Purity and Danger

This refers to the creation of things such as social purity groups during the times of the temperance and prohibition movement which argued that unrestrained male lust and desire was a pollutant to the cleanliness of society. This went side by side with ideas of racial purity that many “Progressivists” had in which they believed other races to be sexually dangerous and threats to the legitimate expressions of white sexuality. These “Progressivists” held racist ideas surrounding racial mixing and also hypersexualised other races to further invoke fear of those people’s sexual expression. This theme also extends after the creation of sexology as a theory as “the homosexual” is the new threat to social purity because “the homosexual” gets associated with the child molester, the diseased, and the criminal (Bronski). [Satveer]