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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
There are two decidedly different images of the YMCA and its contributions to the lives of young men alone in the city, set adrift from hearth and home. Although it positions itself as a stabilizing moral force, it also has a reputation for housing unregulated gay male sexual activity. In Take the Young Stranger by the Hand, John Donald Gustav-Wrathall performs a fascinating and entertaining analysis that reveals these contradictory traditions as so intertwined historically and socially as to be inevitable.
There are two decidedly different images of the YMCA and its contributions to the lives of young men alone in the city, set adrift from hearth and home. Although it positions itself as a stabilizing moral force, it also has a reputation for housing unregulated gay male sexual activity. In Take the Young Stranger by the Hand, John Donald Gustav-Wrathall performs a fascinating and entertaining analysis that reveals these contradictory traditions as so intertwined historically and socially as to be inevitable.
Founded in the mid-19th century, the YMCA fostered close, spiritually sustaining relationships between young men. By the century's end the "Y," as it became known, had implemented a wide-scale program of physical exercise and sex education, in part to combat the increasingly visible specter of physical intimacy between men. But this emphasis on the perfected male body only increased the institution's reputation as a haven for homosexuality. Drawing upon diverse sources, including YMCA records, social histories, urban and economic studies, "physical culture" physique magazines, and gay memoirs, Gustav-Wrathall explicates not only the hidden sexual subtexts of the Y's social history but examines how changing attitudes about sexuality, male friendship, gender, marriage, and privacy all contributed to shaping the nature and both the overt and covert purpose of the organization. Take the Young Stranger by the Hand is a highly readable addition to the ever-growing body of gay history and theory. --Michael Bronski
From Publishers Weekly
The early history of a peculiarly American institutionAthe YMCAAhere serves as a paradigm of late 19th- and early 20th-century American culture at large, at least as far as sexuality and Protestantism are concerned. Scholar Gustav-Wrathhall's history of the pre-WWII Y confirms what Jonathan Dollimore and others have demonstratedAthat the homosocial and homosexual are unstable categories that are constantly being redefined and are inextricable from definitions of the heterosexual. From the beginning, the author reports, passion and piety at the Y were closely linked. Passion came in the form of intense male friendships that may or may not have included an erotic component; piety was expressed in Christian brotherhood. Soon, he contends, such close relations became suspect, and the Y hierarchy attempted to develop new, less intimate models for masculine relations and for masculine identity itself, which, he contends, ironically fostered the image (and documented the reality) of the Y as an easily accessible site for male-to-male sexual "cruising." Originally written as a doctoral dissertation, the book retains some of its Ph.D.-like feel but is thankfully free of the academic terminology that mars so much work in the field of gender and sexuality.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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