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Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality
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.
426 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
November 16, 2011
Damn this is a well researched and written piece o history. So different to the usual ahistorical gay history stuff. Katz writes a lot about why people shouldn't be "reclaimed" by gay history, they should be researched and appreciated in their own historic context.
I learned a shit tonne about 19th Century ideas about love and sex and how extremely different they are to our own. Solid support for my dislike of people projecting homosexuality and other 20th C ideas backwards.
There is a bit too much about Walt Whitman in here for my liking (about half of the 350 pages? maybe) but that could be cos I'm not American and don't see his influence everywhere.
There is genius bits and pieces dug up from newspapers, letters, court reports and such like.. stories of old sailors tenderly caring for their "chickens," tales of effeminate "rouged men" selling sex and a million other great little details that will stay with me.
I learned a shit tonne about 19th Century ideas about love and sex and how extremely different they are to our own. Solid support for my dislike of people projecting homosexuality and other 20th C ideas backwards.
There is a bit too much about Walt Whitman in here for my liking (about half of the 350 pages? maybe) but that could be cos I'm not American and don't see his influence everywhere.
There is genius bits and pieces dug up from newspapers, letters, court reports and such like.. stories of old sailors tenderly caring for their "chickens," tales of effeminate "rouged men" selling sex and a million other great little details that will stay with me.
March 27, 2013
So it's quite apropos that I finished this as the Supreme Court is deliberating on the legality of same-sex marriage. The arguments that marriage consecrates a reproductive union kind of echo Katz's theory that non-reproductive sex was in many ways invisible during the 19th century (except for "the crime that Christians dare not name").
Katz's focus on trying to understand the Victorian mindset without putting current sensibilities into play reminded me of Women of the Mito Domain. Yamakawa, writing less than a century later about her great-grandmother and grandmother, has to illuminate a bygone world for her readers: many people had multiple marriages due to death or divorce; girls were not informed about the political world around them; bushi women spent much of their time spinning and weaving just to clothe the family. Industrialization and opening to the outside world changed things radically in a short time.
So perhaps we can be hopeful that Walt Whitman's* vision of a world where all love is accepted will come to pass--even if he did ignore the woman-loving ladies.
*apparently the most influential 19th century man-lover
Katz's focus on trying to understand the Victorian mindset without putting current sensibilities into play reminded me of Women of the Mito Domain. Yamakawa, writing less than a century later about her great-grandmother and grandmother, has to illuminate a bygone world for her readers: many people had multiple marriages due to death or divorce; girls were not informed about the political world around them; bushi women spent much of their time spinning and weaving just to clothe the family. Industrialization and opening to the outside world changed things radically in a short time.
So perhaps we can be hopeful that Walt Whitman's* vision of a world where all love is accepted will come to pass--even if he did ignore the woman-loving ladies.
*apparently the most influential 19th century man-lover
January 6, 2010
Great insight on how men-loving men struggled for wording to properly express their desires and emotions in a more positive light than society would allow at the time. Katz was careful to stress the difference of what was acceptable in society then and now when it came to the affection between men and/or their behavior. It served as a helpful reminder of what these men were saying in their original context rather than how it may sound in respect to today's thinking. I very much appreciated his care of adding a disclaimer to any speculations offered when interpreting letters and other such written works of the subjects of his study.
April 3, 2011
I was surprised by how many of these stories I didn't know. I appreciated the author's carefulness in the way he described the relationships, not placing modern ideas of homosexuality on the men. The writing style might be a little dry for some, but if you're interested in the topic, I'd recommend it.
October 12, 2015
While some of the historical details in this book are fascinating, the author's writing is dry and tedious, and he is repetitive more often than not. At times there are gaps, as if he had already explained something, but really hadn't even broached the subject, and you are left wondering at the discontinuity and confusion between characters and events in the book. And then he keeps repeating himself on other things that he had already previously mentioned, on several occasions even, as if that was the first time he talked about them. It is an incoherent and messy text as such.
The book also has another very huge flaw -- Katz's obsession with Whitman. It is not a biography on Whitman, but the author treats him as a central figure in this book. It does not make an interesting read. Most of it is useless ramblings on Whitman's thoughts and points-of-view, that have no use to the overall topic at hand and are distracting more than anything else. In the process, it paints a rather negative impression on Whitman and the author himself, unfortunately.
