What's in a name? (Part 2) - Tangentially, I saw where the William & Mary gay alumni association had created something called the Richard Cornish Endowment Fund to purchase of gay and lesbian literature for the school library. Who was this Richard Cornish, you ask? Well, it seems Cornish was an the first person tried and convicted of sodomy in the thirteen colonies, way back in 1624. After martial law was imposed by the royal governor in 1610, the story goes,

The first person to be executed was Richard Cornish, a ship's captain accused of sexually assaulting his indentured servant, William Cowse. The charge, as chronicled in the minutes of the Virginia court, sounds today like a case of sexual harassment - Cornish wanted to have sex with Cowse, who refused and then was given extra work. On the basis of the testimony of another crewmember who overheard Cornish proposition Cowse, Cornish was tried and hanged. Two men who publicly objected to the execution as unjust received punishments of their own - standing on the pillory and having their ears cut off.

The objectors seem to have believed Cornish was set up by the "rascally" Cowse, but we can imagine that buggery wasn't so rare among the young and all-male Virginia Company settlers. Thus began the long and sordid history of sodomy laws in the Commonwealth and the other colonies, leading up to their final demise under SCOTUS's 2003 Lawrence ruling.