“What the writings in this book demonstrate is the variety and inventiveness of strategies, genres, and other textual devices developed to talk about same-sex desire.” – Chris White, Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook
I ACQUIRED this bright yellow beauty during one of my many “book hunts” at the World’s Biggest Book Store—sadly, no longer around—in Toronto. The moment I saw it, I knew it would be a perfect tool for my final year at university, as I was diving deep into nineteenth-century Gothic and queer fiction. I even lent it to my Directed Reading and Honours thesis advisor, Prof. Patrick Holland (also a gay man and very encouraging and mentoring), who, when he saw it, flat-out asked to borrow it. I hadn’t even read it yet, but I gave it to him—he did control my grade, after all. LOL.
Much like the books I’ve previously discussed—Queering the Renaissance, Byron and Greek Love, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930, and Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism—at its core, Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 1999) is trying to solve a problem that anyone interested in queer history eventually runs into: how do you talk about “homosexuality” before the word existed? Before identity became something recognizable, and modern categories came into common use. This sourcebook’s answer is essentially this: don’t overexplain it with modern technical discourse, but show. This is where I feel lies both this book’s greatest strength and its chief constraint.
One of the book’s biggest successes is how thoroughly it undermines the idea that nineteenth-century sexuality was simply “repressed” and silent. Don’t come into this expecting exposition on Victorian prudishness; this book disabuses you of that pretty quickly. People were talking about same-sex desire constantly, just not in the contemporary language we are used to. This is where, once again, coded language, euphemisms, and metaphors aid in disguising desire as friendship, aesthetic admiration, moral panic, criminal pathology, classical nostalgia, or spiritual/internal struggle. What emerges isn’t a straight line (no pun intended) toward modern gay/queer identity but a messy field of overlapping discourses, many of which contradict each other because there were no open discourses, labels, categories, or “sexual identities,” as we know them today, to utilize.
That chaos of desire and identity is where the book really shines. You see how medical writers pathologize same-sex desire at the same time that poets romanticize it; how legal documents try to pin down sexual acts while personal letters slip around categories altogether. One of the most interesting, and perhaps controversial, takeaways is how contingent the boundary between ‘acts’ and ‘identity’ could be.
Much like Angus McLaren’s The Trials of Masculinity and Richard Dellamora’s Masculine Desire, White’s book demonstrates that when you dig into old court records or sexology texts, it’s clear that real social and legal consequences were always lurking in the background. But these documents aren’t neutral; they’re full of anxieties, obsessions, and blind spots. You can almost feel how the authorities were more obsessed with tracking and controlling homosexuality than the people they were supposedly “regulating.”
Sound familiar? Honestly, we’re still seeing the same kind of pathological need to control the gender and sexual identities and behaviours of others today.
The book has a relatively light editorial hand. White’s introductions and headnotes are definitely helpful, but perhaps a tad too restrained for someone unfamiliar with 19th-century verbiage and culture. Also, more context on class, empire, and race would aid the reader’s understanding, especially in the colonial material. While the book touches on imperialism regarding nineteenth-century sexuality, it feels incomplete. Same-sex desire appears in colonial settings, but there’s little about how power, exoticization, and racial hierarchy shape those encounters, a missed opportunity given its importance to Victorian ideas about morality and deviance. One is left wondering whether the source material was limited.
White resists the temptation to editorialize, to retroactively “out” historical figures, or to impose modern labels on them. There’s a real respect for ambiguity here. People in these texts often don’t know what to call themselves; some actively resist labelling themselves. That uncertainty isn’t treated as a problem to be solved but as a historical reality worth preserving. In a moment when queer history is sometimes simplified into timelines and identity checklists, this feels honest.
Still, I’ve got to admit, I’ve struggled with this aspect for years: the urge to slap a clear label on someone from the
past, or at least correct one that feels inaccurate. As a gay man, a writer, and a scholar, I’m always looking back, not to “out” anyone, but to give them the power to finally allow their true selves to be known publicly. To provide them with that sense of modern sexual liberation, that sense of “openness”. Will I ever be satisfied with ambiguity? Probably not. And yeah, part of it is ego. I want idols and historical figures I can relate to, admire, and feel connected with. And so my internal conundrum persists.
Chris White’s Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook doesn’t endeavour to unquestionably define nineteenth-century homosexuality. Instead, it shows how unstable, contested, and historically specific the idea has always been. Its principal value is reminding readers that gay/queer history is complex, a story of ongoing perplexity, reinvention, and debate. Approached as a conversation starter rather than a conclusion, it becomes an invaluable, often fascinating, and sometimes frustrating “sourcebook,” just as White may have intended. Overall, despite some minor limitations, this is a fantastic book.
