GLR March-April 2026

Victorian Times GLR k March–April 2025

W ILL B ASHOR Dr. Jekyll & Victor Frankenstein J. B ARNES Monte Cristo’s Women in Love A NDREW R IMBY Once Upon a Time... in Camden E RIC L. T RIBUNELLA The Prehistory of Gay YA C HARLES T IMBRELL Tchaikovsky’s Men P ETER J ORDAAN Captain Cobb & His Crew

F ILMS & S ERIES R EVIEWED Heated Rivalry Pillion Plainclothes Boots Kiss of the Spider Woman

$6.95 US, $7.95 Canada

Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde

Editor-in-Chief and Founder R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . Managing Editor WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review ® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118 GLR k

The Gay & Lesbian Review March–April 2026 • VOLUME XXXIII, NUMBER 2 WORLDWIDE

C ONTENTS

Victorian Times

F EATURES

J EREMY C. F OX Literary Editor M ARTHA E. S TONE Poetry Editor D AVID B ERGMAN Associate Editors

Dr. Jekyll and Victor Frankenstein 10 W ILL B ASHOR

Both protagonists created a double to embody their hidden desires

Monte Cristo’s Women in Love 13 J. B ARNES

Dumas’ classic explores forbidden love that’s hidden in plain sight

Once Upon a Time... in Camden 16 A NDREW R IMBY The Prehistory of Gay YA 21 E RIC L. T RIBUNELLA Lotte Hahm’s Germany 24 K EIRA R OBERSON The Lives They Filmed 27 H UGO L JUNGBÄCK

When Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde convened one day in 1882

S AM D APANAS P AUL F ALLON M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ Contributing Writers D ANIEL A. B URR C OLIN C ARMAN A NNE C HARLES A LAN C ONTRERAS A LFRED C ORN A LLEN E LLENZWEIG C HRIS F REEMAN P HILIP G AMBONE M ATTHEW H AYS H ILARY H OLLADAY A NDREW H OLLERAN I RENE J AVORS J OHN R. K ILLACKY C ASSANDRA L ANGER

From the 1880s, “boy books” were a vehicle for adolescent love

She was a lesbian / trans organizer from Weimar to the postwar era

Amateur movies captured queer life from the 1930s to the ’60s

A Harvard Don’s Radical Roots 30 S COTT B ANE

Secretly gay, F. O. Matthiessen was a union organizer in the 1930s

R EVIEWS

P OEMS & D EPARTMENTS C ORRESPONDENCE 5 I N M EMORIAM — Rosa von Praunheim’s Films Started a Revolution 8 K EVIN C LARKE BTW 9 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . P OEM — “galveston 1977” 12 C HRISTOPHER S ODEN P OEM — “To my friend, Billy” 15 R ICHARD A RNOLD H ISTORY M EMO — Geoffry Wheatly Cobb and His Youthful Crew 18 P ETER J ORDAAN A RT M EMO — The Men in Tchaikovsky’s Life 20 C HARLES T IMBRELL P OEM — “You’re in the Taco Bell Parking Lot With a Handsome Butch” 29 L YDIA V ENUS K NOWLES A RT M EMO — Jack Spicer’s Heart of a Second Baseman 41 B RIAN B OULDREY A RT M EMO — Patricia Cronin’s Army of Love 45 C ASSANDRA L ANGER C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 46 Phil Melanson — Florenzer 33 B RUCE S PANG Michael Schreiber — Don Bachardy: An Artist’s Life 34 P HILIP G AMBONE Eric C. Wat — Daddy Issues: Stories 35 L ORI O’D EA John Savage — The Secret Public 36 N IKOLAI E NDRES Brian T. Blackmore — To Hear and to Respond 37 D ANIEL A. B URR B RIEFS 38 Martin Padgett — The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick 40 L ARRY R EYNOLDS Gregory Hischak — E Is for Edward 42 M ICHAEL Q UINN Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein — Terry Dactyl 43 A NNE C HARLES Steven Reigns — Outliving Michael 43 C HARLES G REEN Jason Ezell — For a Spell: Sissie Collectivism and Radical Witchery... 44 P ETER M UISE Harry Lighton, director — Pillion 47 C ASPER B YRNE Carmen Emmi, director — Plainclothes 48 B RIAN B ROMBERGER Jacob Tierney, creator — Heated Rivalry 49 J EREMY C. F OX Andy Parker, creator — Boots 50 C OLIN C ARMAN

