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Article: Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality. (Book review: old-fashioned love songs).
- Article from:
- The Advocate (The national gay & lesbian newsmagazine)
- Article date:
- February 5, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Regent Media. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality * Jonathan Ned Katz * University of Chicago Press * $35
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 ...