Love in Dark Settings

Hurrah, I think I've replied to all the comments at my blogs from this year and last year. (But, um, not from 2007 yet. *Cough.*) If I missed you, just nudge me.

Reply to this comment by mightymaeve:

"I was trying to research HOW gay sex pratically happened in the 1800s"

(*The writer about gay history flexes his/her fingers.*)

You're in luck, because the 1800s are a period that's been well covered by historians. But a lot depends on what part of the 1800s you're talking about. Beliefs about homosexuality in the early 1800s were very different from beliefs about homosexuality in the late 1800s. Likewise, locale matters.

My impression from late-nineteenth-century English erotica is that the actual physical acts weren't much different then from now (the big exception being fisting; as far as I know, nobody has found evidence of the existence of fisting before the 1960s). The attitudes and terminology, though, were considerably different. So the best thing to do is to find what sources the historians are using and, if possible, go back to the sources - otherwise, you'll get nineteenth-century homosexuality as filtered through the eyes of a modern historian who, in all likelihood, is trying to use the sources to prove his own agenda. (Gay history is an area of scholarship that is highly politicized.) Also, the sources are more likely to talk about the physical aspects of the interactions than the scholars are, and the sources will tell you what the original terminology was.

If you let me know which period and locale you're studying, I might be able to throw some specific references at you. (This is assuming you're still studying this.)

"I know it was more thought of as something one did, not something one was (actions verses orientation)."

Confining myself here to Anglo-American homosexuality: By the time you get to the nineteenth century, things are getting a bit complex. You have the hold-over of the old idea that homosexuality is an act, not an identity, but you also have the idea, which started to become popular during the eighteenth century, that certain people are inherently homosexual. There are traces of this notion all the way back to Roman times (at least), but it was always the minority view. By the time you get to the end of the nineteenth century, this "homosexuality as orientation" view is beginning to gain ground over the "homosexuality as act" view - but the "homosexuality as act" view continued to flourish well into the twentieth century and is still popular in certain circles. Such as slash authors, for example. :) So again, it depends on the exact circumstances that your characters are in.

"It seems that it is hard to find practicality documents about practices for anything before the days of Kinsey!"

Alas, yes, because scholars who are fighting for tenure tend to be shy about sharing the juicy bits they find in archives. Also, those types of documents had a hard time finding any sort of permanent form in the nineteenth century, thanks to censorship. But there's enough to allow one to do a tentative reconstruction, at least in my time period (turn of the century).

"And this, 'I'm in service to my art,' I like that concept. Was their a friends post about that somewhere?"

Here's what I wrote in an earlier entry:

"I especially appreciated the passage about mr_h [an M/s slave whom I was quoting] serving his art. There's no question that serving his art (and all his other duties in life) is easier for my apprentice when he can regard it as a form of service to me. I have no problems with that; at times, I've driven myself as a writer by thoughts of what I owe my readers or what I owe to my cash-strapped partner. But if my apprentice regarded his work only as being of value insofar as it benefitted me, I'd be deeply disturbed. For me, one of the most valuable aspects of our type of relationship - though of course it's not the right type of relationship for everyone - is that the primary focus is on something higher than both my apprentice and me. We recognize that his art needs to be served, that his leather club needs to be served (through his leadership, as it happens; he's secretary of his club), and that his life needs to be shaped into something that is an art form, in and of itself. My job is as much one of service to those higher goals as his is. That keeps me humble, and helps me never to forget my relatively low status on the complete ladder of life."