A NDREW L EAR J AMES P OLCHIN J EAN R OBERTA V ERNON R OSARIO Contributing Artist C HARLES H EFLING Publisher S TEPHEN H EMRICK Webmaster B OSTON W EB G ROUP WebEditor A LLISON A RMIJO ______________________________ Board of Directors

A RT C OHEN ( CHAIR ) R OBERT H ARDMAN S TEPHEN H EMRICK D AVID L A F ONTAINE J EREMY C. F OX J IM J ACOBS A NDREW L EAR

R ICHARD S CHNEIDER , J R . ( PRESIDENT ) T HOMAS Y OUNGREN ( TREASURER ) S TEWART C LIFFORD ( CHAIR EMER .) W ARREN G OLDFARB ( SR . ADVISOR EMER .)

The Gay & Lesbian Review/ WORLDWIDE ® (formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscription rates : U.S.: $41.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $51.70(US). All other countries: $61.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” ISSN: 1077: 6591 © 2026 by Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. W EBSITE : www.GLReview.org • S UBSCRIPTIONS : 847-504-8893 • A DVERTISING : 617-421-0082 • S UBMISSIONS : Editor@GLReview.org

March–April 2026

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Spring Fever: Victorian Times FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR

T HIS ISSUE takes us back to the dawn of LGBT identity as we explore some of the 19th-century writers who first put legibly queer characters and behaviors on the page. Though it was 1868 before Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the term “homosexual,” and it didn’t become widely used for an other couple of decades, our contributors detect hints of same sex attractions in works as early as The Count of Monte Cristo , serialized in 1844, and Frankenstein , published in 1818. Will Bashor argues that there are hints of queerness in both Mary Shelley’s gothic cautionary tale and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , books in which each protagonist creates a double for himself who rep resents hidden desires. J. Barnes contends that little is hidden in The Count of Monte Cristo , which depicts two women who are obviously devoted to each other, one of whom even dons a man’s suit and cuts her hair short. What could be gayer than a private meeting of the minds between Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde? Andrew Rimby re ports that the tête-à-tête left such an impression on the young Wilde that he said ten years later he could still feel Whitman’s kiss upon his lips. Eric L. Tribunella detects early depictions of adolescent same-sex desire in the late-19th- and early 20th century works of Edward Irenæus Prime-Stevenson, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, and Edwin Emmanuel Bradford. In a History

Memo, Peter Jordaan recounts the tale of Victorian aristocrat Geoffry Wheatly Cobb, who loved ships almost as much as he loved sailors. Charles Timbrell has contributed an Artist’s Pro file on composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and the many men in his life. Taking us deeper into the 20th century are two recipients of TheG&LR ’s Charles S. Longcope Jr. Writers and Artists Grant. Keira Roberson has researched the life of Lotte Hahm, an im portant queer figure in Weimar-era Germany through World War II, who created spaces for lesbians and trans women to congregate. And Hugo Ljungbäck has dug into the archives to explore unsung gay filmmakers of the mid-20th-century like Harold T. O’Neal, Cyrus Pinkham, Jerett Robert Austin, and François Reichenbach. Scott Bane completes this trio of 20th century tales with an article on lovers F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, who were as influential in the arts as they were devoted to progressive politics and racial equality. The issue also includes many great reviews of fiction and nonfiction books, plus critical analyses of recent queer themed TV shows Boots and Heated Rivalry andmovies Pil lion and Plainclothes . In these difficult times for many in the LGBT community, it’s encouraging to see that queer stories are still being told. J EREMY C. F OX

Pioneer of G iscover P D

Gay Liberation! theUnsung G

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The Stonewall Reader editorof JASON BAUMANN — .

