chauffeur, Alfred Tannyhill, as an Ethiopian chief and in other poses that combined a forthright sexuality with dignity. 19
Renowned society painter John Singer Sargent, also in Boston at this time, was exploring the male nude in his public art and private albums. His use of Thomas E. McKeller, an African American elevator operator he befriended, as the model for many of his black-and-white nudes speaks to Sargent’s impulse to rethink racial paradigms, even as he is caught in them. Day, von Gloeden, and Sargent are part of a tradition of negotiating sexuality and race through art, one that stretches back to Thoreau, Melville, and Stoddard. Art historian Trevor Fairbrother points out that Sargent’s male nudes have a sensuous quality, often reclining in positions associated with the female nude. 20 This pose is in direct contrast to patriotic statuary.
Technology and consumer capitalism helped bring some of these artists’ images to a broader public. Inexpensive and easily available photographic prints—called studio cards—were now available through mass reproduction, and copies of artworks could be easily obtained by middle-class and even working-class people. This meant that art, once owned only by the wealthy, was becoming democratized and democratizing in a new way.
Most art historians agree that von Gloeden had sexual relationships with men and that Day, Eakins, and Sargent had romantic, if not physical, relationships with men. Women and men who desired their own sex had not found a significant level of freedom in America. But these female and male artists were able to live with a certain amount of visibility, with privileges the ordinary person did not have.
Politics and Poetics
Walt Whitman, now internationally famous, had become the most visible advocate of “manly attachment” or “adhesiveness,” two of the words he used to describe male same-sex desire. As such, he was a focal point for other men who felt similar desires. Whitman received many letters from the common man, as well as from noted American figures such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Charles Warren Stoddard; English writers such as Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and John Addington Symonds; and Edward Carpenter, a socialist and political organizer who, in an interview much later in his life, claimed to have had sex with the poet. The connections between the intellectually and artistically adventurous Whitman and his British counterparts, Symonds and Carpenter, are a vital link in LGBT history.
Carpenter and Symonds were politically and socially animated by developments in Germany. There, some thinkers were articulating a new way to think, legally and socially, about women and men who desired their own sex. In 1862, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who had trained as a lawyer and a theologian, published (under a pseudonym) Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe ( Researches on the Riddle of Male-Male Love ), a collection of essays that explained same-sex attraction through the lens of philosophy and medicine. In these essays Ulrichs coined the term “urning” to describe a man who is attracted to other men. By 1867 he was boldly arguing in the German courts to abolish laws that forbade consensual same-sex activity.
In 1869, Karl-Maria Kertbeny argued in a series of pamphlets that Prussian laws punishing same-sex sexual activity contradicted the “rights of man” and a natural human desire. In these pamphlets he coined the word “homosexual.” The invention of this word—which quickly gained currency in European legal, cultural, and medical circles—was a turning point in American LGBT history; but it was a turning in a particular direction. “That horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians” was given a “scientific” name that grew out of a legal reform movement. The new name emerged as the primary tool through which homosexuals in Europe would try to alleviate many of the social problems they faced.
Sexology, which
Renowned society painter John Singer Sargent, also in Boston at this time, was exploring the male nude in his public art and private albums. His use of Thomas E. McKeller, an African American elevator operator he befriended, as the model for many of his black-and-white nudes speaks to Sargent’s impulse to rethink racial paradigms, even as he is caught in them. Day, von Gloeden, and Sargent are part of a tradition of negotiating sexuality and race through art, one that stretches back to Thoreau, Melville, and Stoddard. Art historian Trevor Fairbrother points out that Sargent’s male nudes have a sensuous quality, often reclining in positions associated with the female nude. 20 This pose is in direct contrast to patriotic statuary.
Technology and consumer capitalism helped bring some of these artists’ images to a broader public. Inexpensive and easily available photographic prints—called studio cards—were now available through mass reproduction, and copies of artworks could be easily obtained by middle-class and even working-class people. This meant that art, once owned only by the wealthy, was becoming democratized and democratizing in a new way.
Most art historians agree that von Gloeden had sexual relationships with men and that Day, Eakins, and Sargent had romantic, if not physical, relationships with men. Women and men who desired their own sex had not found a significant level of freedom in America. But these female and male artists were able to live with a certain amount of visibility, with privileges the ordinary person did not have.
Politics and Poetics
Walt Whitman, now internationally famous, had become the most visible advocate of “manly attachment” or “adhesiveness,” two of the words he used to describe male same-sex desire. As such, he was a focal point for other men who felt similar desires. Whitman received many letters from the common man, as well as from noted American figures such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Charles Warren Stoddard; English writers such as Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and John Addington Symonds; and Edward Carpenter, a socialist and political organizer who, in an interview much later in his life, claimed to have had sex with the poet. The connections between the intellectually and artistically adventurous Whitman and his British counterparts, Symonds and Carpenter, are a vital link in LGBT history.
Carpenter and Symonds were politically and socially animated by developments in Germany. There, some thinkers were articulating a new way to think, legally and socially, about women and men who desired their own sex. In 1862, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who had trained as a lawyer and a theologian, published (under a pseudonym) Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe ( Researches on the Riddle of Male-Male Love ), a collection of essays that explained same-sex attraction through the lens of philosophy and medicine. In these essays Ulrichs coined the term “urning” to describe a man who is attracted to other men. By 1867 he was boldly arguing in the German courts to abolish laws that forbade consensual same-sex activity.
In 1869, Karl-Maria Kertbeny argued in a series of pamphlets that Prussian laws punishing same-sex sexual activity contradicted the “rights of man” and a natural human desire. In these pamphlets he coined the word “homosexual.” The invention of this word—which quickly gained currency in European legal, cultural, and medical circles—was a turning point in American LGBT history; but it was a turning in a particular direction. “That horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians” was given a “scientific” name that grew out of a legal reform movement. The new name emerged as the primary tool through which homosexuals in Europe would try to alleviate many of the social problems they faced.
Sexology, which
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