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
It does not really seem as if anyone is saying what I am saying. So: contra Chauncey, and this guy Valocchi, it seems that:
1. Signs of a modern sexual-object-choice model predate the Chauncey 1950s gender anxiety argument, and coexisted with a gender inversion model—it’s not that the one came along and replaced the other.
2. 19th-century middle-class MSMs have concerns about masculinity/manliness which counter gender-inversion models;
3. 19th-century middle-class MSMs are interested in Love and homoeroticism and relationships and deep sincere friendships—first as distinct from homosex, but increasingly and esp. after the Wilde trial as part of a package with it
4. This love of comrades (comrades, like with like, à la Miltonic angel sex—obvs counter to a gender inversion model!) is in large part inspired and validated by history and literature (Hellenism, “W.H.”-style Shakespeare, and then Whitman, etc.), something only available to men with access to education (esp. university), which may be part of why it doesn’t seem as readily embraced by WC men interested in sex and a gender-inversion model of it
5. By working with the sexologists and scientific currents, because they have the educational ability to (ahem Symonds, Carpenter), MC men help to build the medical definition of homosexuality as a way of being encompassing particularized behavioral incidents, sex acts, etc., and uniting sodomy+fellatio+masturbation etc.
6. Transatlantic correspondence on the part of this select group of men of letters enables a definite cross-pollination of ideas, esp. European ideas imported into America (but also the Brits who read Whitman [Symonds’ and Carpenter’s correspondence], maybe also Wilde’s reports of America); education = collective identity even in this early period
7. This all leads to the sense of a Kind of Man Who Seeks the Love of Men (and, thanks to the sexologists and Wilde, sex with men) far before that idea has moved into the mainstream discourse
8. And so for all the class-privilege reasons Valocchi discusses this is the version that gets imparted to the mainstream, because it’s owned by the MC/intellectual élite
9. BUT it’s happening for the intellectual élite LONG before the stereotypical 1950s MC bourgeois anxiety.
Chapters (?):
1. Asexual homoeroticism (history and literature and the men who talk about it)
2. Uniting same-sex sexual behavior (sodomy+fellatio+masturbation as sexual-object-oriented) and MSMs’ collusion in doing this (?) it seems as if it wasn’t a definition just forced on them by the medical profession, esp. where Symonds/Carpenter/Ellis etc. are concerned. (Also Magnus Hirschfeld, if I can make the case for his reception in Britain and America)
3. Uniting asexual homoeroticism + sexual behavior: Wilde’s trial for sure, and its reception in America, also the second half of Katz should give some direction on this, also the early work of the Urnings/Uranians, possibly Spirit Lamp/Chameleon; it seems as if it’s Wilde that really makes the penny drop though. Important, however, to emphasize here how all this gets to America. Which is obviously through the offices of intellectuals and writers reading European work.
