Understanding Male Friendship in Nineteenth-Century America

This paper grapples with how to understand male friendship in late nineteenth century America—primarily among the middle and upper classes. In researching male couples or friends in Boston and New York a number of puzzles emerge: were these relationships understood as something akin to marriage between a man and women? Or was the understanding something closer to a chaste but often intense female romantic friendship? Were they understood purely in sexual terms, as a coupling where the active (or conventionally masculine) partner dominated another feminized man? Were these relationships structured around age, power, gender roles, or two equals? Finally, how were these relationships commonly perceived by those observing them from the outside? In searching to answer these questions I intend to stay close to the sources left behind by such Americans as Ogden Codman, Arthur Little, Clyde Fitch, Howard Sturgis, Daniel Berkeley Updike, and many others. While appreciating the work of other scholars, I examine closely letters, writings, and these figures' understanding or readings of published materials—such as novels, newspapers, and medical texts. Through the words of the men themselves it will emerge that they 1) understood these relationships as patently sexual, 2) gender behavior distinctions that George Chauncey has tracked among the working classes did not always translate into the middle and upper class context. Rather, a plethora of models seemed to have coexisted. Finally, 3) the majority of affluent American men found much more acceptance as tourists in Europe—in most cases, Great Britain—for their lives centered on a male partner than they ever could back in the United States. Indeed, typical of the American upper classes these men with same sex attractions looked to Europe for models with which to organize their lives.