The book also has another very huge flaw -- Katz's obsession with Whitman. It is not a biography on Whitman, but the author treats him as a central figure in this book. It does not make an interesting read. Most of it is useless ramblings on Whitman's thoughts and points-of-view, that have no use to the overall topic at hand and are distracting more than anything else. In the process, it paints a rather negative impression on Whitman and the author himself, unfortunately.
March 30, 2024
This is a well researched book on how love and sex between men were described before the words homosexual and gay came along. The book focuses primarily on Walt Whitman’s writings, with stories of a few other men tossed in to break things up.
It’s not a light read; it would’ve been a good Ph.D. dissertation, but for someone with just a casual interest in the subject it becomes dry and turgid.
It’s not a light read; it would’ve been a good Ph.D. dissertation, but for someone with just a casual interest in the subject it becomes dry and turgid.
May 25, 2023
This survey of 1820-1930 male relationships in America is no breezy read, but it is insightful, clearly making the case that language is vital for our abilities to explore and express. Our species understands itself differently in every century; there was a time when men expressed affection without a sexual stigma, generally speaking. Hugging, kissing and even sleeping together was not suggestive of the erotic--the idea didn't even occur to much of the population. Imagine trying to express one's feelings to another person when there isn't even a language for doing so. Coded letters between men paired with the advent of psychology and hysteria trickling into books and newspapers reveal how language forms culture and even our ability to create relationships.
More than anything, I think I better understand how brave Walt Whitman really was and why it's unfair to place him and other men from the past under today's labels, because every age perceives itself, and accordingly, its views on love and lust, differently than any other age can fully comprehend. What, indeed, will the future make of us?
More than anything, I think I better understand how brave Walt Whitman really was and why it's unfair to place him and other men from the past under today's labels, because every age perceives itself, and accordingly, its views on love and lust, differently than any other age can fully comprehend. What, indeed, will the future make of us?
April 8, 2025
Katz looks at same-sex relationships in the 19th-century by studying a few of the men who wrote about them, including Walt Whitman, John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter.
Walt Whitman spoke in 8156 of men “saying there ardor in native forms,”… 9
“Love” is an important word in this tale, as it was in Dodd’s diary. Here, it is Whitman's basic way of naming Lankton’s and Charles’s feelings for each other. Love is one of the key terms by which men of this era affirmatively named and characterized their erotic affectionate feelings for other males. 36
A quarter of a century later, after the reverend Horatio Alger was accused of sexual indiscretions with boys in his Massachusetts church, he escaped to New York City, and they created a literary counter image of older men has poor boys’ saviours-the same theme as Whitman’s “The Child Champion.” 47-48
“among the young men of these states,” said Whitman in a notebook, there exists “a wonderful tenacity of friendship, and a passionate fondness for their friends, and always a manly readiness to make friends.” And yet these men "have remarkably few words… for the friendly sentiments.” The words Whitman did use-“Friends” and “friendship,” "friendly sentiments” and “passionate fondness”-were, for him, in adequate to express the attention of emotions and relations they named.
Terms for friendship, Whitman complained, “do not thrive here among the muscular classes, where the real quality of friendship is always freely to be found.” Whitman pointed, in particular, to “friendship” among working men. The words available to those men did not express, for Whitman, such men's experienced intensity of feeling. Whitman stressed, even “have an aversion” to naming their friendly feelings for each other: “they never give words to their most ardent friendships.” 95
The “lack of any words,” Whitman declared, “is as historical as the existence of words.” He explained: “as for me, I feel a hundred realities, clearly determined in me, that words are not yet formed to represent.” Language had not yet caught up with his experience, he suggested. But Whitman’s “not yet” again anticipated the future formation of the missing words. Emotions were clearly bubbling in this writer, desires for which there were, as yet, no adequate words-or only condemnatory words. 96
There is that in me….I do not know what it is…but I know it is in me. Wrenched and sweaty…calm and cool then my body becomes; I
sleep…I sleep long.
I do not know it…it is without name…it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary or utterance or symbol. Something it swings on more than earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.
Perhaps I might tell more [….]Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.
In Leaves of Grass….
