Product Description

Award-winning author Graham Robb explores the story - and history -of male and female homosexuality in the UK and US, uncovering elements from legislature, literature, medicine and day-to-day life that point to a particularly self-aware and sophisticated culture of Victorian homosexuality. Drawing on famous cases such as the Wilde trials, as well as a wide variety of previously neglected sources, Robb recreates this era with great insight, humour and aplomb, exploding modern myths and restoring the real and vibrant truth of homosexual love to today's readers: Strangers tells a tale that is in part familiar, and in part extremely surprising - a story of oppression and secrecy, but also of unexpected tolerance and familiarity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #366372 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Sunday Times, October 2003
Robb has produced a work that honours human beings who just happen to be gay.

Sunday Telegraph, October 2003
A fascinating study of a complex subject, written with humanity, sceptical intelligence and an impressive command of the sources.

Spectator, October 2003
This is an excellent, amusing, decent book, which covers an enormous amount of ground in a little space.

Customer Reviews

excellent and very funny
Id expected a rather dry tome but this is brilliantly written and in places very funny. Well worth the money, although the authors picture has a bit of a scary eyebrow thing going on.
Falls off a bit in the last chapter, but the rest is excellent - although he doesn't exactly stick to his topic (19th century seems to include 1700 up to about the 2nd world war!). This is nitpicking though, in general i loved it.

Not bad but not brilliant
This book is a bit hit and miss. For a start, the title is a bit of a misnomer as the book covers the period from about 1700 to well into the 20th century. In fact, parts of the book seemed to begin at about 1895, drift into the 20th century and not bother to go back in time at all.

Also, because the author skimmed over so much, I wondered if there just wasn't the information available about the 19th century to put in a book, so he had to divert his attentions to cover a wider time period. I don't actually believe this to be the case, which made what little he did mention become frustrating because he never goes into the subject matter in any depth. It's all a quick skim across the surface.

This book serves as a basic introduction to homosexuality in history, but I think readers will have to make much use of the bibliography to really learn about the subject.

On gay life 150 years ago
When Mister Graham Robb started his book on homosexual love in the 19th century he was suddenly faced with prejudices he never expected to learn from his friends and colleagues. People even felt pity with his family members. Dad goes gay! But not really. The way Robb handles this irritation is an eye opener and a foretaste of his analyzation on homosexuality for the rest of the book. In other words, Robb is great with chasing away dark clouds to let the sun shine in on this subject. He demonstrates it is the people's personal view on homosexuality which has hardly changed over the last ages. Only the position of homosexuals in public (debate) has improved.

A while ago I told a good friend of mine (he is a language scientist) that I would like to have a job in a gay bookstore. He replied: so you want to become a full time homosexual?! I couldn't believe my ears...

'Strangers' has teached me a lot. In fact, gay life looked actually quite the same 150 years ago. Networks and novels gave direction to many, however, in a coded language, not to discover by everybody. Hostility against gays was certainly not common. In fact, the great oppression of gays is a 20th century phenomenon which runs parallel with visible female - and gay liberation. The word "homosexual" didn't exist in the first part of the 19th century but this does not mean people didn't know the gay identity, they just referred to it differently with words like "sodomite" or "invert".

Highly enjoyable on "Strangers" is that Graham Robb is literary well matched to writers like Oscar Wilde or Hans Christian Anderson. It makes both notes and reflections big fun.