Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century
by Graham Robb
W.W. Norton Press
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Quick question. Who said: "This sin is now so frequent that no-one blushes for it anymore, and many indulge in it while perceiving its gravity." It was St. Anslem in 1102 CE. Apparently even in the early 12th century, queer-eye-on-the-straight guy was boringly prevalent.

Despite having been completely discredited, there's still the idea that what we call contemporary gay culture was invented sometime in the late 1960s, or stretching it, the post-war 40s. Graham Robb's wonderful new study of 19th-century gay life is a bright reminder that there's not only a rich, full queer history, but also that we post-moderns didn't invent everything. In a chatty, informative, and intellectually-reflecting style, Robb (who has penned great biographies of Victor Hugo and Rimbaud) takes a leisurely walk through the byways of 19th century queerness.

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Fascinations abound. The chapter on the medicalization of homosexual desire notes how popular fiction, even the most "negative" portrayals, gave queer people hope that they were not singular freaks. Robb is not judgmental about the promiscuity and casual sexual encounters that form the infrastructure of so much queer society. He simply notes a list of tricks that John Maynard Keynes kept, beginning with "Stable Boy of Park Lane" and skips onto the "The Swede of the National Gallery" and "The chemist's boy of Paris" to "The Blackmailer of Bordeaux."

Robb's explication of Hans Christian Andersen's "Fairy Tales" is terrific, pointing out that the fabulist didn't write his famous stories "to make children happy (he did not especially like them), but because the fairy tale was a magic cloak that allowed him to be himself in public." Andersen examines the theme that "abnormal desire leads either to death" (as in "The Little Mermaid," in the original pre-Disney version) or disgrace. Robb's take on the male-centered society of The Wind in the Willows is smart, and his reading of Howard Pyle's 1883 The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown, at Nottingham (once read by most boys and now mostly forgotten) is marvelous. When Robin and one of his merry men meet a new friend in Sherwood Forest, Pyle writes:

"'By my life!' quoth Robin Hood, laughing, 'Such a pretty, mincing fellow.'

"'Truly, his cloths have overmuch prettiness for my taste,' quoth Arthur ą Bland; 'but his shoulders are broad and his loins are narrow.'"

Robb follows the hidden-- or not-- thread of homoeroticism along into religious literature. There's Gerard Manley Hopkins's descriptions of Jesus-- "In his body he was most beautiful.... I leave it to you, brethren, then to picture him in whom the fulness of the godhead dwelt bodily, in his bearing how majestic, how strong and yet how lovely and lissome in his limbs." There's the way the language of the Gospels was used, writes Robb, "to express the suffering of happiness of homosexual life."

Strangers is a scholarly work, but also highly readable-- and full of cocktail-party fodder. The book ends with a meditation on queer imagery in Sherlock Holmes, as well as other late-Victorian detective fiction. Robb ponders why this new genre would focus on various manifestations of queerness-- and muses that gay culture had reached a point of semi-visibility that made it both descry-able but still needing efforts to detect. And here we are more then 100 years later still uncovering and deducing what was in out recent past.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com