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts….voices veiled, and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured…97
The intimacies of men with men were the subject of forty-five eloquent new poems gathered under the title “Calamus” in Whitman’s third Leaves of Grass (1860). 112
On the eve of the American Civil War, Whitman presented men’s love for men as the glue that could keep the union intact. 120
The American’s precious literary style suggests that a group of men were, by 1870, already constructing a distinctive, still secret, subcultural mode of speech, now known as “camp.”
Whitman then asked Stafford if he had read about Oscar Wilde, who was touring America: “He has come to see me & spent an afternoon-He is a fine large handsome youngster-had the good sense to take a great fancy to me!” 231
From then on, reported Synod’s in his Memoirs, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass “became for me a sort of Bible.” 235
Making up names for men’s sexual love for men was, in these years, a preoccupation of men in England, Germany and America. Walt Whitman was not only in appropriating “Calamus” and “adhesiveness” for the use of men-loving-men. 238
Symonds…in Memoirs….about his first time…The Soldier:
Was a very nice fellow, as it turned out: comradely unnatural, regarding the affair which had brought us together in the first place from a business like and reasonable point of view. For him at all events it involved nothing unusual, nothing shameful; and his simple attitude, the not displeasing vanity with which he viewed his own physical attractions, and the general sympathy with which he met the passion they arouse, taught me something I had never before conceived about illicit sexual relations. Instead of yielding to any brutal impulse, I thoroughly enjoyed the close vicinity of that splendid naked piece of manhood. 245
The same “gestures,” says Duberman, “can decisively shift their symbolic meaning in the course of one hundred years, can ‘signify’ different emotions during different eras.” 319
In Arthur's first version of his encounter with Carpenter, published in 1966, Inigan suggested that Arthur “sleep with the Old Man” that night: “A young man’s electricity is so good for recharging the batteries of the old.” Arthur answered that he would consider it a privilege. 324
In contrast to the modern homo/hetero polarity, the nineteenth-century sexual order distinguished between procreative and nonprocreative or improperly procreative acts. Though proper reproduction was authorized by true love and legal marriage, true love was not thought of as sexual in itself. True love and marriage functioned then to redeem even proper reproduction from its sensual, animalistic associations. The procreative-sexual potential of relationships between men and women even subjected their intimacies to greater surveillance than those between men and men and women and women. For the sexual was defined narrowly then as the intercourse of penis and vagina, so true love, however, passionate and physical, could flourish between men and between women without raising suspicions of illicit intercourse. 336
…Herbert Mitchell, who generously allowed me to reproduce many old photographs from his marvellous collection,…345
Walt Whitman spoke in 8156 of men “saying there ardor in native forms,”… 9
“Love” is an important word in this tale, as it was in Dodd’s diary. Here, it is Whitman's basic way of naming Lankton’s and Charles’s feelings for each other. Love is one of the key terms by which men of this era affirmatively named and characterized their erotic affectionate feelings for other males. 36
A quarter of a century later, after the reverend Horatio Alger was accused of sexual indiscretions with boys in his Massachusetts church, he escaped to New York City, and they created a literary counter image of older men has poor boys’ saviours-the same theme as Whitman’s “The Child Champion.” 47-48
“among the young men of these states,” said Whitman in a notebook, there exists “a wonderful tenacity of friendship, and a passionate fondness for their friends, and always a manly readiness to make friends.” And yet these men "have remarkably few words… for the friendly sentiments.” The words Whitman did use-“Friends” and “friendship,” "friendly sentiments” and “passionate fondness”-were, for him, in adequate to express the attention of emotions and relations they named.
Terms for friendship, Whitman complained, “do not thrive here among the muscular classes, where the real quality of friendship is always freely to be found.” Whitman pointed, in particular, to “friendship” among working men. The words available to those men did not express, for Whitman, such men's experienced intensity of feeling. Whitman stressed, even “have an aversion” to naming their friendly feelings for each other: “they never give words to their most ardent friendships.” 95
The “lack of any words,” Whitman declared, “is as historical as the existence of words.” He explained: “as for me, I feel a hundred realities, clearly determined in me, that words are not yet formed to represent.” Language had not yet caught up with his experience, he suggested. But Whitman’s “not yet” again anticipated the future formation of the missing words. Emotions were clearly bubbling in this writer, desires for which there were, as yet, no adequate words-or only condemnatory words. 96
There is that in me….I do not know what it is…but I know it is in me. Wrenched and sweaty…calm and cool then my body becomes; I
sleep…I sleep long.