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Correspondence

Breitensträter, and entertainers Friedrich Holländer and Josef von Sternberg. His fiftieth Birthday Party in Berlin’s Kaiserhof hotel (later Hitler’s pre-Chancellor lodging) featured nine skits in drag. Flechtheim started publishing portfolios featuring his galleries, and expanded to a full magazine, Der Querschnitt (“Cross section”), projecting a “distinctly gay aes thetic,” covering art (naturally) as well as sports and “life.” It featured portraits (many nude), travel, gossip, and essays, including by Ernest Hemingway (who dubbed Flechtheim the “noble citizen, prominent Jewish bugger and great art dealer Alfred Flechtheim”), Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, André Gide (in French). It also carried ads for Berlin’s gay nightspots. These developments prompted several trips to Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, and successful restitutions that have enabled financial support to AIDS research, LGBT organizations, and Jewish charities. They also led to a personal book: Jewish, Gay & Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany: Uncle Al fred Flechtheim’s Unexpected Legacies in Art, AIDS, and Law . Michael Hulton, San Francisco, CA Encounters with Boyd McDonald To the Editor, Michael Quinn’s Art Memo, “Cruising with Boyd McDonald” (Jan.-Feb. 2026), brought back memories of my 1986 en counter with McDonald, when I interviewed himfor a Penthouse Forum profile. As I wrote in my article, McDonald “lives in quarters that would appall most upwardly

her parents to the Gestapo expulsion back to Poland and its inevitable conclusion. And I shared his comparison of the Shoah and our AIDS pandemic. By the 1980s I had emi grated to Canada, working as an anesthesi ologist in Toronto. Propelled by this similarity, I questioned local “experts,” eventually adding a parttime primary early HIV care practice. Drawing on my U.S. contacts (one year’s training at Stanford) I aimed to introduce U.S. advances (primary care AZT availability, aerosol pentamidine etc), becoming a local activist. Some eighteen years ago, now in San Francisco, I began to receive messages rekindling my early fascination with the Germany from which my parents (who met in London) had luckily fled. I was poten tially able to reclaim works left by my noto rious great uncle, art dealer Alfred Flechtheim. I only knew Dad disapproved of Flechtheim’s open homosexuality, and that father was sole heir after his passing in 1937, from leg infections, despite bilateral amputations. I later discovered he died in St. Pancras Hospital, scene of some of my medical training. I started research into his Francophilia, introducing early Picasso and Braque to a German public. He left his family’s grain business, opened a Dusseldorf art gallery in 1913, resumed post World War I, and ex panded to Berlin. He became the “cham pagne fizz” in heady Weimar society. Flamboyant parties in which he entertained artists George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Rudolf Levy, Max Pechstein, Renée Sintenis, boxers Max Schmeling and Hans

Notes on LeDic ti onnaire To the Editor:

Hugh Hagius’ review of Le Dictionnaire historique du lexique de l’homosexualité (Nov.-Dec. 2025 issue) offers a captivating sampling of Nicholas Lo Vecchio’s study of words in European languages that have been used to describe queer folk over the ages. One correction is needed, however. According to the American Heritage Dic tionary, Third Edition , the word “berdache” is indeed attested in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. It origins can be traced from Ara bic ( bardag , bardaj ) to Persian ( barda ), Middle Persian ( vartak ), Old Iranian ( *varta -), and ultimately, the root * uel or * wel ə - in Proto-Indo-European. Over the ages, its meaning has evolved. In Persian and Arabic, it might refer to young male slaves who might be used for sex; earlier it simply meant “seized, captive, prisoner.” In the Mediterranean word, it was likely intro duced by sailors from Middle Eastern ports. By the advent of printing, it had already en tered Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English, typically in reference to young, non-masculine males who were receptive in sex with men. The French fur traders who used “berdache” (in various forms) to refer to Two-Spirits among the indigenous people of North America had no way of knowing these ancient meanings. “Berdache” was simply frontier jargon for the nonbinary in digenous people found in many tribes, mostly male-bodied but sometimes female bodied as well. Since it wasn’t part of the European terminology for prohibited sex ual practices, its use in this context was fairly neutral. Will Roscoe, San Francisco, CA To the Editor: Regarding your article on Nicholas Lo Vecchio’s Dictionnaire historique du lex ique de l’homosexualité , in my research on male and female impersonators in the Victo rian era, I repeatedly came across journal ists who used the word “queer” to describe them. Of course at the time they were using it in the sense of “unusual,” but over several decades “queer” slowly became attached to homosexuals in general. David Williams, Louisville, KY In Search of Uncle Alfred and HIs Lost Art To the Editor: I found particular parallels in Harlan Greene’s article on Herschel Grynszpan [in the Jan.-Feb. 2026 issue]. My mother (who escaped to England in January 1938) lost

