Waiting for Winter

If we open a letter written by a young woman and read, “Often too he shared my pillow – or I his, and how sweet to sleep with him, to hold his beloved form in my embrace, to have his arms about my neck, to imprint upon his face sweet kisses,” we can reasonably assume that she and the man in question shared a sexual relationship. There is no justifiable grounds for changing that assumption when we learn that the words were actually written by Albert Dodd, a Yale undergraduate in the 1830s, describing his relationship with a fellow student, Anthony Hall. There is no valid reason to assert that passionate language in a letter between a man and a woman implies a sexual attraction, while exactly the same language exchanged between two men is “just the way male friends wrote about one another back then.” Yet this type of willful disbelief in the prevalence of historical homosexuality, and refusal to accept passionate male-male discourse as anything other than a literary convention, is all too common.