Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004
Sex & the City
By John Bayley
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century
by Graham Robb
Norton, 342 pp., $26.95
Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947–1985
by James McCourt
Norton, 577 pp., $29.95
Strangers—the word was once homosexual slang—is a glorious book packed with information and historical comedy, while the writing has a kind of sly and serious charm about it. Graham Robb's study of nineteenth-century homosexual culture is largely about gay characters and themes in literature. The atmosphere is dense and rich, the references almost overwhelmingly cosmopolitan. That bisexual Tiresias, for instance, is far from being the only sexual oddity in Eliot's The Waste Land. There is also Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, who, as Robb points out, helps to keep both international trade going and a richly epicene literature alive. 'Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants,' he
Review, 2060 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |