It suffused the inner lives of men across the country, from Abraham Lincoln, who shared a bed with his best friend, Joshua, for four years when they lived together in Springfield, Illinois, to middle- and working-class friends in nineteenth-century New England.
Romantic male friendship was in no way limited to Southern life and culture. Men publicly cultivated romantic friendships alongside their erotic relationships with women. Male romantic friends sometimes expressed their outpouring of emotion through light physical touching and gentle kissing, but, in a culture lacking the terms and concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality, these gestures weren’t considered at odds with their marriages and domestic lives nor were they seen as challenges to masculinity. These fictional portraits of male comradeship and attachment reflected a social reality: in the nineteenth century, it was common for men to forge romantic friendships-fervid, life-defining connections-with other men. state, when the word homosexuality hadn’t yet entered the English language, novels and stories about men exploring intimacy with each other abounded: Bret Harte’s “Tennessee’s Partner” (1869), James Lane Allen’s “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky” (1888), Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend (1870), Frederick Wadsworth Loring’s Two College Friends (1871). Every time I opened Grindr to start conversations with guys my own age, I’d end up abandoning these attempts and disappearing instead into the late-nineteenth-century short stories of gentle renegades from Missouri or the flirty letters of antebellum South Carolinians who called each other “bedfellows.”Īt a moment when sodomy was a felony in every U.S. Under my comforter, I snuck in their quiet tales about caring for their best buds. In my sixth year out of the closet, old stories of chaste but intense male friendships became my new dirty secret. Male romantic friendships in art and life