LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a message to Chrislove.
Good evening, faithful LGBTQ Literature readers. Sorry again about the snafu with the March diary and the week-long delay. Hopefully, the wait will have been worthwhile.
I decided to approach this diary a little differently than I normally do. Usually, any LGBTQ Literature diary I write is a deep-dive into one particular LGBTQ history book. This time, rather than plumbing the depths of one book, I thought it would be more interesting to write about a larger historical debate in which many different books are engaged. I’d like to zoom in on two of them in this diary: Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (2001) and Graham Robb’s Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (2003). Both books, as you can tell, deal with homosexuality (especially male homosexuality, although Robb does also deal with women to some extent) in the nineteenth century. These are certainly not the only books on this large topic, but I like the juxtaposition since they were published at around the same time and certainly seem to be in pretty direct conversation with each other. Again, this diary is not going to go deeply into either book (maybe I’ll save that for another diary), but here are some blurbs to give you an idea of what each book covers:
In Love Stories, Jonathan Ned Katz presents stories of men’s intimacies with men during the nineteenth century—men like Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman—drawing flesh and blood portraits of intimate friendships and the ways in which men struggled to name, define, and defend their sexual feelings for one another. In a world before “gay” and “straight” referred to sexuality, these men created new ways to name and conceive of their relationships, and Katz dives into history to offer us a clearer picture than ever before of how they navigated the uncharted territory of male-male desire.
In Strangers, the brilliant biographer of Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud has turned his attention to uncovering the real story of male and female homosexuality in the Victorian era. On the basis of archives, diaries, and letters scattered throughout Europe and America, Graham Robb tells a tale that is in part familiar, and in part extremely surprising—a story of oppression and secrecy but also of unexpected tolerance and familiarity.
Contradicting the widely held view that a liberated and proud gay heritage dates back only a few decades, the author uncovers evidence from legislation, literature, medicine, and daily life pointing to a culture of homosexuality that was uniquely well developed, self-aware, and sophisticated. He describes the lives of gay men and women: how they discovered their sexuality and accepted or disguised it; how they came out; how they made contact with like-minded people. He also includes a fascinating investigation of the encrypted homosexuality of such famous nineteenth-century sleuths as Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes himself (with glances forward in time to Batman and J. Edgar Hoover). Finally, Strangers addressed crucial questions of gay culture, including the riddle of its relationship to religion: Why were homosexuals created with feelings that the Creator supposedly condemns?
As you might be able to glean just from reading the above blurbs, there is some significant overlap when it comes to the topic. However, there is a very crucial difference that becomes obvious to the reader very quickly. That difference boils down to the question: How do we talk about men who loved and/or had sex with other men in the nineteenth century? This was a time, after all, before the word “homosexuality” had even been coined. Combine the lack of language with the very different landscape of gender and sexuality that existed, and then combine that with the scant evidence we have, and it can become sort of tricky to talk about, say, what exactly Abraham Lincoln’s intimate letters with Joshua Speed really meant.
The problem of changing language and fluid identity categories is something I struggle with myself, as somebody who teaches large U.S. history survey courses. I do my best to weave threads of gender and sexuality throughout my courses, but I’m confronted with the challenge of teaching LGBTQ history before “L,” “G,” “B,” “T,” or “Q” existed as identity categories—and I have to make language choices. The kind of nuance that exists in academic LGBTQ history is kind of difficult to adequately work into a survey class.
There are “camps” of historians—so-called social constructionists and essentialists—who approach this issue quite differently. Social constructionists engage (whether consciously or not) with Michel Foucault, who basically argued that the sexologists’ “construction” of the “homosexual” category in the late 1800s gave way to the rise of homosexuality as an identity—whereas, before, homosexuality was thought of as a sexual act (“sodomy,” “buggery,” etc.). Essentialists—who, I think it’s safe to say, are outnumbered by social constructionists in the field—don’t deny that language changes, but they assert that queer people have always identified themselves as different (in much the same way as queer people today do), even if they used different words (such as “Uranian”). Part of the reason I chose the above books is because Jonathan Net Katz and Graham Robb fit pretty neatly into these categories, with Katz firmly in the social constructionist camp and Robb with the essentialists. In preparing for this diary, I actually read over my notes for my Ph.D. exams, and wow—just based on these notes, it seems like I really had it in for Graham Robb. (I don’t, actually, although I do take some issue with his theoretical approach.) So you can tell which side I generally fall on. But this diary isn’t meant to start an argument—it’s meant to present this historical debate through the arguments Katz and Robb make in their respective works.
I think Katz’s Love Stories would be the best place to begin, where he takes this debate head-on in the first chapter. He begins the book with an account of Abraham Lincoln’s very close (even intimate) relationship with his friend Joshua Speed. You might have heard some draw the conclusion that Lincoln was “gay” based on this relationship, and it’s safe to say that Katz would not agree with that characterization. Katz covers the relationship—and the flowery exchanges between the men—in great detail. But also places the men’s friendship in the context of a larger “institution” of romantic male friendships in the nineteenth century, which he argues existed separately from sex:
Intense, even romantic man-to-man friendships—an institution in nineteenth-century America—were a world apart in that era’s consciousness from the sensual universe of mutual masturbation and the legal universe of “sodomy,” “buggery,” and the “crime against nature” (legally, men’s anal intercourse with men, boys, women, and girls, and humans’ intercourse with beasts). The universe of mutual onanism and sodomy was a world of carnal acts. The universe of intimate friendship was, ostensibly, a world of spiritual feeling. The radical Christian distinction between mind and body located the spiritual and carnal in different spheres. So hardly anyone then asked, Where does friendship end and sodomy begin?
[...]
To understand Lincoln and Speed, and others of their century, we must try to comprehend their world’s structuring of eros and love, their ideas, and their language. Their society had its own ways of ordering, conceiving, and naming men’s affection and lust for men, and the erotic acts between them. Walt Whitman spoke in 1856 of men “saying their ardor in native forms,” and that is what Lincoln, Speed, and others were attempting. Creatures of a particular historical time and place, men generated their own native forms of intimacy, of sex-love and sex-acts, sex-talk and sex-silence.
And then we get to the meat of his argument:
We may refer to early-nineteenth-century men’s acts or desires as gay or straight, homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual, but that places their behaviors and lusts within our sexual system, not the system of their time.
[...]
Neither Lincoln nor Speed thought that his love for a man or for a woman made him into a certain kind of person—a man-loving man or woman-loving man, or a combination type. The identities homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual had not yet been invented—neither had those terms and concepts.
Katz specifically takes issue with some historians of sexuality who fall on the essentialist side of the divide and makes clear that one of his primary purposes in writing the book is to challenge those underlying essentialist assumptions:
But many historians, it seems to me, still assume, in practice, the existence of unchanging, ahistorical homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual desires and acts—whatever those lusts and behaviors were called in their own time. In this book, I challenge that assumption and try to deepen our understanding of sexuality as a historical construct. In every society, no doubt, some men have always sexually desired and erotically interacted with men. But those desires and acts were not always structured as specifically “same-sex” phenomena, or understood as “sexual.” If, in the nineteenth century, the sexual was, properly, the potentially reproductive intercourse of penis and vagina, there existed many erotic desires and acts that were not recognized as such. In this book I ask that we consider sexual desires and sexual acts, along with sexual identities, as fundamentally changing and fully historical, a still-controversial, counterintuitive idea.
[...]
[A]ccording to recent historical understandings of sexuality—my own and others’—there is no such thing as an unchanging essence of homosexuality and heterosexuality. Instead, over time, human beings continually reconfigure their affectionate and erotic feelings and acts. People use words, and the ideas those words convey, as tools to reshape eros. The names people call particular erotic desires and acts play a big role in the shaping of sexualities in an era. In this historical view, even the basic idea of what is “erotic” or “sexual” changes fundamentally over time. Its character cannot be assumed; it must be investigated, with evidence sought in old diaries, letters, trial records, and newspapers.
That sets the theoretical stage for the rest of the book, which really is a series of “love stories” between men in the nineteenth century. This is a book that—in addition to being about (sometimes famous) men like Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman—is really about change over time and how different men in different times and places constructed their own identities and understood their own desires (and, in turn, how society at large understood these men). It’s a story of how a relatively narrow idea like “sodomy” became entangled in the public mind with once-accepted romantic friendships between men—and how the definition of “sex” itself changed over time.
Graham Robb looks at roughly the same time period, but with some important differences. Robb’s approach is more transnational, since it looks at both the United States and Europe, and it’s also not just about male homosexuality. Maybe even more importantly, Robb comes at this topic from a completely different theoretical perspective, which (as with Katz) becomes clear very quickly, when he directly takes on Michel Foucault and the influence he has had on the field:
The biggest surprise was the blanket influence of Michel Foucault’s theory of social construction, developed in his Histoire de la sexualité (1976-84). The great advantage of this theory was that it allowed sexuality to be studied in the light of history and sociology. Unfortunately, it has popularized the view that gay people have no real heritage before the 1870s. The basic idea is that sexuality is not innate but “constructed” by a particular set of circumstances, notably by the rise of competitive capitalism and its handmaidens, modern science and bureaucratic control. In its extreme form, the social constructionist approach suggests that “homosexuality” did not exist until the word was invented. Before then, supposedly, sexuality was just a certain repertoire of acts, not a personality trait.
This approach not surprisingly had a wide appeal beyond the scholarly gay community: it meant that there was no continuous gay culture and that Socrates or Michelangelo could not be seen as “gay”; it seemed to promise an automatic avoidance of anachronism, and it attributed enormous influence to the theorists; academic predecessors. It also allowed very small amounts of evidence to be presented as insights into an entire period and culture. It is no coincidence that the biggest theories tended to come from the smallest articles.
He goes on to make his central argument, which flows throughout the rest of the book:
First, there always were people who were primarily or exclusively attracted to people of their own sex. They had no difficulty in identifying themselves as homosexual (or whichever word was used), often from a very early age. Second, these people were known to exist and were perceived to be different. They did not call themselves “homosexual” or “gay,” and they lived in a society that would be in many ways profoundly shocking and mostly unrecognizable to inhabitants of the 21st century. But early Victorian “sodomites,” “mollies,” “margeries” and “poufs” had a great deal in common with the later “Uranians,” “inverts,” “homosexuals” and “queers”: very similar daily experiences, a shared culture, and of course an ability to fall in love with people of their own sex.
This sets the stage for the rest of the book, which is also about change over time, even if not in quite the same way as Love Stories. Looking on both sides of the Atlantic, Robb examines the ways in which law and medicine oppressed men and women with same-sex desires, in addition to uncovering the myriad ways these men and women sought connections with others like them and built communities. Robb frames this history as being the very early roots of the modern gay rights movement.
I know this wasn’t my typical diary, and I really only scratched the surface of each of these books. Like I said, maybe future diaries will cover each of them in more detail. But since this is such an important debate in the field (even if, as I mentioned, social constructionism seems to be more mainstream), I thought it was worth devoting a diary to. I will also say this: Whichever side you find yourself on (if any), both of these books are very much worth your time. I may personally take some issue with Robb’s approach, but Strangers is truly a fascinating and important book—and the same can certainly be said for Katz’s Love Stories. If you’re interested in the larger topic of homosexuality in early American history, these are excellent starting points—and, again, they are by no means the only books on the topic (stay tuned for future diaries).
I will end this diary with a pair of quotes taken from letters James Hammond (antebellum politician from South Carolina and prominent defender of slavery) received from Jeff Withers in 1826. No reason, except I can’t talk about homosexuality in the nineteenth century without mentioning these letters:
I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole—the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling? Let me say unto thee that unless thou changest former habits in this particular, thou wilt be represented by every future Chum as a nuisance. And, I pronounce it, with good reason too. Sir, you roughen the downy Slumbers of your Bedfellow—by such hostile—furious lunges as you are in the habit of making at him—when he is least prepared for defence against the crushing force of a Battering Ram.
I fancy, Jim, that your elongated protuberance—your fleshen pole—your [two Latin words; indecipherable]—has captured complete mastery over you—and I really believe, that you are charging over the pine barrens of your locality, braying like an ass, at every she-male you can discover.
LGBTQ Literature Schedule (2021):
If you are interested in taking any of the following dates, please comment below or send a message to Chrislove. We’re always looking for new writers, and anything related to LGBTQ literature is welcome!
January 31: Chrislove
February 28: Chrislove
March 28 April 4: Chrislove
April 25: rserven
May 30: OPEN
June 27: OPEN
July 25: OPEN
August 29: OPEN
September 26: OPEN
October 31: OPEN
November 28: OPEN
December 26: OPEN
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
