Queer Lives: Men's Autobiographies from Nineteenth-Century by William A. Peniston, Nancy Erber

By William A. Peniston, Nancy Erber

Eight homosexual males wrote their autobiographies in French among 1845 and 1905;  a few of them mirrored on their adolescence, early life, and adulthood, others supplied short impressions in their loves and needs. some of them dramatized their lives following modern theatrical and fictional types, whereas others wrote for doctors, who used the men's writings as case reports to demonstrate their theories on sexual deviance. In a few circumstances the doctors’ vast interpretations can't be separated from the men's personal tales, yet in others the authors communicate for themselves.
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The awesome autobiographies in Queer Lives, translated into English for the 1st time the following, supply present-day readers an extraordinary glimpse into differently shrouded existences. They relate the reviews of a guy approximately city, a cross-dressing entertainer, a adolescent, and fetishists, between others. The autobiographies will curiosity a large viewers this present day at a time while readers are seeking for new perspectives at the lives of standard women and men from the previous, whilst homosexual everyone is trying to find the roots in their groups, and whilst students are attempting to appreciate the formation of sexual identities at an important second within the historical past of contemporary Europe.
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When the subject saw her portrait, she was silent and motionless for a long time. Her face, already pensive, grew even sadder; burning tears fell from her eyes, and one could hear her repeating, “No, he’s wrong, just like all the others. I don’t lack a heart. Alas! It’s probably because mine is more sensitive than others that I hide it with so much care. With such a heart, how could I have entered this shameful and infamous profession? How miserable I am! I’ve exchanged all the noble things of nature for the most ignoble and shameful ones.

Later she taught me to sing lovely songs. When I got older, she was grateful to have such a calm, peaceful child. ” “My dear Arthur, you know how much I’d enjoy that, but you, my sweet child, should not spend so much time indoors. You should play too. You’re much too serious. Oh! ” And she’d kiss me, the dear woman, as if I were still a baby. Poor mother! When she was sewing, I’d often read aloud to her from a stack of old novels that were kept locked in an old trunk in the back of a closet. These were the most dangerous books that one could find, but my mother was too ignorant, despite her innate intelligence, to realize the dangers of such readings.

How would it otherwise have been possible for this elegant man, who kept describing his intentions and his desires to me in a manner that would have been almost completely incomprehensible to a truly naive person? How could he have made me understand what he wanted if I hadn’t already been introduced to the pleasures of masturbation? But, I repeat, Charles’s lessons, together with my unfortunate preoccupation regarding those secret benefits, had prepared me to accept everything in order to satisfy a passion that was incessantly stimulated by desire.

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