Love in Dark Settings

Reply to this comment by mightymaeve:

"Well, I have a lot of textbooks in my library about sexuality and practices in Asia (not so timid there in their records!), but I was trying to find info around the period of Oscar Wilde (Ireland/England) and the Impressionist artists (France) in the era covering from the 1850s to 1900s. Secondarily, I was also researching into the early part of the 20th Century (due to research about Antonin Arnaud, who was 1890s to 1940s). Where do you primarily look?"

If it's interwar twentieth-century America, I ask Parhelion. :)

You may have found these already, since they're listed at my Toughs bibliography:

Late Victorian gay erotica. Also try going through the Olympia Press catalogue (which I link to) - they may have added more items since I last visited.

Primary and secondary sources on homosexuality during the turn of the century.

Here's some books on my "to read" list; I can't say how good they are; nor do I know how relevant the American ones are to your research.

David Leavitt: "Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914."

William Benemann: "Male-Male Intimacy in Early America."

Chris Packard: "Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature."

Graham Robb: "Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century."

Matt Houlbrook: "Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957" (The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society).

Morris B. Kaplan: "Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times."

The indispensable Rictor Norton: "My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries."

Frederick Roden: "Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture."

Richard Dellamora: "Masculine Desire: the Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism."

Sarah Cole: "Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War."

I'd also recommend that you go through the gay history section of dmoz.org with a toothcomb. I list a few at Leather Fonds, but there are many more out there. (See especially the related links section.) An amazing amount of valuable information is tucked away in gay history Websites, but you have to dig, because the sites are usually created by academic archivists who don't actually want visitors to find anything on their sites (at least, that's what I think in my cynical moments). And French gay history archives - I assume that some exist? - are likely to be your best bet for compiling a list of French sources.

Don't overlook image Websites either. The Homoerotic Art Museum is the best source for paintings - and it's international in scope - but there are also likely to be sites out there that have early twentieth century gay pornography. I've never tracked them down myself. And if you're studying the early twentieth century, film images of gays have been a much-studied topic - you're bound to find lots of information about that online.