I do not know it…it is without name…it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary or utterance or symbol. Something it swings on more than earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.
Perhaps I might tell more [….]Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.
In Leaves of Grass….
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts….voices veiled, and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured…97
The intimacies of men with men were the subject of forty-five eloquent new poems gathered under the title “Calamus” in Whitman’s third Leaves of Grass (1860). 112
On the eve of the American Civil War, Whitman presented men’s love for men as the glue that could keep the union intact. 120
The American’s precious literary style suggests that a group of men were, by 1870, already constructing a distinctive, still secret, subcultural mode of speech, now known as “camp.”
Whitman then asked Stafford if he had read about Oscar Wilde, who was touring America: “He has come to see me & spent an afternoon-He is a fine large handsome youngster-had the good sense to take a great fancy to me!” 231
From then on, reported Synod’s in his Memoirs, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass “became for me a sort of Bible.” 235
Making up names for men’s sexual love for men was, in these years, a preoccupation of men in England, Germany and America. Walt Whitman was not only in appropriating “Calamus” and “adhesiveness” for the use of men-loving-men. 238
Symonds…in Memoirs….about his first time…The Soldier:
Was a very nice fellow, as it turned out: comradely unnatural, regarding the affair which had brought us together in the first place from a business like and reasonable point of view. For him at all events it involved nothing unusual, nothing shameful; and his simple attitude, the not displeasing vanity with which he viewed his own physical attractions, and the general sympathy with which he met the passion they arouse, taught me something I had never before conceived about illicit sexual relations. Instead of yielding to any brutal impulse, I thoroughly enjoyed the close vicinity of that splendid naked piece of manhood. 245
The same “gestures,” says Duberman, “can decisively shift their symbolic meaning in the course of one hundred years, can ‘signify’ different emotions during different eras.” 319
In Arthur's first version of his encounter with Carpenter, published in 1966, Inigan suggested that Arthur “sleep with the Old Man” that night: “A young man’s electricity is so good for recharging the batteries of the old.” Arthur answered that he would consider it a privilege. 324
In contrast to the modern homo/hetero polarity, the nineteenth-century sexual order distinguished between procreative and nonprocreative or improperly procreative acts. Though proper reproduction was authorized by true love and legal marriage, true love was not thought of as sexual in itself. True love and marriage functioned then to redeem even proper reproduction from its sensual, animalistic associations. The procreative-sexual potential of relationships between men and women even subjected their intimacies to greater surveillance than those between men and men and women and women. For the sexual was defined narrowly then as the intercourse of penis and vagina, so true love, however, passionate and physical, could flourish between men and between women without raising suspicions of illicit intercourse. 336
…Herbert Mitchell, who generously allowed me to reproduce many old photographs from his marvellous collection,…345
March 31, 2008
Pretty good--I've always had an interest in the history of sexuality, and I find homosexuality particularly interesting because it's one of those things that was happening before there were words to express what was happening. I also learned a lot about Walt Whitman.
January 8, 2014
Another milestone from the dean of gay history in North America.
See my full review at Gerry B's Book Reviews
See my full review at Gerry B's Book Reviews
July 3, 2008
Beautiful. Heartbreaking. Eye-Opening. PICK-THIS-UP....Lincoln lovers will be in for a real treat!
February 2, 2021
Interesting topic; dull read. Although the author has a really interesting premise: gender and sexual identity arise and are defined by particular places and times, it's a bit of a slog to get through.
I am still longng for a more readable version of this history, but I walked away with an appreciation for how most of us need a model of what's possible in order to create our lives--the men featured here seemed to be experimenting in ways that made future queer lives possible. And yet, it's often hard in reading through these stories to find empathy for some of the fussy victorian men so preoccupied with Christian morality.
As others have noted here: the author seems obsessed with Walt Whitman and has used 2/3ds of the book as a biography.
Beyond that, this work is problematic in that it centers white, educated, upper class experiences with no critical analysis of how that impacts the history being told. Also, Many instances of racism, classism and abuse of under age boys are passed over by the author as "common for that time" With little further comment.
