Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality

In Love Stories Jonathan Ned Katz presents stories of mens intimacies with men during the nineteenth centuryincluding those of Abraham Lincolndrawing flesh-and-blood portraits of intimate friendships and the ways in which men struggled to name define and defend their sexual feelings for one another. In a world before "gay" and "straight" referred to sexuality men like Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds created new ways to name and conceive of their erotic relationships with other men. Katz diving into history through diaries letters newspapers and poems offers us a clearer picture than ever before of how men navigated the uncharted territory of male-male desire.