also raped the African-born enslaved man Joaquim Antonio, with anal penetration. According to Joaquim, like him, several other enslaved men were also sexually abused by Castro.⁷⁰ These cases bring to light how slave owners coerced enslaved men to have sex with them and how they violated their bodies through rape.

In colonial North America and the antebellum South, sexual encounters between white women of various statuses and enslaved men posed serious challenges. During most of the seventeenth century, the children of a white woman with an enslaved man would carry the legal slave status of the father. Starting in the eighteenth century, sexual relations between a Black man and a white woman were prohibited. And at any time, these liaisons could be denounced as alleged rapes.⁷¹ Similar liaisons obviously existed in Latin America and the West Indies, but there was never any legislation preventing interracial sex and marriage. The Catholic Church punished women who had sexual relations out of wedlock, regardless of whether the sexual partner was enslaved or free, or white. But although unmarried white women who engaged in premarital sex were morally reproached, they were not legally prevented from having sex with whomever they chose.

In a famous passage of an early twentieth-century book, historian and sociologist Manoel Bomfim describes the tragic outcomes of such forbidden sexual liaisons in Brazil: “It is not uncommon for the â€?little missy’ who was raised touching young black boys, to deliver herself to them, when the degenerate nerves wake up in irrepressible desires; then paternal morality comes: the black or mulatto is castrated with a badly sharped knife, the wound is salted, and he is buried alive afterwards. The girl, with a reinforced dowry, marries a poor cousin.”⁷² Although castration is perhaps an exaggeration, this description suggests that despite the absence of legislation preventing interracial sex, Brazilian society violently punished enslaved men who engaged in sexual relations with young white elite women.

Other factors also impacted sexual relations among the enslaved population. On plantations and in urban areas, the absence of private spaces where bondspeople could engage in intimate exchanges was an obstacle to sexual activity.⁷³ Depending on the period and region, fewer enslaved women were available to become sexual partners of enslaved men.

Regardless of gender imbalance, some bondsmen also chose to engage in sexual relations with other enslaved men. In his account to journalist Domingo Del Monte, former enslaved man Esteban Montejo emphasized that some male slaves preferred to have sex between themselves and did not want to have anything to do with women: “This was their life: sodomy. They washed clothes and if they had a husband they also cooked. They were good workers and were busy cultivating their plots. They gave the harvest to their husbands so that they would sell it to the peasants.”⁷⁵ However, we can presume that Cuban Catholic society likely rejected and disapproved of same-sex enslaved couples.