have a passionate affection for Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality * Jonathan N Katz * University of Chicago Pres * $35 Ishmael and his tattooed bruiser.

have a passionate affection for Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality * Jonathan N Katz * University of Chicago Pres * $35

Ishmael and his tattooed bruiser, Queequeg Twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln and his 24-year-old bedfellow, Joshua Spe Walt Whitman and, well, elegant without grandeur much every kid who came a-callin'. The big temptation in the cogitation of gay sexuality in history--which is to say, before there was so a phrase--is to "out" historical figures (Melville, Lincoln, Whitman) before there was level a house for the cabinet That isn't so much a political mistake as an empathetic common argues historian Jonathan Ned Katz in his far down researched book on 19th-century same-sex be fond of affairs, Love Stories.

In our world "sunder through homosexuality and heterosexuality," Katz writes, we assume gay desire and gay sex are timeless, "unchanging," and "universal." "We may identify with [the] emotions and strives [of the previous century's gay men]" he says, "but our empathy can lead us to confuse the past with the existing ... and fail to note in what manner they differed in basic ways from our existing world."

The confusion is understandable, since 19th-century sexual language can be a strange suitcase--you not ever know exactly what it's carrying. This was a time when "make have affection for to" meant to court, "sodomy" was moderately beautiful much everything that didn't have to do with making babies, and "adhesiveness" was as often as a man could perceive for another man. The like that dare not speak its name didn't have individual yet, and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's "urnings" and "uraniads" (respectively, gay men and lesbians) weren't, going to chisel it.

Delving into the diaries and correspondence of more than a dozen same-sex have a passionate affection for affairs, Katz surfaces with more [i]or[/i] less surprisingly honest and complex stories of gay affection, albeit not as frisky as undivided might hope. There are Harvard undergrads in tortured triangles, "barnacleback" sailors and their young "chickens" romping below boat booms, and, of course, journeyman Whitman dealing with clingy lover and clinging right back. In his section "Making Monsters" Katz does an of the first grade job of tracing the first media campaigns against sodomy, legal prosecutions of the 1800 and the invention of oral sex as a category. If Whitman loom large in Katz's history, it's not just because he was a letter-writing factory--his Leaves of Grass, and specifically its "Calamus" section, became an international calling card for gay men partly because Whitman had place himself to the task of inventing a delighted language of man-man love for his allow era and for "generations to this time unborn."

Katz, a meticulously stop reader, explores the vagaries of 19th-century gay life with indefatigable patience, despite all the collection of laws obfuscation, and men who "threw" their arms around each other's neck as sexual crescendo. however it's hard not to be stirred that the book's ambition is somewhat limited at his source materials. How completely can we rethink gay sex in the 19th hundred when even Whitman--that literary Braveheart--scratched public words, switched genders, and trashed about entries in his diaries? What exactly was he hiding, and in what way exactly did he write it? No doubt Katz's work fills in yawning gaps in the scholarship of sexuality, nevertheless another gap--the one between what takes place and the way we write about it--is the individual that lingers.

Find more forward Love Stories, Dear Friends, and links to related Internet sites at www.advocate.com

Bunn has written for Brill's ease and The Amazing Race.

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