A collection of notes, titles, citations, thoughts, images, acknowledgements, etc. relating to a senior thesis on the intellectual history of male homosexuality in the 19th century.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Notes from conversation with mother, 25 May
Possible title/way of describing the project: “The Invention of American Homosexuality”
- how in America homosexuality gets displaced because other forms of identity politics pose greater threats or relevance to democratic ideals (c.f. race, gender)
- C.f. people in Britain like Symonds and Carpenter who start to construct a kind of proto-homosexual identity politics—it seems like this isn’t happening in America?
- Does the silencing that happens after Wilde’s trial lead to homosexuality being a largely urban working-class phenomenon by the 1920s (c.f. Chauncey)?
- What happens literarily between Wilde and Waugh/Forster/etc.? What’s going on in pulp fiction at this time and in the intervening years?
I want to find ways to get around the lack of circumstantial evidence and think about what about America means that it’s different. Why aren’t Americans reading Whitman or Eakins or whoever the same way that the Brits are? And what happens when people do start reading them as gay? How has the culture changed? (Is it because you can figure homosexuality along the lines of race—i.e. Stonewall, gay-is-good stuff—and how does that come to be possible?)
Mom brings up the Civil War, and how therefore everything is getting read politically: “union” is not about, so to speak, one-flesh unions (not to channel Robbie George or anything), but about the Union—and Mom has something or other to say about “adhesive democracy.”
Also, have been reading Ellman’s Wilde biography and have made many notes in-text on the American-tour chapter. Hope to transcribe them at some point, but it probably won’t happen till July when I can work on the project at something closer to full time.