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March–April 2026

5

mobile gay Manhattanites. His ‘lovely home,’ as he calls it, is packed tight with several bookcases filled to overflowing, a cot covered with an Army blanket, a tiny stove and refrigerator, and his writing table. There are also rows of shopping bags stuffed with the sex letters his contributors send him for publication in his books and in the column he edits for the gay newsweekly, The New York Native .” Some skeptics doubted the letters he pub lished were authentic, but I saw them, and Boyd let me read some of them. (Full dis closure: Boyd included several of my first person accounts in his “true case histories of men’s groins and rear ends.”) Boyd was friendly, talkative, and dryly but outrageously funny. The several hours I spent with him were among the most enjoy able I’ve had with anyone I’ve interviewed. McDonald was also a trenchant and hilari ous political commentator, and, as he told me, his politics were socialist. In addition to his sex books, he wrote film reviews and es says for Christopher Street magazine, which were later anthologized in Cruising theMovies , published by Gay Presses of New York. They were funny and insightful; Mother Jones magazine observed that Mc Donald was “one of the nation’s least appre ciated and most astute film critics.” George De Stefano, Long Island City, NY To the Editor: Thank you for publishing Michael Quinn’s “Cruising with Boyd McDonald.” He notes

sues of TheGuide but also an archive of materials by McDonald (correspondence, photos, files, articles) for the period 1975 to 1993, plus 4,200 copies of his last book, Scum: True Homosexual Experiences (1993). I sorted through the pile and whit tled it down to 44 boxes. The rest was left for recycling. I rented a U-Haul van, packed it, closed the account, and drove off. I had arranged in advance to gift the materials to the Human Sexuality Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY. They re ceived the bulk of the material, but I also arranged to send copies of TheGuide to the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (now The ArQuives) in Toronto, as well as to Rick Hurlbut’s collection of travel materials at the Pride Library, Western University, London, ON. McDonald’s papers, 14.5 cubic feet in total, are at Cornell, and the finding aid is available online at Cornell’s RMC Library. Donald W. McLeod, Toronto, ON, Canada Correc ti ons In the Nov.-Dec. 2025 issue, a piece by Chase Bryer includes in his bio (p. 13) a ded ication to Beverly Little Thunder, who died on August 24th (not July 18th) of last year. In the May-June 2025 issue, in a feature ti tled “The First Lesbian Image Makers,” the photo from the Elvira Studio was published in the German newspaper DieWoche (not DieWoke ).

that McDonald’s family cleaned out his room after he died in 1993, throwing everything away. This suggests that his papers did not survive, which is not entirely true. In May 2013, I was hired by Pink Trian gle Press (PTP) of Toronto to go to Boston and clean out a storage locker. PTP had pur chased The Guide: Gay Travel, Entertain ment, Politics, & Sex , a grand old queer publication that had published McDonald. The locker was the final clean-up for the purchase, and my instructions were to clear the locker and to place any suitable material in a queer archive. There were 122 dust covered boxes mostly containing back is

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IN MEMORIAM

In the words of gay film critic Axel Schock, Rosa was a “ schrille Nervensäge ” (“a shrill irritant”). But many were grateful that he volunteered to put himself on the line publicly, confronting hostility head-on while others were too afraid to do so. Born Holger Radtke in German-occupied Riga, Latvia, and raised in the Frankfurt suburb of Praunheim, he chose his stage name by combining the place of his upbringing with “Rosa,” a reference to the pink triangle used by the Nazis to mark im prisoned homosexuals. Until the very end of his life, he con tinued making films at an astonishing pace, as well as publishing poetry, penning and staging over-the-top plays such as Jeder Idiot hat eine Oma, nur ich nicht (Every Idiot Has A Grandma, Except Me, 2018), and creating exhibitions of his colorful penis paintings. He also turned some of his older films Rosa von Praunheim’s Films Started a Revolution K EVIN C LARKE T HE NEWS came as a shock. Only two days after leg endary German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim had shared photographs of his wedding to longtime partner Oliver Sechting—images full of celebrity guests from the film world, a cake topped with a giant penis, and Rosa himself look ing radiant in pink despite being in a wheelchair—his husband announced that Rosa had died on December 17th at age 83. With his 1971 film Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt (It Is Not the Homosex ual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives), Rosa had ignited the gay liberation movement in West Ger many. First screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, then on many university campuses, the mockumentary offered

