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In introductory conversations, I always managed to avoid describing the nature of the desire these photographs elicited in me. It was homophobic self-censorship, masked as strategic discretion, that led me even after people responded to my query to describe my project to them in the disinterested manner of a scholarly photo historian. More than twenty individuals wrote me with interest, often enclosing in their correspondence reproductions of early photographs in their possession that they considered representative of what my query referred to as “comradeship.”Īfter the query appeared, my dealings with one delightful man from Missouri eventually helped me to realize the extent to which my dealings with collectors like him had been tainted all along by my own internalized homophobia.
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Soon after the newsletter arrived in the mail in February 1999, an inundation of correspondence from “daguerreians” throughout the United States made it apparent that I’d hit the mother lode. He suggested that I place a query in the Daguerreian Society Newsletter, which I did-taking care, as he advised, to describe my project discretely, which is to say without any allusion to its possibly gay point of view. After giving me the names and addresses of a handful of collectors and dealers he thought might have what I was looking for, he told me about the extensive community of early-photography enthusiasts who had come together as members of an organization known as The Daguerreian Society. At the advice of a friend, I phoned a well known authority on early photographs in general, and on daguerreotypes in particular. I’d been unable to locate a sufficient number of photographs dating back to the earlier years in American photography during the 1840’s and ’50s. At a certain point in the process of conducting such photo research, I reached an impasse.