Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb

It’s hard to know where you’re going when you don’t know where you’ve been. For that reason, I’m a student of history. Much of what I review for this blog that isn’t fiction is historical in some context. It’s hard to avoid and, quite frankly, I don’t wish to avoid it. As I said, I’m a student. I seek to learn from it.

I’ve reviewed a lot of LGBT personal histories in the form of biographies and autobiographies, several books that dealt with LGBT history as it related specific events like the Stonewall riots and like WWII, books that dealt with the history between LGBT people and organized religion and many more. Today, I want to take you back many years to the 19th century. My review is of the 2005 book Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by author Graham Robb.

Graham Robb is a British author who has written several noted biographies of luminaries in French literature such as Balzac and Victor Hugo. Here, he has taken a vast topic with many facets and attempted to cover quite a bit of ground and to tie the 19th century past to the events of the late 20th century and beyond.

The Publishers Synopsis:

A fresh examination of this forbidden history shows the profound effects of gay culture on modern life.

The nineteenth century was a golden age for those people known variously as sodomites, Uranians, monosexuals, and homosexuals. Long before Stonewall and Gay Pride, there was such a thing as gay culture, and it was recognized throughout Europe and America.

Graham Robb, brilliant biographer of Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud, examines how homosexuals were treated by society and finds a tale of surprising tolerance. He describes the lives of gay men and women: how they discovered their sexuality and accepted or disguised it; how they came out; how they made contact with like-minded people. He also includes a fascinating investigation of the encrypted homosexuality of such famous nineteenth-century sleuths as Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes himself (with glances forward in time to Batman and J. Edgar Hoover). Finally, Strangers addresses crucial questions of gay culture, including the riddle of its relationship to religion: Why were homosexuals created with feelings that the Creator supposedly condemns?

This is a landmark work, full of tolerant wisdom, fresh research, and surprises. 16 pages of illustrations.

There is so much here. It’s as though Robb wanted to fit in at least a mention of everything that he found. That tactic, of course, has the proverbial pros and cons. I learned much, but in many areas I found I wanted more information. In some areas he could have written an entire book just on the single topic under discussion yet we get 2 or 3 lines with this book.

This is an excellent overview of a broad subject. Go ahead and enjoy the book. Then, take  individual points of his that interest you and run with them to do your own, in depth research.