into modern musicals, including Die Bettwurst (The Bed Sausage) in 2022; it tells the story of a hopelessly stupid gay criminal called Dietmar falling for an elderly woman named Luzi who offers him refuge in her bed with a “sausage” shaped pillow. It’s a high camp classic, on screen in 1971, and on stage five decades later. His final film, a reflection on his own life, premiered at the Berlinale in February 2025 under the title Die sa tanische Sau (Satanic Sow). In it, Armin Dallapiccola portrays Rosa, speaking candidly about sex in old age and about mortality. Friends later told me that after a long and severe illness last summer, Rosa had planned an assisted suicide—and had it filmed as part of his cinematic farewell. His collected plays have been pub lished by the prestigious S. Fischer Verlag. Many of his films are avail able on DVD. Several of his later stage productions were filmed— often by Rosa himself—to document

a biting caricature of gay men who sought refuge in “art,” masking their sexuality with “culture” in stead of fighting for political change. The film ends with a call to action: “Get out of public toilets and into the streets to protest!” The impact was explosive, especially with a younger generation. In the film’s immediate aftermath, count less activist groups formed, pushing West German society into a new era—long before the first Pride marches. As a filmmaker, Rosa went on to create works about key LGBT figures such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. He also made films about AIDS, in cluding Ein Virus kennt keine Moral (A Virus Knows No Morals). Many screened at international fes tivals. Their outrageous aesthetic can be compared to the work of artists such as John Waters, though the latter never had such an obvious activist streak.

Rosa von Praunheim in the 1980s. From the artist’s private collection.

his work. They are time capsules worth revisiting, including his final play, Die Insel der Perversen (“The Island of Per verts”), which tackles German politics and figures such as the lesbian far-right politician Alice Weidel, a noted favorite of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It’s still in repertoire at the Kammerspiele of Deutsches Theater Berlin. In a farewell letter, Deutsches Theater Berlin quotes Rosa as promising to continue putting on shows after death, calling it “Post-Mortem Theater.” If anyone can pull that off, it’s Rosa. R.I.P., my hero. Kevin Clarke, an Irish German musicologist and journalist living in Berlin, has published books on musical theater and has curated var ious exhibitions at Berlin’s Schwules Museum.

At the height of anti-gay hysteria during the AIDS crisis, Rosa sparked a major debate. In 1991, on the television show Explosiv—Der heiße Stuhl (Explosive—The Hot Seat), he publicly outed several famous figures, arguing that admired public personalities had a responsibility to show that gay men were not abstract outsiders, but people the public already loved. The backlash was fierce, raising questions about whether out ing could ever be justified for a perceived “greater good.” Two of the men involved—TV host Alfred Biolek and comedian Hape Kerkeling—later thanked Rosa for forcing them out of the closet. For decades, Rosa remained omnipresent in the public eye, often in wildly flamboyant outfits that became his trademark.

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Togetherness The prevalence of same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) in nonhuman species has been a recurring topic in these pages, in keeping with the steady stream of research that con tinues to turn up cases in more and more corners of the animal kingdom. Now a major meta-study has compiled the results of hundreds of these studies—96 on primates alone—to answer the $64 question: just how widespread is SSB in non-human species in general and primates in particular? The study, pub lished in Nature Ecology & Evolution (Jan. 12, 2026), found that SSB has been observed in some 1,500 animal species to BTW

posted by his wife), firefighters were called to his home and found it engulfed in flames. McDonough’s charred remains were later identified in the wreckage. Silver lining: perhaps this means that trans minors in Alaska will get a reprieve. But it turns out their numbers are very small (under 100), adding to the absurdity of McDonough’s phony crusade. Good Sports This one is mostly about the photo, presented as an example of a growing trend among college sports teams, as

reported by Out sports.com . Ifonce team photos en tailed lining up in rows or huddling stiffly for the cam era, those days are long over. In this age of TikTok high jinks as the pass port to your fifteen

date, including 59 primates for which there was robust evidence of SSB. A total of 491 primate species were rated across fifteen factors that could help explain its prevalence, and their findings are fascinating. Relative to all primate species, those with SSB tend to live in drier environ ments with higher food scarcity, show greater size dimorphism

minutes of fame, team leaders know they have to do something truly eye-catching to rev up those fans. Group activities may involve feats of agility, as in this photo of the Purdue diving team, while individual team members can be seen showing off their physiques in various states of déshabillé. Critics may complain that the new team photos often have nothing to do with the sport being played, a fault that may be forgiven by many readers of this magazine. As the nation grew, soldiers and sailors, poets and lumberjacks found new opportunities to connect.

