Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality

Katz, Jonathan Ned/ "Love Stories: Sex Between Men and Homosexuality", University of Chicago Press, 2003. A New History Amos Lassen Jonathan Ned Katz's "Love Stories" is a new way of looking at men in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This time we look at them from the gay and romantic point of view. Katz gives us stories on men and their intimacies with other men and the way these men looked to find a name for what they felt for each other. This was long before the terms of "gay" and straight" entered our vocabularies in the way they are used today. Looking at diaries and letters as well as newspaper and poems, we get a clear picture of how men acted in male/male situations. There are names we recognize in the pages of this book and looming above them all is Walt Whitman who spoke in favor of love between men and served as an inspiration and as a mentor to other men who were struggling with their feelings of love for other men. We must remember that we cannot look at the 19th century in the way we look at today---there was no terminology then and many times same sex relations were deemed either immoral or wrong. The book is really about the struggle for men to find a place for themselves. Katz maintains that the origins of the come temporary gay community go back to this time. We learn a lot from Katz and he shows how same sex attraction was not really looked at as out of the ordinary. Katz dissects history and gives us a great deal of information and he really shines in his discussion of the legal definition of sodomy. The book looks at deep friendships between men with the sexual aspects playing second fiddle. This is a wonderful collection of facts about sex between men in the 19th century. It is because of the courage of the men in this book that we have come as far as we have. Without this book we may never have learned about them.

I must applaud this author for producing a fine book which takes the pain to explain people and their actions in the light of their times; before we invented the label 'gay'. A lot of reserach went into this work, and it shows. Facts are shown which have nowadays been glossed over by urban myths and have become distorted. I found the book fascinating and full of aspects that highlighted historical backgrounds. Recommended for all who wish to study the facts.

"Love Stories" is about a struggle for men who love men to find a place for themselves within their own imaginations. Katz examines the 19th century intellectual nexus where same-sex male lust, emotional intimacy between men and, to a lesser extent, male femininity meet and from which the origins of contemporary gay male identity are found. This book gives context to those who believe the "gay community" as it is popularly thought of today is not a point of arrival, but a temporary and, in the history of same-sex attraction, relatively short-lived form. In a time when being gay is a commodified identity analagous to rooting for a sports team, Love Stories gives substance, history and meaning to those seeking to understand where we come from. Love Letters reads easy, in parts like a Vanity Fair-style social history, with famous names and well-known historical circumstances. I hope Jonathan Ned Katz lives, researches and writes forever.

Jonathan Katz, who by now is one of the most respected scholars of gay history, has written another telling volume about same-sex love in America. This one centers around the nineteenth century. Well-known names appear in these pages, principally the towering figure of poet Walt Whitman, who not only espoused the ideal of love between men in his own life, but was a mentor and inspirational figure to others struggling with their desires for those of their own gender.Katz's overall point is that one cannot judge the sexual behavior of men of the past by today's standards and attitudes--for much of the nineteenth century, there existed no sharp dichotomy between man-woman (heterosexual) and man-man or woman-woman (homosexual) behavior. Rather, distinctions were made between _types_ of love, spiritual as opposed to carnal, and _types_ of erotic behavior, procreative as opposed to non-procreative. Even among acts judged early on to be immoral or wrong, some were more wrong than others--oral copulation for a long time was not regarded with the same revulsion as other penetrative acts, for example. Having delineated these basic arguments, Katz then tells the stories of individual men and specific incidents (trials, arrests, news reports, et al.) against this background, bringing a historical perspective of unusual lucidity to all of these disparate tales.Although he does not specifically attempt to tie his history toward attitudes and behavior of the present day, one of the beneficial effects of Katz's study is that the careful reader can discern where the frequently virulent prejudices against gays and lesbians that remain today got their start. The fact that many of these once did NOT exist, moreover, gives hope for the future. This is an unusual, valuable, candid and ultimately very moving chronicle.

In addition to being a wonderful collection of most if not all of the known facts about sex between men in the Western world during the nineteenth century, this book is a well-written narrative about how the mystery and the cultural taboo surrounding gay sex was gradually, sometimes awkwardly, unravelled and revealed and finally relaxed. The story of gay liberation in America and England begins here, with Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds and the dozens of unknown but courageous men who were unwilling to let themselves be crushed by the social pressure to be less like themselves and more like the heterosexual, morally acceptable "norm." We should all be grateful to these early freedom-fighters and non-conformists, and grateful, too, to Jonathan Ned Katz for telling these stories with such passionate and admirable accuracy and feeling.