I can’t say I’ve come across much on same-sex relations between slaves, but there is a little on such relations and on relations between master and slaves in Thomas A. Foster’s Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men which came out last year with University of Georgia Press. Most of the book is dedicated to heterosexual exploitation, but Chapter 5 delves in the more difficult subject. I should also mention that his work is not specifically about the U.S., but about slavery across the Americas.

Sexual exploitation is of course, a very difficult subject to examine within plantation life in the U.S. Those who owned people in bondage were reluctant to speak on the matter because it of course contravened the "Christian" and "paternalist" doctrines that were supposed to guide their actions, despite it being a pretty regular affair. Even in slave narratives, autobiographies that were meant to document the brutal experience of slavery, sexual exploitation was considered too taboo a subject for publication and was not as regularly discussed as we know it must have occurred. Harriet Jacobs is one of the few former slaves to write about this issue in her slave narrative (I highly recommend checking this one out - https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html) In addition, for male slaves who wrote the majority of these accounts, to fail to protect your wife, sister or mother was an emasculating and shameful thing, so many chose not to discuss it. This of course, is doubly so for same-sex exploitation on the plantation.

Foster’s chapter delves into this subject in the most depth I’ve seen, but he has to extrapolate and draw his conclusions primarily from art where the black male body is objectified or in particular passages where odd or atypical language is employed to describe relations between people with the same sex. One example would be where he refers to research by Vincent Woodward, who argues that Frederick Douglass himself was raped by the slave-breaker Mr. Covey because of the way he recounts the experience in his narrative in coded language: “THE foregoing chapter, with all its horrid incidents and shocking features, may be taken as a fair representation of the first six months of my life at Covey’s. The reader has but to repeat, in his own mind, once a week, the scene in the woods, where Covey subjected me to his merciless lash, to have a true idea of my bitter experience there, during the first period of the breaking process through which Mr. Covey carried me. I have no heart to repeat each separate transaction, in which I was a victim of his violence and brutality.” Foster’s chapter also makes a structuralist argument, namely that the condition’s on the plantation (violence, close quarters, exploitation) would lead logically to some sort of same-sex sexual exploitation, even if we cannot calculate exactly how much. He makes the case that some male slaves, particularly domestic ones such as valets, would have been more likely to be subject to such assaults.