GLR September-October 2025

yond same-sex romance and become heterosexuals capable of fathering children. But the view that the Civil War happened so that American boys could grow up to become heterosexual fa thers and married men seems a bit much. But here is the frustrating thing about this: scattered in the stream of Queer Theory are old-fashioned historical facts that make one wish that historians would stop writing, as they say, for other historians. “This book is not about individual gay Con federates,” Donnelly writes. But one wishes it was—because the history, even viewed through the lens of Queer Theory, is fascinating. But then there are sentences like: “The very elas ticity of any inquiry into the political meaning of same-sex ro mance ... suggests a phenomenon whose boundaries may be coextensive with the imagination of white manhood itself.” Every time the book discloses something about someone in passing to make a point about politics and homosexuality, one perks right up. How interesting it is, for instance, to learn that Charles Sum ner had a very close friendship with a fellow Bostonian who founded the first school for the blind, and that he had a break down when his best friend married; or to come upon a doctor who was obsessed with wiping out masturbation among young American men, or upon a former Surgeon General of the Union Army who opened the first psychiatric practice in New York after the war and treated what he called pederasts; or to learn that no one paid any attention to Lincoln’s affection for other men when Lincoln was alive, only after his death; that Joshua Speed, the man whose bed he shared in Springfield before mar

facing but looking past one another, Whitman’s hat high on his forehead, Doyle’s pushed down low. They look like card sharps on a Mississippi riverboat; there’s nothing romantic about it at all. And that may be said for much of the evidence in Donnelly’s book. It’s familiar enough to read that President Buchanan, the only president in history never to marry, was attacked by his opponents for being a bachelor, or that “the Bowery boys” were sailors who would walk around the bars of lower Manhattan with their pinkies linked. But almost everything else is in the eye of the beholder. Same-sex prostitution was obviously known about, but most other examples raise the question: did the ante- or post-bellum audience perceive the homoeroticism of the images and language that Donnelly argues for, or is this just a projection of Queer Theory? Confederate Sympathies is an academic book that may take for granted the reader’s familiarity with what is called “the Archive” of homoerotic imagery in this era—especially the nov els with titles like The Thinking Bayonet that today are of in terest only to scholars. Donnelly’s survey finds the homoerotic in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation , the film that romanti cized the Ku Klux Klan, and novels by Albion Tourgée and William Gilmore Simms. It uses political cartoons by Thomas Nast. And it reproduces the illustration of a scene in a pro-slav ery novel called Frank Freeman’s Barber Shop in which a Black man on his knees is begging a white man to “Buy me! Oh! buy me, Master Leamington!” to make its point. But many others seem to be examples of old-fashioned homophobia as much as they are of the homoerotic. Donnelly’s book also stresses the fact that post-Civil War America saw both the urbanization of the North and the rise of sexology as a discipline. The word “homosexuality” was coined in 1869, and soon thereafter it became associated with big North ern cities whose Bowery boys supposedly threatened the South. There is even a discussion of the way the Civil War was viewed by some literary critics as a stage in the country’s sexual matu ration—that the idyll of same-sex friendship in the agrarian South had to be destroyed so that young men could move be Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, 1865. Photographer: Moses P. Rice.

MARKED BY STR OF QUEER SUICIDE A A MOVING JOURNEY g justice for the .. “Stunnin , ele ant LISA DIEDRICH suicide.”— p g in its documenting of the , “Incredibly movin Patrick Anderson examines t have died by suicide. Author emotional tribute to those w blend of historical analysis an is aunique The Lamentations emotional, and embodied re the ho nd l d b di d i adwh g queerde i h grieve in the wake of lives go light the stories of those left and case studies, and brings newspaper articles, obituarie compiling narratives from history of queer suicide, one to to es, grief and queer survivial in t death; it’s a narrative of quee more than a meditation on is The Lamentations too soon. he er s i https://bit.ly/TheLamentati wake of profound loss.

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i ” ho came b ore through ethica , ef l a meditation about how to do .. LÁZARO LIMA epair.”—

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September–October 2025

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