Strangers Quotes

“The 1994 National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles in Britain finds that the only obvious distinguishing feature of British homosexuals apart from sexual orientation is a tendency to live in London.”
― Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century

“ALLEGORY IS STILL a contentious aspect of gay writing. To read a work of literature as an expression of heterosexual desire is literary criticism; to read it as an expression of homosexual desire is ‘appropriation’ or ‘prurience’. Associating it with something in one’s own love life is either ‘conscripting a writer for the cause’ (gay) or ‘demonstrating its universal relevance’ (straight).”
― Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century

“You, man, who read these lines, they are written to you by a brother who has suffered much. My thoughts are wrung from the deepest distress, yet still they try to find expression. O, that you could and would understand me! Some people are capable of deep, heartfelt, self-sacrificing love, yet the only possible object of their love is a person of their own sex. There are said to be such women, and I know that such men exist. I myself am such a man. These confessions contain a life of anguish.”
― Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century

“The implication was that a cure might be the mental equivalent of amputating a healthy limb. Some patients seemed to need nothing but encouragement to regain their health. As one of Krafft-Ebing’s early patients exclaimed: ‘Ever since I gave free rein to my Uranian nature, I have been happier, healthier and more productive!”
― Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century