Red Hearts in a White World: Anarchism, Primitivism, and the Invention of the Third Sex

J. William Lloyd was one of the most influential yet understudied figures in the early twentieth century anarchist movement. He was never particularly successful: editing a series of tiny magazines, which never reached more than a thousand people, he ultimately died in near destitution on a homestead in California. Yet, his extensive writings on sex, gender, love, and sexuality were read by a whose-who of the era’s social reform world, including Walt Whitman and Emma Goldman. Indeed, Lloyd helped introduce US Americans to the “third sex,” the notion that some people were neither male nor female, but had either masculine souls in feminine bodies, or vice versa.

To Lloyd, sex was “spiritually the fountain, physically the garden of life; the visible finger of the Creator.” White, civilized people, he asserted, needed to seek to gain “red hearts,” learning the "natural" ways of indigenous people (even as he was sure that actual indigenous people were soon to be extinct), which would lead them to recognizing the inherent fluidity of sexuality. Lloyd’s dreams of sexual freedom, in other words, rested on the appropriation and ultimate eradication of indigenous people.

Where scholars have often presented anarchists as an anti-racist force, I will argue instead that in the first years of the twentieth century, this movement developed and popularized notions of gender and sexual alterity that rested on a settler colonial logic that predicated the liberation of white people on the erasure of indigenous. This logic, I will suggest, was inherited by generations of queer activists across the twentieth century and helps explain the preponderance of what Ben Miller has called the “Primitivist Homomythopoetics” at the center of white gay male thought in the later twentieth century.