between males and females, have longer lifespans, and exhibit more complex social structures and hierarchies. This pretty well describes the environment in which homo sapiens evolved, that dry African savannah where lions roamed, where early humans had to band together quite literally, physically, to protect one another and cement their loyalties to the group. In general, primate species facing environmental pressures and scarcities tend to show greater cooperation and sociability— and higher levels of SSB. The higher density of social interac tion creates a probability that social contact will be more frequent and varied, including intimate bonds that may involve camaraderie or sex or possibly just a reassuring hug. The Fire This Time Whenever a preacher or politician seems a trifle too zealous in his hatred of sexual minorities in public, we’ve learned to suspect that he has something to hide in pri vate. For example, in the last BTW we encountered a pol in South Carolina who was just plain nihilistic in his ability to distribute kiddie porn and then go back to sending Easter bless ings to his constituents. Then there’s Dr. Ryan McDonough, a cardiologist in Wasilla, Alaska, whose cause célèbre was the banning of gender-affirming care for trans minors, which he pursued with gusto from his position on the Alaska Medical Board. That was until he was arrested for possession of a giant trove of photographs and videos of children being sexually abused. The material turned up in a monthslong investigation included scences with both boys and girls as young as infants. He was charged with ten felony counts and soon resigned from the Medical Board. This is usually the point in the story when the perp tries to deny or explain away his sins, blaming alco hol or mental illness and promising to get help. But not this time. Soon after McDonough’s release from jail on bond ($50k,

Essays from Th eGay &Lesbian Review by William Benemann

AVAILABLE AT

March–April 2026

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ESSAY Dr. Jekyll and Victor Frankenstein W ILL B ASHOR

N INETEENTH-CENTURY English society adhered to conventional notions of Christian morality and respectable behavior, but the culture’s stiff upper lip quavered over anxi eties around social, moral, and psychological degeneracy, which provide the context for the horrifying tales of Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson. These anxieties are personified by the authors’ monsters, whose bodies incorporate fear, desire, and fantasy. Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), written during the late Georgian period, emerges from a time of social and intellectual upheaval marked by revolutionary ideals and the dawn of modern science, in which emotional repression and anxieties about human nature were already prominent. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) was written in the late Victorian era under the queen’s reign of straitlaced civility, by which time these anxieties had hardened into a cultural expectation of emotional restraint and moral rigidity. This historical layering enriches the interpretation of these works, highlighting how Shelley and Stevenson’s mon sters symbolize the complex interplay of progress and repres sion across these transformative periods in English history. believed to stem from the womb ( hystera in ancient Greek), but by the 19th-century doctors recognized similar symptoms in men—such as nervousness, emotional instability, fatigue, and psychosomatic ailments—particularly among men facing in tense social pressures. This expansion reflected broader cultural fears about the destabilization of traditional masculinity in an in dustrializing, imperial Britain. Male hysteria thus became a sub ject where medical discourse and anxieties about gender intersected, marking off certain men perceived as physically or morally weak, and revealing underlying tensions about sexual ity, identity, and social roles. These anxieties about masculinity were not only medical but also social, influencing how men navigated and occupied male-dominated spaces in 19th-century England. Such envi ronments became settings in which male identity, secrecy, and transgressive behavior came together. It is within these male so Will Bashor teaches at the University of the People and lives in Sitges, Spain. His novels include The Bizarre Case of Dr. Grindle and The Bastard Prince of Versailles. Moreover, these anxieties coincide with a rise in purported cases of male hysteria, a diagnosis that emerged as medicine ex panded its understanding of nervous and emotional disorders beyond women to in clude men. Historically, hysteria was pathol ogized primarily as a female condition,

