In the following chapter from his book, Craft studies Tennyson's In Memoriam as a document of homosexual desire, looking at the poem in relation to its social context and contemporary notions of sexuality.

In the excerpt that follows, Dowling investigates the culture that prevailed at Oxford University in the late nineteenth century. She contends that a Greek or Hellenistic idea of aesthetics advocated by many of the school's leading scholars—most notably Benjamin Jowett—facilitated a more positive sense of homosexual desire among such prominent Oxford students as Wilde, Pater, and Symonds. She notes that other scholars, including Matthew Arnold, attempted to valorize the Greek aesthetic...

Dellamora, who also wrote Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, offers a more condensed version of his studies in the essay that follows. Looking at several of the major figures of the era—including Wilde, Walter Pater, and J. A. Symonds—Dellamora considers the shifting notions of masculinity and male-male desire that traversed the century, focusing specifically on efforts to maintain the Greek ideal.

Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men constituted a landmark in the progress of feminist and lesbian studies on its publication in 1981. The book's scope ranges from the sixteenth century to the present, examining the nature and images of both sexual and platonic female relationships. The chapter on the nineteenth century, excerpted below, puts forth Faderman's argument that the "romantic friendships" of the era were an integral part of mainstream culture. Such attachment...

In 1956, Foster published the first exhaustive study of lesbian content in literature, Sex Variant Women in Literature. The following excerpt presents some of her findings on the nineteenth century, demonstrating the ways in which authors—most of them French men—presented lesbian characters and encounters.

Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire became a standard in the new field of gay and lesbian studies on its publication in 1985. In her work, Sedgwick argues that heterosexual culture depends on homosocial relations between men: that is, on a male-male sexual desire played out through exchange of women. In the following chapter, Sedgwick presents her thesis in relation to Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend.

In the excerpt below, Castle surveys the history of lesbianism in literature—both covert and overt—to find a connection between the presence of apparitions and the presence, or erasure, of lesbian desire.

The following excerpt from Crompton's biography of Romantic poet Lord Byron looks at the explicitly homosexual poem Don Leon. The poem, which appeared in print soon after the poet's death, presents itself as a portion of Byron's memoirs. Crompton argues against Byron's authorship, but also takes the poem as a serious object of study, considering it an important document in gay history.

Meyers's Homosexuality and Literature 1890-1930 offered one of the first serious studies of gay male content in literature. In the chapter excerpted below, Meyers reassesses Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray in light of the author's sexuality, arguing that much of the novel's ambiguity is actually veiled reference to homosexual desire and activity. Although the specifics of Meyers's interpretation have been disputed by more recent scholars, his work apparently help...

In the excerpt that follows, Fone suggests that gay male literature tends toward a certain image of Utopia. He substantiates his view with examples from the work of several nineteenth-century writers, including Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walt Whitman.

When sexologist Havelock Ellis first published Sexual Inversion in 1897, his study became one of the standard authorities in English on the subject. Considered a highly scientific and generally sympathetic perspective for its time, Ellis's work presents the view that most homosexuals are the product of an inborn condition that inverts their gender identities, coupling male personalities with female bodies and vice versa. Although largely discredited among professionals today, Ellis's theory s...

In the late-nineteenth century, Symonds and sexologist Havelock Ellis discussed working together to produce a study of homosexuality. When Ellis published his finished work in 1897, Symonds's contribution, written several decades earlier, was relegated to the appendix. Excerpted below, his "A Problem in Greek Ethics" presents the thesis he had wanted to include in the larger work: like many homosexual men of his generation educated at Oxford, Symonds emphasized the importance of male-m...