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: #138401 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.

Cloudy, but no rain.
This review is of the hardback edition.

This book is in three parts, with ten chapters, the first forming a separate introduction. Part one looks at how the law and medicine and society in general dealt with homosexuals in the nineteenth century; part two looks at how gay men and women looked at and found themselves; whilst the final section deals with some various loose ends. Robb writes that, "The subject of this book ... is not intended to be a checklist of famous homosexuals, ... A social history that ranges over one and a half continents [mostly Europe, including Britain] and one and a half centuries can have nothing precise to say about the likely future, but it might provide some credible reasons to take a more cheerful view of the past." When Robb spoke to friends about the subject of the book that he would be writing, he noticed how "public behaviour towards gay men and women has changed enormously, but private ideas about homosexuality are much what they were 200 years ago."

In part one Robb notes how "one of the richest sources of information on the gay past has to do with the capture and punishment of homosexuals." But what he finds is surprising, for "punishment was rarely systematic and never a vital element of gay culture. ... Nineteenth-century homosexuals lived under a cloud, but it seldom rained," because laws were enforced on an irregular basis. "As far as law enforcement is concerned, it was in the 20th century that the Dark Ages began. The chapter devoted to medical thinking is long and rambling, but he concludes that, "The notion that AIDS was a special punishment for gay people was [sic] just the latest version of an ancient idea."

The final chapter of this first part is somewhat of a potpourri, but just as interesting for all that. We look at outings and at attitudes generally, Robb making the point that "evidence of ordinariness tends to be neglected because it lacks dramatic interest ... Unfortunately, there is very little good evidence of attitudes among peasants and the working class. Some quiet voices will never be heard." I knew of Custine; I knew of Winckelmann; but Robb has done us the service of providing some more examples from the worlds of art and aristocracy, such as Platen: "The tearful woman on Platen's grave is a more appropriate symbol for the treatment of homosexuals than the gallows or the padded cell. Silence was by far the commonest form of persecution."

But there is laughter too. Robb refers to the court case of Boulton and Park in 1870s London where righteous indignations were squashed by a sympathetic jury. Robb also has a keen insight, and makes an important point about the distance between generations: "We now need a whole array of historical positioning equipment to find our way about in the world of out great-great-grandparents. The jitteriness of modern male friendships was quite foreign to the early 19th century ... Compared to his Romantic ancestors, 21st-century man has only a small repertoire of cautious gestures and words with which to make his feelings know to male friends."

The second part of the book is described by Robb as "a long journey towards the light", as more and more gay men and women are bold enough or indiscrete enough to tell their stories. But even here, there are problems due to censorship, self-censorship and the burnings of papers by relatives after death. I was particularly amused by the euphemistic examples proffered by gay contributors to the Dictionary of National Biography to describe other fellows of the tribe, such as that for Oscar Browning "the disgraced Eton housemaster", who " `assisted young Italians, as he had done young Englishmen, towards the openings they desired'. " In this section, Robb also lauds the work of Jeremy Bentham, and has much to say too about Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first gay man to `come out'.

The third and final part presents, "the available evidence for a vital presence in three areas" of nineteenth-century life, namely literature (in a chapter inevitable titled `Fairy Tales'), the religious life, and "the art of living in the modern world." Robb is already well-known for his biographies of some of the greats of French literature, so he has a keen eye for literary analysis. However, I felt his arguments concerning Hans Christian Andersen ("the Aesop of 19th-century homosexuality") are a trifle forced. Where religion was concerned, the start of a critical examination of Christ in his historical context led to "the greatest proliferation of alternative Christs since the dawn of Christianity." Robb refers to Jesuses and John-the-Baptists that were the icons of male loveliness - but there is no mention of Sebastians.

Robb ends his enthralling review by focusing onto the shamanic role of homosexuals, "seen most clearly in the emergence of the private detective as a modern hero". Robb makes a convincing case for Sherlock Holmes's homosexuality, and his register of fellow members of the gay guild of detectives include Auguste Dupin, Raffles, Arsene Lupin, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple, Father Brown, Ellery Queen, the Lone Ranger with Tonto, and Batman with his Robin. Robb shows a sharp mind when noting that, "The anthropological association of clairvoyance with homosexuality may correspond in part to certain practical characteristics of gay life. This area could have been expanded with further research, the necessity of living a double life creating strong powers of observation in the gay man or woman, augmented by the equal power of empathy.

As in his other books, there are the usual verbal Robbisms aplenty, witty turns of language that add to the lustre of the literature. Try these: "The factory regime of breeding couples had yet to replace the free-range sexual economy"; of Foucault's assertion that homosexuality did not exist until its literal invention in 1870, "To say that no such dichotomy [between homo- and heterosexuality] existed until these terms were coined is to sit on the dictionary and expect it to function as a magic carpet."

The book comes with thirty-two plates. Some of them are (to me) odd choices. Instead of Jean martin's 1832 `The Destruction of Sodom', I would have preferred Girodet's 1792 `Sleep of Endymion'! And where is Simeon Solomon's pre-Raphaelite "The Sleepers" or Ralph Adams Cram's crucifixion?

This is a wonderful read, providing sound arguments that life for gay people in the long nineteenth-century needs to be re-assessed: the trial of Oscar Wilde has cast too long a shadow. Robb's central argument does not view recent centuries as a linear progression towards sexual liberation, but instead seems to demonstrate that comparisons of the past with the present are much more complex than many realise. It will be interesting to see whether his strong arguments are taken up and augmented by other researchers.