cial spheres—like scientific laboratories—that Shelley and Stevenson’s protagonists operate. In Shelley’s Frankenstein , scientist Victor Frankenstein gives life to a sapient creation that seeks revenge through ter ror and murder when rejected by its creator. In Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , the respectable doc tor Henry Jekyll develops a serum to help hide his repressed urges, but the drug instead transforms him into the physical in carnation of his angst, Edward Hyde (even his alter ego’s name is a homophone referring to concealment). Importantly, Henry Jekyll was named after Walter Jekyll, a former clergyman and friend of Stevenson who was almost certainly homosexual and who had renounced his ecclesiastical career, spending several years living on the Continent—an experience that suggests he struggled with societal expectations and identity, possibly echo ing the themes of duality and repression found in Stevenson’s novella. Based on the strange behavior of Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and their preoccupation with male spaces, readers may question what the protagonists are hiding and whether it might be their sexual orientation. Although it is not possible to “out” the cultural and social restrictions of the time, in which women were relegated to peripheral roles and denied access to scientific or intellectual pursuits. This absence amplifies the emotional and psychological ten sions experienced by Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll, who navigate their double lives and repressed desires largely in isola tion from meaningful female influence or companionship. The limited presence of women also highlights the homosocial and homoerotic undercurrents in the stories, as male relationships and conflicts occupy center stage, and the protagonists’ struggles un fold within exclusively male spaces. Consequently, the lack of strong female characters not only mirrors 19th-century gender norms but also intensifies the portrayal of masculine anxieties about identity, companionship, and social expectations. While the century’s scientific progress and rapid socioeco nomic change fostered the growth of new urban male spaces— public and semi-public environments dominated by men and often inaccessible to women—these venues could embody both the promise and peril of modernity. From elite gentlemen’s clubs (e.g., The Reform Club, The Athenæum) and scientific any of Shelley or Stevenson’s characters as gay, the stories can be examined to detect the elements of the homoerotic. Moreover, the stories share themes of male duality and the conspicuous absence of strong female char acters, which serves to underscore the pro tagonists’ isolation and the prevalence of male-dominated spheres in both narra tives. The marginalization of women reflects

Based on the strange behavior of Drs. Jekyll and Frankenstein and their preoccupa ti on with male spaces, we may ques ti on what they are hiding...

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Shelley and Stevenson’s works be longed to an era when social class deter mined upward mobility and financial prosperity. Englishmen were expected to be respectable husbands, providers, and protectors. But if they were seen as weak, they were judged inferior in a so ciety in which male hysteria was in creasingly diagnosed. Because Victor and Dr. Jekyll frequently exhibit the af fliction’s unmanly symptoms—includ ing melancholy, depression, and sickly appearances—their monsters can be seen as an expression of their masculine insecurities. In this reading, Victor represses ho mosocial or homoerotic yearnings that cannot be fulfilled due to social pro scription and his privileged status. He reacts by creating a soulmate or double being to compensate for this prohibi tion. In one instance, he explains his in tense yearning for such companionship to his sister Margaret: “But I have one want which I have never yet been able

Fredric March as Jekyll and Hyde in 1931’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glow ing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to par ticipate in my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection.” But the compan ionship desired is not that of a female: “I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gen tle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a ca pacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans.” Victor is aware of his own hysteria, oppressed with a “slow fever” every night and “nervous to a most painful degree.” Such a need for a double being is also found when the hyster ical Dr. Jekyll carries on horrific nighttime activities in the body of Mr. Hyde. Such hysteria can also be seen as an expression of homosocial or homosexual anxiety during a period when no terminology existed for such a sexual identity. (While the term “homosexual” had been coined in Germany in 1868, it was not in general usage until the early 20th century.) Moreover, the men in Dr. Jekyll’s male space find Mr. Hyde abhorrent, viewed with “disgust, loathing and fear”—just as they might view a morally debased individual such as a homo sexual. One recalls in the text: “there was something queer about that gentleman—something that gave a man a turn.” Dr. Jekyll also suffers from hysteria, telling his friends that he is “very low.” A friend confirms the illness, finding the doctor “looking deathly sick.” Both protagonists can be considered “queer” not only be cause they exist outside normative heterosexual frameworks— evidenced by the near absence of marital or sexual relationships in the narratives—but also because “queer” here signals a broader challenge to the era’s norms of gender, sexuality, and

societies to theaters, coffeehouses, commercial arcades, and even private laboratories, such spaces reflected industrial pros perity, imperial confidence, and male social power. Yet they also nurtured secrecy, alternative masculinities, and activities deemed morally suspect, from clandestine sexual encounters to unchecked scientific experimentation. In Frankenstein and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , the protagonists emerge from and operate within this male urban sphere, their transgressive pursuits mirroring contemporary anxieties about shifting sexual and familial roles—anxieties that were fre quently pathologized as “male hysteria.” When Victor and Dr. Jekyll create their monsters, they ex perience a temporary reprieve from their hysteria. For Dr. Jekyll, the sensation is almost orgasmic: The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescrib ably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images run ning like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obli gation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. The same sense of relief from Victor’s hysteria is euphoric when he creates his monster and perceives his new soul mate as al most perfect and worthy of praising to God: “I saw the dull yel low eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God!” March–April 2026

