I have been trying to find any truth/proof to "Buck Breaking" for over a year now -- and I am convinced it is a myth.
Male-on-male sexual abuse
definitely did occur -- in addition to male enslaved being raped by white women. But. Buck Breaking.... I haven't found any solid proof.
References to the sexual abuse of male slaves by white male owners in the historical record; a handful of slave narratives (including Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) contain references that seem to clearly refer to non-consensual, exploitative same-sex activity; at least one study of abolitionist rhetoric has identified how some strands of abolitionist thought tried to imply that there was an inherently homoerotic component to the exploitation of male slaves that could and did culminate in sexual abuse.
Indeed, abolitionists went to great lengths to highlight sexual abuse as a particular, masculine act of depravity in general. Plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood quite notably made explicit reference to the practice in Jamaica even in the 1700s, when he briefly drew attention in his diary to news that another slave owner had been accused of committing sodomy with one of his male domestic servants.
Additional references:
- Thomas Foster, "The Sexual Abuse of Black Men Under American Slavery", Journal of the History of Sexuality (2011): 445 - 464.
- Thomas Foster, Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (mainly John Salliant, "The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic").
- Fay Yarborough, "Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South", The Journal of Southern History 71, no. 3 (2005): 559 - 588.
- Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo Jamaican World (2004).
- William Benemann, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendship (2006)
