Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality [Hardcover]

Jonathan Ned Katz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 14, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0226426157 | ISBN-13: 978-0226426150 | Edition: 1

In Love Stories, Jonathan Ned Katz presents stories of men's intimacies with men during the nineteenth century—including those of Abraham Lincoln—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, men like Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds created new ways to name and conceive of their erotic relationships with other men. Katz, diving into history through diaries, letters, newspapers, and poems, offers us a clearer picture than ever before of how men navigated the uncharted territory of male-male desire.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Forget about the Lincoln Bedroom scandals of the Clinton administration; the real scandal is who was in Lincoln's bed in 1837. This highly provocative, often startling reconsideration of 19th- and early 20th-century male-male sexual relationships begins with a detailed description of what Katz depicts as Abraham Lincoln's romantic, erotic relationship with Joshua Speed, the man with whom he shared a decades-long intimate friendship, as well as a bed for three years. While Speed himself wrote that "no two men were ever more intimate," Katz is not arguing that these two men were homosexual; Katz makes it clear that referring "to early nineteenth-century men's acts or desires as gay or straight, homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual" places "their behaviors and lusts within our sexual system, not theirs." Katz, whose groundbreaking 1976 Gay American History is foundational to contemporary gay and lesbian studies, has researched deeply and widely, uncovering astonishing materials: a relationship between John Stafford Fiske, the U.S. consul to Scotland in 1870, and famous British cross-dresser Ernest Boulton; the existence of the Slide, a male-male pick-up bar in Greenwich Village in the 1890s; romances between older sailors and their "chickens" during the Civil War. Walt Whitman, noted Harvard mathematician James Millis Peirce, writer Charles Warren Stoddard, English philosopher Edward Carpenter Katz finds these men engaged in deeply loving and erotic friendship with no specific labels of sexual orientation attached. All of this is described and shaped with enormous sensitivity and judiciousness. Written clearly, succinctly and free from postmodern jargon, Katz's arguments are strong and vibrant. By contextualizing "sexual, acts, sexual desires, sexual identities" in their historical periods, but never avoiding the specifics of sexual activity or emotional connection, he contributes surprising, even shocking, insights into how sexual and emotional relationships are constructed, as well as demonstrating the enormous diversity and malleability of human eroticism.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap

Abraham Lincoln arrived in Springfield, Illinois, on April 15, 1837, and met Joshua Fry Speed, who offered the new legislator half of his double bed. The two shared that bed for more than three years, and Speed would later recall that "no two men were ever more intimate." The story of Lincoln's relationship with Speed, which opens this book, transports us into a forgotten world of love between men.

Jonathan Ned Katz presents stories of men's intimacies with men in the nineteenth century, tales with all the features of a good novel: engaging characters, moving conflicts, and surprising revelations. Katz draws flesh-and-blood portraits of these intimate friendships, tracing the way men struggled to name, define, and defend their deep feelings for one another. Some of these are love stories, some sex stories, some stories about love and sex. In a world before "gay" and "straight" referred to sexuality, men like Lincoln, Walt Whitman, John Addington Symonds, and James Mills Peirce created new, affirmative ways of naming and conceiving their intimacies with other men. Katz quotes diaries, letters, newspapers, and poems to offer glimpses into an uncharted territory of romance and eros.

Love Stories is an original and engaging take on sexual diversity over time. By this book's end its many chronicles coalesce into a beautiful portrait of the varieties of love and lust in another social world.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 426 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (December 14, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226426157
• ISBN-13: 978-0226426150
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #661,083 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating history, November 11, 2002

By 

klavierspiel "klavierspiel" (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Hardcover)

Jonathan Katz, who by now is one of the most respected scholars of gay history, has written another telling volume about same-sex love in America. This one centers around the nineteenth century. Well-known names appear in these pages, principally the towering figure of poet Walt Whitman, who not only espoused the ideal of love between men in his own life, but was a mentor and inspirational figure to others struggling with their desires for those of their own gender.

Katz's overall point is that one cannot judge the sexual behavior of men of the past by today's standards and attitudes--for much of the nineteenth century, there existed no sharp dichotomy between man-woman (heterosexual) and man-man or woman-woman (homosexual) behavior. Rather, distinctions were made between _types_ of love, spiritual as opposed to carnal, and _types_ of erotic behavior, procreative as opposed to non-procreative. Even among acts judged early on to be immoral or wrong, some were more wrong than others--oral copulation for a long time was not regarded with the same revulsion as other penetrative acts, for example. Having delineated these basic arguments, Katz then tells the stories of individual men and specific incidents (trials, arrests, news reports, et al.) against this background, bringing a historical perspective of unusual lucidity to all of these disparate tales.

Although he does not specifically attempt to tie his history toward attitudes and behavior of the present day, one of the beneficial effects of Katz's study is that the careful reader can discern where the frequently virulent prejudices against gays and lesbians that remain today got their start. The fact that many of these once did NOT exist, moreover, gives hope for the future. This is an unusual, valuable, candid and ultimately very moving chronicle.

36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating gay history, May 2, 2002

By 

Rick Whitaker (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Hardcover)

In addition to being a wonderful collection of most if not all of the known facts about sex between men in the Western world during the nineteenth century, this book is a well-written narrative about how the mystery and the cultural taboo surrounding gay sex was gradually, sometimes awkwardly, unravelled and revealed and finally relaxed. The story of gay liberation in America and England begins here, with Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds and the dozens of unknown but courageous men who were unwilling to let themselves be crushed by the social pressure to be less like themselves and more like the heterosexual, morally acceptable "norm." We should all be grateful to these early freedom-fighters and non-conformists, and grateful, too, to Jonathan Ned Katz for telling these stories with such passionate and admirable accuracy and feeling.

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I saw the title, got excited about the subject..., May 28, 2003

By 

E (Sandhausen, Germany) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Hardcover)

..and then was very disappointed in the content. When I bought the book, I assumed it was truly about "sex between men before homosexuality." Instead, I found a thinly veiled biography of Walt Whitman and his writings. Nowhere on the cover does it indicate this. Only way in the back in the acknowledgments, is this "acknowledged." When I started the book, the section on Abraham Lincoln was fascinating and I'm glad Katz advocates ensuring we look at relationships within their own context of society and culture. But he spends too much time on Whitman and hyperanalyzing every word he wrote. I am not interested at all in poetry or Walt Whitman, so it was a shame that I bought this hardcover and had to try and pick out the parts without Whitman. The only time this became interesting was toward the end where the focus was more on Whitman's life.
The best part of the book, and I have to agree with another reviewer, are the wonderful vintage photographs.
While I believe Katz is an expert and writes fairly well, I would not recommend this book to someone looking for a wide range of subjects.