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39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Joyful wisdom, February 8, 2004
By A Customer
This is a terrific piece of social history, wide-ranging, smart, fair-minded and thoroughly entertaining. Too much gay history is two parts theory to one part story, but Graham Robb has distilled the past thirty years of research by various historians into a wonderful concentrate of stories. (Yet, he's an incredibly generous reader other people. He corrects and improves on Michael Foucault and others without ever trashing them.) The book is full of great characters: Anne Lister, Magnus Hirshfeld, Karl Ulrichs, and the anonymous man who wrote to the author of an early gay menace-type study to thank him for letting him know he was not alone, even if he did use the word "repulsive" a few too many times. This is a witty book, whether it's dealing with the medical claim that gay men have corkscrew-shaped penises ("for reasons easy to imagine") or John Maynard Keynes's personal list of sex partners from 1906 ("the chemist's boy of Paris; the clergyman; David Erskine, MP") or offering Sherlock Holmes as a gay hero. Robb does a terrific job of establishing continuities with our age as well as identifying differences. He never condescends to the past, and he doesn't trivialize the present. The book clears away the half-baked theories that have gathered around the subject like cobwebs in recent years, but, more important, it's a joy to read.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ambitious and pioneering!, February 22, 2006
Graham Robb's study of homosexual love in the nineteenth century, 'Strangers,' is a singularly ambitious work. Over the space of some 270 pages, the author explores themes as varied as the horrible legal oppression suffered by homosexuals in 19th century Europe to the blossoming of gay letters encoded in characters like Sherlock Holmes and Poe's amateur detective, Auguste Dupin.
Robb maps territory that has been kept locked away too long in the special archives of prudish university libraries. Touching on all facets of the 19th century homosexual's life, Robb has successfully uncovered a world thought not to exist. The book's central thesis attempts to refute the Foucaltian claim that 'homosexuality' as an identity, is a modern construction dating from the turn of the 20th century. Robb claims that 'inverts'and 'uranians' not only had a pretty strong idea about being different from the majority but lived out that difference in a vigorous, if underground, community. Not only did public parks and toilets provide necessary meeting places, but bars, clubs and even theaters catered to this undergound community. Not that homosexual life was all that hidden either. Robb gives the example of French aristocrat, Astolphe Custine, who after a traumatic outing, lived quite openly with his friend and lover. Even in the mid-nineteeth century, homosexual partnerships were not only known about but also tolerated to some extent as well.
Robb makes the claim that the 19th century was not the dismal age of despair for the 'uranian' as we might suspect. Rather, Robb states that the 20th century was far darker for those who professed the love that dare not speaketh its name. With the fin de siecle advances made in psychology and psychiatry, Robb argues that science strove either to 'treat' and/or eradicate this deviation from the Victorian world. As a result, ghastly and inhumane attempts to 'cure' the homosexual---electroshock, hormone therapy---increased as did prison sentences for 'indecent behavior between men.'
Thought provoking though it is, I had trouble accepting Robb's nostalgia for the gay 1800's. His first chapter is all about the sad and horrible oppression--i.e. death penalty--that homosexuals in England suffered during the first half of the 19th century. Being sent to the gallows for the 'crime' of anal intercourse with another man should be seen as barbaric by any sensitive human irregardless of century, and should especially be seen as incomprehensible to those who've passed the threshold of the 21st. How therefore the 19th century homosexual can be seen as 'better off' than his 20th century brothers and sisters would seem rather difficult to prove. In defending his thesis, Robb downplays the importance of Wilde and his trial. According to the author, it was not an historical act of publically embracing homosexual identity, but rather an exaggerated show. An Irishman publically shamed for taking pot shots at Albion. Referring to the trial, Robb writes, 'The melodramatic approach fashions a weapon of sexual oppression out of a jumble of laws that were often casually enacted, sporadically applied and aimed primarily at acts of violence.' Were not such laws themselves, 'acts of violence' par excellence?
If one can suspend their initial disbelief as to Robb's central thesis, 'Strangers' can be an enjoyable read. And a tiring one at that. From public and private outings, to Hirschfeld's and Ulrich's pioneering attempts to create a gay community, 'Strangers' provides an almost encyclopedic plethora of facts and anecdotes about the 19th homosexual. The problem is that you get too much stuff and too little satisfying analysis. The author jumps from fact to example to anecdote to exegesis and then adroitly moves on. Not only did my head spin a lot while reading 'Strangers,' but I started to question the validity of many of its claims. Nowhere is this weakness more noticeable than in the chapter dealing with the Victorian homosexual's attempt to find a place within Christianity. A rich and fascinating topic, it alone could and should warrant a book unto itself. Some tantalizing hot potatoes like Matthew 19 and analysis of the real sin of the 'Sodomites' are raised only to be dropped two sentences later. A pity.
Furthermore, despite its all-inclusive subtitle, 'Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century,' 'Strangers' makes some rather egregious exclusions. Coverage of 19th century America is less than thorough and Europe for Robb seems to end abruptly at Vienna, only to continue with Moscow and St. Petersburg. For those of us gay denizens in Central and Eastern Europe, our forefathers appear to be such strangers that they fail to warrant even the slightest mention. Sad and hurtful when you think that the Hungarian polymath, Kertbény Károly, was the first to actually pen the term 'homosexual.' His appearance in 'Strangers' is sadly minimal and underscored.
Despite its shortcomings, grievous though they are, 'Strangers' deserves our respect. Considering the overwhelming quantity of material he had to deal with and the still-existent taboos that surround anything remotely related to 'gay studies,' Graham Robb has given us a truly pioneering work. A work that not only enriches our collective past, but strengthens our present as well. Kudos!
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Thoroughly Satisfying Book by a Genuine Original Thinker!, August 17, 2004
STRANGERS: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century as written with consummate skill and wit by Graham Robb is a fascinating insight about the history of homosexuality through the ages. Though particularly addressing the 19th Century, uncovering letters, notes, books, and facts vs. fiction by some of the more luminous writers and thinkers of that time, Robb takes multiple asides to Greece, the Middle Ages, and the centuries before his chosen example, allowing us to realize that Gay Rights Movements did NOT start in 1969 with Stonewall. His exploration of pan-sexuality includes the Church and spirituality in general, Medicine, Psychology, the fraternities and sororities, the balls and brothels, and private lives of Henry James, da Vinci, Ludwig II of Bavaria, Gide, Alexander the Great, Marcel Proust, Walt Whitman, Lord Byron, Shelley, Oscar Wilde et al, Michelangelo etc without ever becoming just a book of gossip. Quite the contrary, this is serious literature, albeit written in an often hilarious tongue-in-cheek mode. Robb's main purpose seems to establish the fact that `homosexuality' has been around and popular for far longer than the historians, sociologists and physicians believe would have us believe: it is not a discovery dating to Kraft-Ebbing, Freud, or Hirschfield. Read it for history, read it for stories about people you venerate, read it for historical information, read it as elegant prose, but by all means read this immensely successful book!
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