E-Mail This Article to a Friend 19th-century gay Graham Robb goes Wilde BY JOHN FREEMAN
	Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century By Graham Robb. W.W. Norton, 352 pages, $26.95.

In France they were known as "chestnut gatherers." Brits called them "lavender aunts." The names suggest a quieter, saucier time, when the diluted champagne flowed and gay men and women could live relatively harassment-free lives. And yet the law tells a different story. Gays in the 19th century were living under a death sentence. Sodomy was punishable by death in England until 1861. Forty-six people were executed in England alone between 1810 and 1835.

But in Strangers, Graham Robb argues that persecution was the exception, and that homosexual life in Europe was, if not thriving, then vibrant. To build this case, he combs through criminal records, letters, diaries, newspapers, and libraries of literature to find a "vanished civilization," Wildean before Wilde was a star. In doing so, he takes on French philosopher Michel Foucault, who theorized that until Victorian doctors came up with the category homosexual, no one identified him or herself as such.

Strangers builds its case slowly, and the first half of the book almost refutes the author’s thesis. Although Robb credits doctors with giving gays a sense of community, a place to tell their stories, the downside of their diagnoses seems hardly worth it. Many physicians believed that men and women could masturbate themselves into "sexual inversion," as it was then called. The criteria for identifying gays seem even more haphazard. For some reason, the ability to urinate in a straight line was a tell-tale sign. One medical man devised a rather ingenious test. "Throw an object at the lap of a sitting homosexual, said the Berlin doctor Magnus Hirschfeld in 1913, and he will automatically open his legs to catch it. A lesbian, being a natural trouser-wearer, will close her legs."

And as long as homosexuality was a condition, there could be a cure. Thus, the homosexual 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. When Oscar Wilde left prison, Edward Dowson persuaded him to visit a lady of the evening in Dieppe in order to develop more "wholesome tastes." He emerged unconvinced: "It was like chewing cold mutton!"

And yet Robb asserts that there were places in Europe where gay life was actively, uninhibitedly lived and gay men and women could meet each other: the docks in Barcelona, the Champs-Élysées in Paris, Broadway and Central Park in New York, and almost anywhere in Naples. In big cities, encoding behavior was not just a necessity, it was a sport. "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. There was even the Gay Grand Tour, which stretched from London to Amsterdam and Paris and beyond, anticipating the party circuits of the 21st century.

One obvious flaw with Strangers is that it focuses almost exclusively on the upper echelons, a problem Robb attributes to historical record. It is also unfortunate that the book is tilted more toward gay male life than lesbian life. To read Strangers is to hear a lot about Tchaikovsky, André Gide, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and John Maynard Keynes, men of privileged intellect or station, or both, who had access to a larger network of people and whose lives were individually documented.

Still, one could hardly pick a better literary sleuth to peek into these lives. Robb’s previous biographies of Rimbaud, Hugo, and Balzac were notable for their combination of research and page-turning readability. Strangers is a starchier read — you might want to draw an outline while perusing so as to keep track of his argument. But often enough, he 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, he turns up a diary by Walt Whitman in which the great bard recorded his nightly conquests. "Saturday night Mike Ellis — 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 appendices, its 25-page list of works cited, Strangers may satisfy scholars. But it is in details like Whitman’s diary entry that the message borne out by the statistics comes clear: gay life was alive and well in the 19th century. It almost makes one want to sound a barbaric yawp of celebration.