Michael Field, John Gray, and Marc-Andre Raffalovich: Reinventing Romantic Friendship in Modernity

Abstract

It has become a commonplace in doing the history of sexuality, particularly the history of homosexuality, to speak of “romantic friendship” as something out of the past, a phenomenon we associate with a more innocent age when same-sex passion was possible under the guise of “friendship.” A good deal of scholarship has idealized that golden time before the fall: prior to the classifications that forced a pathology upon human desire. Heteronormativity then purged the now-dissident longings from appropriate same-sex connections, making them the healthy foil to the deviance of sexual inversion. In writing this history, there is always the problem of agency. Are we to assume (or not?) that the men and women who enjoyed each other’s love in friendship were consciously aware in any way of how their bonds differed from “normal” relationships? Do we generalize that such “romantic friendship” was the rule rather than the exception? Does the phrase serve as a marker, a code word, or a substitute for how we really want to call the relation-ship homosexual, but Foucault says we can’t?