Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century

by Graham Robb

Overview

"A brilliant work of social archaeology....A major historical contribution."—Adam Goodheart, The New York Times Book Review

The nineteenth century was a golden age for those people known variously as sodomites, Uranians, monosexuals, and homosexuals. Long before Stonewall and Gay Pride, there was such a thing as gay culture, and it was recognized throughout Europe and America. Graham Robb, brilliant biographer of Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud, examines how homosexuals were treated by society and finds a tale of surprising tolerance. 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 addresses crucial questions of gay culture, including the riddle of its relationship to religion: Why were homosexuals created with feelings that the Creator supposedly condemns? This is a landmark work, full of tolerant wisdom, fresh research, and surprises.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393326499
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/17/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	370
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Graham Robb is the author of several award-winning books on literature and history. His book The Discovery of France won both the Duff Cooper and Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prizes. For Parisians, the City of Paris awarded him the Grande Médaille de la Ville de Paris. He lives on the English–Scottish border.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	vii
1.	Prejudice	1
Part 1
2.	In the Shadows	17
3.	Country of the Blind	40
4.	Outings	84
Part 2
5.	Miraculous Love	125
6.	Society of Strangers	156
7.	A Sex of One's Own	174
Part 3
8.	Fairy Tales	197
9.	Gentle Jesus	233
10.	Heroes of Modern Life	253
Appendices
I.	Criminal Statistics	272
II.	'A Categoric Personal Analysis for the Reader'	276
III.	Map of Uranian Europe	278
	Acknowledgements	280
	Notes	281
	Works Cited	307
	Index	332

Editorial Reviews

In Strangers, [Graham] has produced a brilliant work of social archaeology, all the more remarkable because the truths he unearths were never buried very deep; for decades if not centuries they have been hidden in plain sight … In excavating the long-buried lives of our gay great-great-granduncles and lesbian great-great-grandaunts, Robb has done more than make a major historical contribution. He has, as it were, provided their distant nieces and nephews, gay and straight, with a family tree that we have never had before. — Adam Goodheart

The New York Times

Literary biographer Robb (Rimbaud, 2000, etc.) gives resonance and shape to homosexual life and love in 19th-century Europe and North America, "the obstacles it encountered and the societies it created." It certainly wasn't the worst time to be gay, he writes. "Pliant attitudes to homosexuality in almost all its forms were prevalent throughout the Victorian age," though pliancy generally consisted of a miserly acceptance that "seasoned, as it usually was, with distaste, pity or amusement . . . could be worse than open hostility." Sexuality was not the dominant question, he contends; "the neighbors were more concerned about an influx of socialists and vegetarians." Robb is not being flip but endeavoring to unearth the long continuity of gay culture. Nineteenth-century homosexuals, he remarks, "lived under a cloud, but it seldom rained." (Oscar Wilde's travails were not the norm; his case went to court as the Dark Ages of the 20th century approached.) The gay community possessed "a highly politicized sense of its sexual rights, a calendar of events and anniversaries, its own villains and living legends, social clubs with international links, cafes and brothels, and well-established cruising grounds with organized patrols." Robb does not paint a sexual utopia; he acknowledges the legal and medical establishments' anti-homosexual ways, but points out that legal-medical persecution was casual and spasmodic. Much more vital and lasting was the gay presence in literature, religion, and "the art of living in the modern world," from symbolism and allegory-Rimbaud to Hans Christian Andersen to Sherlock Holmes-to the tradition of sexually ambiguous messiahs. And though there was no gay-rightsmovement as such, sexual coteries and milieux "could turn shame into self-respect and fear into defiance." An invigorating tour of gay cultural influence during the 1800s and the place occupied by homosexual society within national and international settings. (16 pp. illustrations, not seen)

Kirkus Reviews