The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene HalleckHailed in the mid-nineteenth century as the most important American poet of the period, Fitz-Greene Halleck was a close friend of William C. Bryant, an associate of Charles Dickens and Washington Irving, and a celebrity sought out by John Jacob Astor and American presidents. Halleck, an attractive man of wit and charm, was dubbed "the American Byron" because he both employed similar poetic strategies and challenged the most sacred institutions of his day. A large general readership enjoyed his verse, though it was infused with homosexual themes. Indeed, Halleck's love for another man would be fictionalized in Bayard Taylor's novel Joseph and His Friend a century before the Stonewall riots. |
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... Homosexual argues that " the American experience is largely irrelevant " in examining the birth of homosexual culture , providing an essentialist counterattack to construc- tionist essays like Jonathan Katz's " The Early - Nineteenth ...
... homosexual " insanity " and suicide escalated in the nineteenth century as social and medical sci- ences reexamined sodomy as a dysfunction of the self . Psychomedical theories on homosexuality are as ancient as the Greek Hippocratic ...
... homosexual history of the term " Calamites " ( e.g. , Ganymede ) .35 Whitman scholars used " calamus " rather than " homosexual " to describe Whitman's erotic poetry through the last quarter of the twentieth century . Bradley and ...