I am still longng for a more readable version of this history, but I walked away with an appreciation for how most of us need a model of what's possible in order to create our lives--the men featured here seemed to be experimenting in ways that made future queer lives possible. And yet, it's often hard in reading through these stories to find empathy for some of the fussy victorian men so preoccupied with Christian morality.
As others have noted here: the author seems obsessed with Walt Whitman and has used 2/3ds of the book as a biography.
Beyond that, this work is problematic in that it centers white, educated, upper class experiences with no critical analysis of how that impacts the history being told. Also, Many instances of racism, classism and abuse of under age boys are passed over by the author as "common for that time" With little further comment.
July 15, 2022
I had high hopes for this book because his other books are valuable. He focuses on Whitman which is beneficial in history, but he focuses way too much on him so why not write a biography instead. It would have been more beneficial, if the chapters were individually storied.
October 22, 2025
Pretty dense and academic but fascinating! Kind of 70% about Walt Whitman, which I wasn’t expecting. But I loved to get a glimpse of what the evidence shows of what concepts of MM love were like in the West in the 19th century.
May 14, 2023
Thoroughly researched and well written but reads like a textbook. I enjoyed the in depth specifics on Whitman. I think the title would have been better to reflect the Whitman focus.
October 26, 2023
Slow reading , but full of facts
May 11, 2024
Lot of interesting queer history. At time I felt like I was reading a Whitman biography, though. And yes, I get that he’s important in our history.
November 19, 2018
Interesting... So interesting that it should have a disclaimer stating that it is much more an academical text than a just-interesting reading. And more: the title should change too. It is not just "Love Stories" nor "Sex between men...", but most accurately "Walt Whitman's love stories: sex between him and others", since almost half of the book is dedicated to Walt's affaires and "comrades", and even on the few pages where Katz condescends to talk about somebody else, he relates no-matter-who's story with Whitman's life, text or thoughts. I know: the book (should I say academical essay?) is about men's quest to find adequate words to speak about men's love for other men, and undoubtedly Whitman and his work have helped a lot, giving names to feelings, emotions and even acts related to love and sex between men but still… I'm sorry: I ended up completely fed up of Whitman... and Katz.
February 13, 2012
Really fascinating look at sexuality in the nineteenth century. The book is ostensibly about men desiring sex with men, but it speaks to sexuality more broadly, particularly the disconnect in the minds of many Victorians between sex and love. The book follows a progression from close male friendships with homosocial elements to more explicit sex, but I'm not sure it quite makes it far enough to demonstrate that men in the nineteenth century ever fully connected sex and romantic love in the way we think about it now (although that seems to be the point made in the book's conclusion)—in fact, in many of the examples of letters and prose written by the men analyzed, romantic love seems to exist in an idealized space separated from sex. I thought the book was interesting and particularly enjoyed the explication of Whitman's Leaves of Grass along with the discussion of how Victorian men searched for words to describe their desires that weren't bogged down by negative connotations (Whitman's "adhesiveness" and "comradeship" vs. sodomy/buggery, etc.).
January 21, 2009
The scholarship is somewhat less than awesome, and he's terribly long-winded about his argument, but the real value of Katz's book is in the collection of 19th century primary source material (letters, news articles, testimony, etc.) on/from/between people he terms "men-loving men" (as homosexuality as the sociological construct we understand today didn't exist yet). I kind of wish the book were more about 19th century male/male eros and less about linguistics issues (i.e. the freedom to name an unspeakable act), but that lack of freedom to do so makes finding primary sources near impossible...so yeah, catch-22. Definitely a fascinating look at 19th century m/m love.
* The poetry tag is included due to over half the book focusing on Walt Whitman, his work, his letters, and his sex life. (Walt's archives are huge.)
* The poetry tag is included due to over half the book focusing on Walt Whitman, his work, his letters, and his sex life. (Walt's archives are huge.)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 17, 2016
The product of careful and exhaustive research and documentation, this is a well written history that is insightful and highly readable without being pedantic. Most enjoyable.
June 28, 2016
Interesting, but too much about Walt Whitman. May as well have been "Walt Whitman and his friends".
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews