Old-fashioned love songs
Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality by Jonathan Ned Katz
University of Chicago Press, $35
Unearthing true tales of men who loved men before we split the world into gay and straight
The Advocate
February 5, 2002

Ishmael and his tattooed bruiser, Queequeg. Twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln and his 24-year-old bedfellow, Joshua Speed. Walt Whitman and, well, pretty much every kid who came a-callin'. The big temptation in the study of gay sexuality in history -- which is to say, before there was such a phrase‹is to "out" historical figures (Melville, Lincoln, Whitman) before there was even a house for the closet. That isn't so much a political mistake as an empathetic one, argues historian Jonathan Ned Katz in his deeply researched book on 19th-century same-sex love affairs, Love Stories.

In our world "sundered by homosexuality and heterosexuality," Katz writes, we assume gay desire and gay sex are timeless, "unchanging," and "universal." "We may identify with [the] emotions and struggles [of the previous century's gay men]," he says, "but our empathy can lead us to confuse the past with the presentŠand fail to note how they differed in basic ways from our present world."

The confusion is understandable, since 19th-century sexual language can be a strange suitcase‹you never know exactly what it's carrying. This was a time when "make love to" meant to court, "sodomy" was pretty much everything that didn't have to do with making babies, and "adhesiveness" was as much as a man could feel for another man. The love that dare not speak its name didn't have one yet, and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's "urnings" and "uraniads" (respectively, gay men and lesbians) weren't going to cut it.

Delving into the diaries and correspondence of more than a dozen same-sex love affairs, Katz surfaces with some surprisingly honest and complex stories of gay affection, albeit not as frisky as one might hope. There are Harvard undergrads in tortured triangles, "barnacleback" sailors and their young "chickens" romping under boat booms, and, of course, journeyman Whitman dealing with clingy lovers and clinging right back. In his section "Making Monsters," Katz does an excellent job of tracing the first media campaigns against sodomy, legal prosecutions of the 1800s, and the invention of oral sex as a category. If Whitman looms large in Katz's history, it's not just because he was a letter-writing factory -- his Leaves of Grass, and specifically its "Calamus" section, became an international calling card for gay men, partly because Whitman had set himself to the task of inventing a joyful language of man-man love for his own era and for "generations yet unborn."

Katz, a meticulously close reader, explores the vagaries of 19th-century gay life with indefatigable patience, despite all the code, obfuscation, and men who "threw" their arms around each other's necks as sexual crescendo. But it's hard not to feel that the book's ambition is somewhat limited by his source materials. How deeply can we rethink gay sex in the 19th century when even Whitman‹that literary Braveheart‹scratched out words, switched genders, and trashed some entries in his diaries? What exactly was he hiding, and how exactly did he write it? No doubt Katz's book fills in yawning gaps in the scholarship of sexuality, but another gap -- the one between what takes place and the way we write about it -- is the one that lingers.