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identity. In the historical context of these works, “queer” en compasses identities and behaviors that deviate from dominant heteronormative expectations, including nonreproductive male relationships, emotional intimacy between men, and the re pression or concealment of desires that could be socially stig matized. Scrutinizing these texts thus opens up readings that detect homosocial or homoerotic subtexts and highlights how the protagonists’ double lives and creations metaphorically re flect the pressures and anxieties of living a “queer” existence in a rigidly moralistic society. In the 19th century’s system of sex, gender, and body norms, the bachelor occupied an inherently unstable position— neither fulfilling the moral and reproductive duties of the hus band nor fully outside the social gaze. Whereas a husband’s identity was grounded in the tangible legal and domestic frame work of marriage, the bachelor was defined by a conceptual absence, by that which he was not . This absence provoked cul tural unease, for bachelorhood evoked possibilities ranging from the romantic ideal of independence to the darker associ ations of idleness, sexual abnormality, or even moral degener acy. Such ambiguity finds its fictional parallel in Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll—publicly respected men of sci ence who, in their private lives, remain unmoored from the sta bilizing presence of women and the domestic sphere. Their isolation renders them susceptible to forms of secrecy, obses sion, and self-division that contemporary commentators might have read as symptoms of “male hysteria.” Dr. Jekyll himself hints at the social and personal strain of this position: “I am painfully situated … my position is a very strange—a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking.” Both Victor and Dr. Jekyll’s close-knit societies as well as their laboratories represent exclusively male spaces. Through out both novels, men dine together, have tea together, and drink gin together. The structure of Frankenstein depends on men talking to each other: the monster to Victor and Victor to his male friends. And when Victor becomes engaged to his cousin Elizabeth, he has an emotional breakdown. Similarly, two of Jekyll’s friends maintain a peculiar male bonding ritual on weekly excursions: It was a nut to crack for many, what these two could see in each other, or what subject they could find in common. It was reported by those who encountered them in their Sun day walks, that they said nothing, looked singularly dull and would hail with obvious relief the appearance of a friend. For all that, the two men put the greatest store by these ex cursions, counted them the chief jewel of each week, and not only set aside occasions of pleasure, but even re sisted the calls of business, that they might enjoy them un interrupted. As Gothic literature, both stories relate to their eras as re actions to advances in science, as commentary on 19th-century consciousness, and as reflections of new masculine spaces. The tales of Shelley and Stevenson’s monstrous doubles not only haunt the foggy streets of 19th-century London; they also mir ror the duplicity beneath the era’s stiff collars and polite soci ety. Just as Victor Frankenstein’s creature and Dr. Jekyll’s alter ego lead double lives, many men of the time also navigated se 12

cret worlds hidden behind respectable façades. Moreover, Shel ley and Stevenson’s monsters embody the secret subcultures, coded languages, and shadowy meeting places that flourished under the surface of English society. Their dual natures remind us that beneath the veneer of progress and propriety, 19th-cen tury England was a stage for hidden identities and concealed desires, where science and secrecy danced hand in hand— sometimes with terrifying results.

galveston 1977

our first spring break we shared a beach house though it was april it was chilly and we saw only puffy dowagers in bathing caps enormous dull yellow dogs we tapped our typewriters sang wistful pop and roasted hens

traced the surf for hours fizzy suds between toes you composed plays and i my poetry found a glass jar

for frail wild flowers that reminded you

of your dads funeral we collaborated on goofy

poems nobody cries when a jellyfish dies

you looked funny first thing in the morning white white jockey shorts horn rimmed glasses maybe like jesus i had no idea 40 years later that week would tear into me like a cyclone when i heard you breathing as we slept you were my brother my only brother

C HRISTOPHER S ODEN

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