Between the Leaves
Gay life: out and about in the 19th century

By John Freeman
Special to The Seattle Times

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For the past three decades, the standard wisdom about gay culture is that men and women did not identify themselves as homosexual until 1870, when Victorian doctors began diagnosing them as such. In his provocative new book, "Strangers," Graham Robb contradicts this long-held belief, arguing that homosexuality had a culture and a way of life long before it had a medical terminology. It was Wildean, before Oscar Wilde was a star.

To hear Robb tell it, doctors actually did far more harm than good. While their consultations gave gays a forum for their stories, it turned their behavior into something to be cured. Thus, the homosexuals became "a walking laboratory." There were mild treatments, such as a New York doctor's prescription of "cold baths with outdoor exercise and the study of mathematics." Others prescribed going to prostitutes. Even Wilde visited one after being let out of prison. He emerged rather unconvinced. "It was like chewing cold mutton!" he muttered.

"Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century" by Graham Robb Norton, $26.95

Yet no matter how persistent the message that homosexuality was wrong, Robb writes, there were places in Europe where gay life was lived, and lived quite vigorously. There were the docks in Barcelona, the Champs-Elysees in Paris, Broadway and Central Park in New York, and almost anywhere in Naples. In big cities, encoding behavior was not just a necessity but a sport as well. "Visiting cards with photo-portraits were exchanged like cigarette cards," Robb writes, and the selectivity and secret quality of this life bred a closeness that made the world seem small.

One obvious flaw to "Strangers" is that it focuses almost exclusively on the upper echelons, a problem Robb attributes to historical record. It is also unfortunate that "Strangers" is tilted more toward gay male life than lesbian life.

To read "Strangers" then is to hear a lot about people like Tchaikovsky, Andre Gide, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Marcel Proust and John Maynard Keyes, men who were or may have been gay. Most were from privileged intellect or station — or both — which meant access to a larger network of people.

One could hardly pick a better literary sleuth to peek into these lives, however. Robb's previous biographies of Rimbaud, Hugo and Balzac were notable for their combination of research and page-turning readability. By comparison, "Strangers" is a starchier read — one so meticulous that a reader might want to draw an outline while perusing, so as to better keep track of Robb's argument.

Often enough, though, Robb digs up some juicy tidbit that makes this book worth its taking-your-medicine tone. In the later sections, as he delves into the lives of one figure after another, Robb turns up a diary by Walt Whitman, in which the great bard recorded his nightly conquests. "Saturday night Mike Ellis," Whitman wrote, "wandering at the corner of Lexington av. & 32nd st. — took him home to 150 37th street, — 4th story back room — bitter cold night."

With its graphs and appendixes, its long list of sources sited and Byzantine analysis of 19th-century law, "Strangers" does a lot to satisfy scholars. It is details like the diary, however, in which the message borne out by statistics comes clear to the rest of us. Gay life was alive and well in the 19th century.

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