RARE Autograph Letters (2)

Theodore Frelinghuysen Dwight

Early Openly Gay Man

Personal Assistant to Henry Adams, Librarian, Archivist, Diplomat

Letters regard his Mother's Funeral

1897

For offer, an original manuscript letter archive. Fresh from an estate in Upstate NY. Never offered on the market until now. Vintage, Old, antique, Original - NOT a Reproduction - Guaranteed !! These two letters were found among the recently discovered archive of the Tallman Funeral home, in Auburn, NY. They have not seen the light of day on over a century. S.C. Tallman was a prominent figure who presided over the funeral of Harriet Tubman and many other known figures. He was an early automobilist, among many other things. These two letters from Theodore Dwight regard his mother's funeral in Auburn. Mr. Dwight was born in Auburn. The first letter is written from the Osborn House in Auburn, with detailed instructions for the funeral procession. The second letter is written from Dwight's home, Stone House, Kendal Green in Boston, Massachusetts and is in regard to payment for the funeral. 3 pages of writing, two signatures, each on 4 pg. blue stationary. The writing and letterhead match examples I found at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Musuem. His letters also reside in other institutions. Quite rare. Please see below for biographical information. In very good condition. Please see photos for details. If you collect Americana history, American 19th century literature, gay, etc., this is one you will not see again. A nice piece for your paper / ephemera collection. Perhaps some genealogy research information as well. Combine shipping on multiple bid wins! 3080

Theodore Frelinghuysen Dwight (June 11, 1846 – February 3, 1917) was an American librarian, archivist, and diplomat who was a member of Boston's elite homosexual subculture in the late 19th century. His place in American literary history was secured when he served for almost a decade as Henry Adams's literary assistant and family archivist.

Early life

Theodore Frelinghuysen Dwight was born in Auburn, New York, the son of Almon Dwight (1814–1902) and Cyria Charge White (1817–1897).

His father professed the Millerite Doctrine, the belief that the second coming of Christ would occur around 1843 or 1844 and, acting on that belief, lived in Jerusalem for four years before Theodore's birth, between 1837 and 1841, where he ran an industrial school.[1]

From 1865 until 1869, Theodore Dwight attended Rochester Collegiate Institute and paid his way through school by working in a wholesale saddlery and hardware store.

Career

The major portion of Dwight's career was as a librarian and archivist. Later in life, he served as an American diplomat. He occasionally worked as a bookkeeper, editor, and proofreader.

Early literary work

Around 1869, Dwight moved from Rochester to San Francisco, where he lived at 256 Bush Street and worked as a bookkeeper for the Pacific Union Express Company. Shortly after arriving in San Francisco, Dwight became a member of the local literary scene that included such established writers as Bret Harte, Ina Coolbrith, and Charles Warren Stoddard.[2] Dwight began writing for Harte's magazine Overland Monthly, primarily about books and autograph collecting.[3][4] His writing occasionally drew notice in East Coast publications.[5] His place in the local arts and letters scene was recognized when in January 1872 he was elected a trustee of the San Francisco Mercantile Library Association.[6]

In the early fall of 1873, Dwight moved to New York City to take a position in the publishing house of G.P. Putnam’s Sons.[7]

State Department librarian

In 1875, Dwight left Putnam’s and moved to Washington, D.C., where he served briefly as a literary assistant to the American historian George Bancroft.

While working for Bancroft, Dwight became known to the State Department Library senior staff, who eventually offered him the position of Chief of the Bureau of Rolls and Library.[8] The Bureau was the repository of manuscripts related to the foreign relations of the United States, beginning with the Continental Congress in 1774.[9] Dwight held the position from 1875 until 1888.

While there, Dwight assembled what was at the time called "the best international law library outside of the British Museum.”[10]

In 1881, Secretary of State James G. Blaine instructed Dwight to assist the U.S. Government in acquiring a collection of Benjamin Franklin's papers. The papers were on the market in London, England, and Dwight, who was then traveling in Europe, went to London to examine the papers and assess their relevance to American history. He reported to the Senate that the papers "are the veritable records of our history, and are as worthy of a place among the national archives as those of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton."[11]

Adams family archivist

In 1888, Dwight left Washington to take charge of organizing and indexing the Adams family political papers, including those of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, housed in that historic American family’s so-called “Stone Library” (a reference to its construction in stone) on the Adams estate in Quincy, Massachusetts, a position he held for the next four years.[12] His duties for the Adams family included organizing and indexing the presidential and family papers as well as serving as a proofreader for Henry Adams and his brother Charles Francis Adams Jr.

Boston Public Library

In March 1892, Dwight was chosen to head the Boston Public Library, at a critical point in the Library's history. A new building on Boston’s Copley Square was under construction and Dwight's selection was eagerly anticipated by Boston society.[13] He began his job on April 13, 1892, but his tenure was from the outset characterized by personal and professional turmoil. Henry Adams was aware of the crisis that faced both Dwight and the Library, writing to a family friend: "Rumors reach me about Dwight, and grow more emphatic, but I am in deadly terror of him, and want to escape being drawn into the inevitable collapse of his ambitions. I never had so much difficulty in keeping out of a quarrel as in this case."[14] He left Boston within a year and spent the summer of 1893 in Rome, Italy, where he represented Isabella Stewart Gardner on acquiring a number of items from the famous 1892 Borghese Collection sale handled by the Italian dealer Vincenzo Menozzi.

On December 19, 1893, Dwight gave four-months' notice that he would leave the Library on April 30, 1894, but Library trustees immediately granted him a leave of absence for the remainder of his term, stating publicly that his departure was due to "poor health and inability to stand the cares and responsibilities of the office."[15] Rumors in Boston suggested that his resignation was not voluntary. The Boston Globe opined:

How any young man with such a brilliant future before him as librarian of an institution like the new Boston public library could voluntarily throw so glittering a prospect aside is what passes the comprehension of the layman, who can appreciate the social and literary standing which the librarianship must necessarily give any man. There is thought to be a possibility that Mr. Dwight's withdrawal was not voluntary. Mr. Dwight says it was, and further asserts he never has had any talk with any of the trustees relative to retiring.[16]

Dwight may also have been moonlighting elsewhere in a way that interfered with his duties at the Library. In 1895, within months of his departure from the Boston Public Library, Dwight published two hefty volumes of Civil War History for the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, of which he was a member: Campaigns in Virginia 1861-1862, The Virginia Campaign of 1862 Under General Pope and Critical Sketches of Some of the Federal and Confederate Commanders.[17]

With his reputation as a librarian ruined in Boston, Dwight wrote to his friend Isabella Stewart Gardner on August 27, 1894, that he had no prospects there, but might move to Chicago and seek work there. "My efforts to be patient & cheerful usually end in failure," he wrote to Gardner, a reference to the emotional problems that Adams and others had noted off and on for years.[18]

U.S. