Book Review: Love Story: Sex Between Men before Homosexuality

[osprey_archer]

Although the title sounds more general, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality is specifically about man-sex in 19th century America, and if you are wondering if I cackled wildly with glee when I found it the answer is emphatically YES. Exactly what I need for my Sleeping Beauty story! Thank you, Jonathan Ned Katz!

This is an excellent book if you're interested in the topic (I particularly enjoyed the chapter about journalist Charles Warren Stoddard and artist Francis David Millet's Venetian sojourn), and particularly useful to me because there's a whole chapter about sex in the Civil War, plus a fairly clear timeline of what you might call "How Socially Acceptable Was It To Really Really Really Love Your Best Friend in the 19th Century."

In the 1830s you have Albert Dodd enthusing about his BFF Anthony Halsey in his diary: "how sweet to sleep with him, to hold his beloved form in my embrace, to have his arms about my neck, to imprint upon his face sweet kisses!... Dear, dearest Anthony! Thou art mine own friend. My most beloved of all! To see thee again! What rapture it would be, thou sweet, lovely, dear, beloved, beautiful, adored Anthony!"

(Side note: Katz suggests that Dodd's use of the word "friend" here suggests a cultural vocabulary not quite equal to the task of defining male-male intimacy, but it's worth noting that during the Civil War, soldiers would often start their letters "Esteemed Friend" when writing to their wives. Clearly, in a nineteenth century, "friend" could be used for sexual as well as non-sexual relationships.)

The 1880s seem to constitute a turning point. Frederick Shelley Ryman writes similarly about his relationship with his own dearest friend, carefully recording every time they share a bed, every embrace, every kiss, etc. - but he adds, "Now in all this I am certain there was no sexual sentiment on the part of either of us... & yet I do love him & loved to hug & kiss him because of the goodness & genius I find in his mind."

Ryman is not so concerned about it that he's going to, God forbid, actually stop kissing his friend. But this marks the beginning of a shift: Dodd rattles on rapturously and without guilt, while Ryman has a nagging feeling that his behavior might suggest "unmanly & abnormal passion." And, of course, moving into the twentieth century, that does become the dominant interpretation of men kissing and embracing and sharing beds and walking arm in arm and having super intense feelings for each other. Earlier in the nineteenth century, these behaviors were seen as sexless and socially acceptable, even charming; going into the twentieth century, they come to be seen as inherently sexual and therefore bad.

There's a sort of "Schrodinger's sexuality" problem about the Albert Dodds of the past: if the participants didn't see lying in bed passionately kissing each other's faces as sexual, even though it seems obviously sexual to most modern readers, was it sexual? Is it somehow sexual and not-sexual at the same time?

Comments

[oracne]

"Esteemed Friend" should be a band.

[osprey_archer]

They either sing folk songs or death metal. Or possibly folk sons reinterpreted as death metal?

[oracne]

A lot of folk songs would make good death metal!

[sovay]

Clearly, in a nineteenth century, "friend" could be used for sexual as well as non-sexual relationships.

Greek φίλος "loved one" can be used for friends, lovers, spouses, and family.

if the participants didn't see lying in bed passionately kissing each other's faces as sexual, even though it seems obviously sexual to most modern readers, was it sexual?

Ryman stresses that his physical affection for his own φίλος ἑταῖρος was without a sexual element, but do we know the same was true of Dodd? Otherwise it looks to me less like a Schrödinger's than a multivalence problem: for some people this affectionate language is sexual, for some people it's not, and I suspect for a lot of people it was in a kind of undifferentiated zone because there was comparably less anxiety about IS IT GAY.

[osprey_archer]

Sometimes I feel like reading about the past really is an act of translation, even if it's technically the same language. Like, yes, in this passage they are talking about "friends," but what do they MEAN by that? Many things, apparently!

With Dodd, we get a brief musing about how his feelings for his male friends are so similar to his feelings for his female sweethearts! Isn't that interesting!... and then someone ripped a page out of his diary, so goodness only knows where he went with that next. (For all we know, someone ripped it out because he got a little too enthusiastic describing his female sweetheart's charms.) But Dodd definitely doesn't seem to share Ryman's sense of an invisible accusatory audience reading over his shoulder.

[kore]

I suspect for a lot of people it was in a kind of undifferentiated zone because there was comparably less anxiety about IS IT GAY.

