Queering Holmes: the bibliography post

[damned_colonial]

This is a round-up post for suggested reading related to this community's subject matter.



Queer history

Harry Cocks, "Nameless Offences: Homosexual desire in the 19th century", I. B. Tauris, 2009.

Matt Cook, "London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914", Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Graham Robb, "Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century", W. W. Norton & Co, 2003.


If you have suggestions for additions to the bibliography, please drop us a comment. The bibliography tag on this community is another place to look for book reviews and the like.

Comments

[iamshadow]

I haven't read it, but I have it on my wishlist should I ever be able to afford it Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld by Theo Aronson. Though it is a biograohy, it sounds like it has a fair amount of detail about homosexuality in Victorian London, in particular, Prince Eddy's involvement in the Cleveland Street scandal, which you mentioned in the review of Matt Cook's book.

[damned_colonial]

Ooh, interesting, thanks!

[iamshadow]

No problem! If you get hold of it, do review it and let me know if it's worth getting, won't you?

[damned_colonial]

Sure! I tend to buy batches of books from Abebooks when I've got some spare cash, but I have a backlog at present, so it might not be for a while. (It is a sad, sad fact that buying books secondhand online is cheaper for me than paying the library fines I invariably accrue if I try to fool myself into believing that borrowing from the library is cheaper.)

[iamshadow]

LOL, me too. Abebooks is good, but have you tried Bookmooch? I've been on there for over four years, and it's brilliant. Got plenty of books on there I never would have been able to find, otherwise.

[damned_colonial]

Yeah, I used them extensively for a while, but they seem to have dried up. I never get notifications of books available lately :( Maybe I want stuff that's too obscure? Or the algorithm is complicated and wants me to send stuff out before it will send stuff to me, even though I have a heap of points I'm trying to use up before I gain any more?

[iamshadow]

I'm still finding them pretty useful, and I search for a lot of obscure books, mainly on autism, rather than queer studies. Maybe it's worth going through and doing a search for related editions for the ones on your wishlist? That's got a lot better in the last couple of years.

[oursin]

May I point out that Prince Eddy's involvement in the Cleveland St scandal is extremely hypothetical. (Also, neither is he likely to have been Jack the Ripper.)

[iamshadow]

Oh, I know, but I'm still interested in reading it. Much like The Girls, which was was all written around the author's fairly groundless idea that two Hollywood actresses had had an affair, setting that aside, there's still a lot of interesting information detailed about the queer history of Hollywood.

[yan-tan-tether.livejournal.com]

I'm about 200 pages into The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna and so far it has some good general information on gay life in the late 19th century, as well as all the detail on Wilde.

[damned_colonial]

Thanks for the rec :) Would you like a Dreamwidth invite code, btw? I have plenty to share.

[yan-tan-tether.livejournal.com]

No, but thanks for the offer.

[oursin]

Oldies but goodies:

Jeff Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the C19th to the Present (1977)
Timothy D'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English 'Uranian' Poets from 1889 to 1930 (1970) - and, should you ever come across a copy of this small press collectors' item, check out his intro to Elysium Press's lovely edition of The Quorum: A Magazine of Friendship

More recent:
Charles Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform (2009) - the period is the earlier part of the century, but it's all excellent stuff
Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (2008)
Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913 (2005)
Morris Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (2005)
Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Psychiatry and the Making of Sexual Identity (based on detailed research in the Krafft-Ebing papers) (2000)
Angus McLaren's Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History (2002) has some material on gay blackmail cases.

The best study of Havelock Ellis, to my mind, is Chris Nottingham's The Pursuit of Serenity: Havelock Ellis and the New Politics (1999) (Grosskurth's bio is terribly Point Thah U Hav Misst It - Ellis was not aiming to be Freud, srsly) - but it's more about wider late C19th progressive circles. I am slightly hesitant to recommend Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition (2007) on account of history with the editor - he does do solid research, but tends towards a rather odd theoretical framework.

I don't think there's anything in the way of biography on George Ives out there - but I know Matt Cook has an article or two about him in the pipeline.

You all know already know about Rictor Norton's massive website on gay history, right? I refer here especially to the section on John Addington Symonds.

And probably not entirely finally: has anyone else ever read Chris Hunt's novel Street Lavender (1990), about a late Victorian rentboy? As I recollect it seemed fairly well-researched. I have an idea there may have been a sequel, but don't have the details.