GAY STUDIES AND THE VICTORIAN PERIOD on JSTOR

Contents:

• SEX SYMBOL: HOW ANTO BEME A GAY CO WORD THE VICTORIAN ERA
• BEFORE STRAIGHT AND GAY
• THE SURPRISG TTH ABOUT THE LIV OF GAY MEN VICTORIAN ENGLAND
• HOW GAY CULTURE BLOSSOMED DURG THE ROARG TWENTI

SEX SYMBOL: HOW ANTO BEME A GAY CO WORD THE VICTORIAN ERA

And more than a thoand years after he drowned, he spired a new generatn of the Renaissance, gay men redisvered Anto’s bety and tragic story. This law moved s volvg homosexual acts om eccliastil urts to the state urts. ) The persecutn forced gay men to exprs themselv Joachim Wckelmann's portra shows him wh a book open to an engravg of Anto.

BEFORE STRAIGHT AND GAY

Brgg antique statu of Anto (or replis of the origals) back to Bra was a way for gay men to remember the eedom and liberti they experienced on their tours. A nobleman, displayg an Anto his stately home, uld show off his taste and knowledge of the Classics, and perhaps drop a ht about his sexual 1861 Brish law did away wh the ath penalty for homosexual acts but ma them punishable by a mimum of 10 years prison.

Victorian poets and wrers began g Anto as a word for love between men, shieldg their exploratns of the forbidn ncept om censor 18th-century brooch shows reliefs of Anto (left) and Hadrian, and was likely worn by a gay man as a d signal to others. ” Symonds argued that love between men rose to the plane of gay wrers were not as overt as Symonds but ed Anto as for same-sex sire, knowg that gay rears would pick up on the subtext and pdish typ would be none the Osr Wil’s nt novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the tle character embodi the late 19th-century tensn between sexualy and moraly. Wil’s romantic affair wh the younger Aled Douglas eventually led to his crimal prosecutn for “gross cency”—another, ls appealg word for homosexualy.

THE SURPRISG TTH ABOUT THE LIV OF GAY MEN VICTORIAN ENGLAND

Wil’s nvictn and sentence to hard labor st a chill over the gay lerary scene Victorian London, breakg the of Anto. Before Straight and GayThe discreet, disorientg passns of the Victorian eraMarc BurckhardtEven by the formidable standards of ement Victorian fai, the Bensons were an timidatg lot. As a great al of queer history has by now monstrated, the strictly fed tegori of “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are relatively new: bright l drawn across the late-20th-century sexual landspe that ma “g out” a dichotomo the Victorians, the suatn was much more fluid.

Though sex between men was a crimal offense ( Bra, lbianism was visible before the law), there was, as yet, hardly a homosexual inty fed by same-sex sire.

HOW GAY CULTURE BLOSSOMED DURG THE ROARG TWENTI

He don’t diagnose the Bensons retrospectively and anachronistilly as a fay of reprsed homosexuals. Even though the term homosexual was g to currency, he did not e until 1924, the year before he died.

And when he did e , after a theoretil nversatn on the subject wh Fred, he wrote the word out—“the homo sexual qutn”— a way that suggted ’s another way of unrstandg reticence, though, which Fred, Arthur’s sunnier brother, suppli. Unlike Fred Benson, she was unsentimental about her Victorian upbrgg, yet as the dichotomy between homosexual and heterosexual solidified, she uld see what had been lost: “Where people mistake, as I thk, is perpetually narrowg and namg the immensely pose and wi flung passns—drivg stak through them, herdg them between screens. ” The irony of all this is somethg that no gay liberatnist would have thought possible when the mpaign for homosexual rights was regard as a grave threat to the social orr.