I think that is a HUGE part of the past that we often miss, unconsciously, but omg do I remember a lot of sort of proto-queer literature where the (clearly autobiographical) characters make out, or something Queer happens, they say nothing about it, and then there's an agonized discussion later about Was That Queer. (Almost never Are We Queer, or even, Do We Want To Do That Again, Queer Or Not.) I think it's in that limbo between what society knows and what society permits, as long as it's not openly spoken. And then of course there's the situational stuff (military, boys in British boarding schools, prisons) or as one friend nicknamed it, We're Queer Because We're Here. Liminal spaces.

for some people this affectionate language is sexual, for some people it's not

//this always makes me think of Melville and Hawthorne

[sovay]

I think that is a HUGE part of the past that we often miss, unconsciously

How people talk (or think) about what they do with one another differs hugely when behavior is not taken to equal identity.

And then of course there's the situational stuff (military, boys in British boarding schools, prisons) or as one friend nicknamed it, We're Queer Because We're Here.

Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy (1951) is hard reading, but one of the elements that makes it so interesting is that it's about a relationship between two men in wartime which one of them comes to realize cannot be written off as purely situational. (And then he's all fucked up about it.)

//this always makes me think of Melville and Hawthorne

The divine magnet!

[rachelmanija]

There's also the factor that even today people will have literal, undeniable sex which they do in fact deny because it's more socially acceptable for it to not be sex. For instance, MF anal sex isn't sex because the woman is still a virgin, men having sex with men isn't sex because they don't identify as gay or they don't bottom, etc.

[osprey_archer]

I for one intend to use this in future nineteenth century m/m novels, where the characters will progress beyond passionate face-kissing to definite undeniable sex, except they figure it's fine and maybe not even really sex at all because it's not sodomy.

[sovay]

even today people will have literal, undeniable sex which they do in fact deny because it's more socially acceptable for it to not be sex.

No argument. I'm just interested by the strain where the ambiguity isn't the result of obfuscation.

[kore]

Ned Katz is great!

[osprey_archer]

Any other Ned Katz books you would particularly recommend?

[kore]

The Invention of Heterosexuality! the classic! Mid-nineties grad school memories I think! (grad school is such a blur). It got reprinted I want to say 10 years ago? ....no, 2007 was not 10 years ago, Moi. //cries

(Also: Straight by Hanne Blank, both more scholarly/abstract and stylistically lovely -- think it's OOP but you can get it on Kindle)

Argh, I'd have to either dig thru boxes or get on JSTOR to find articles, but I think he did at least one Gay History book back in the eighties. (Seventies?).

[osprey_archer]

The Invention of Heterosexuality is the one that the library actually has, so there's no need to dig through boxes to look for more. And it has Straight, too! On ebook! Maybe my next read when I finish Stalingrad...

[kore]

I didn't mean to sell Straight short, it's REALLY good!

[dira]

I think I just saw... somewhere... someone kind of splitting the difference on this question and saying--whether their genitals were involved or not, whether there were orgasms or not, whether or not they were regarded as the same thing as relationships with women, these were clearly deeply meaningful romantic relationships.

[osprey_archer]

Yes. I think because our own time period's cultural baggage (sexual relationships are the Most Real, basically), sometimes historians get too hung up one whether the people in question were bumping uglies, like if the participants weren't banging it's totally meaningless that they lived together for thirty years, or that their letters clearly show a very intense emotional investment, or even recount numerous kisses and embraces that the participants clearly considered so intensely meaningful that they needed to record them on paper afterward. Sure, there's a whole paragraph in this letter about how person A clambered up on the train as it left the station to kiss person B goodbye, but was it a KISS-kiss?

[calandrahunter]

"Clearly, in a nineteenth century, "friend" could be used for sexual as well as non-sexual relationships."

I do wonder when the distinction between 'platonic friend' and 'romantic/sexual relationship' started with friend vs girlfriend or boyfriend (although you also get women who call their female friends their girlfriends sometimes, so that word gets used both ways)

Because both in Dutch and German (and presumably other Germanic languages), the word for 'male friend/boyfriend' or 'female friend/girlfriend' is the same. (you can do a lot with emphasis and 'this is my friend' or 'this is a friend' to make the distinction clearer, but I'm sure there's some closeted people making use of the fact that it's the same term either way)

So MAYBE the English use of Friend for both platonic and romantic relationships could come from English's Germanic side?

[osprey_archer]

I think there's something to the idea that friend became specifically platonic when girlfriend/boyfriend supplanted sweetheart/beau as the term of choice for "this is my ROMANTIC friend." That's around the 1920s, which is also when homosexuality as a concept really started to gain traction with the masses... which might be just a coincidence, but might also have created a need for a word that defines a relationship as emphatically platonic.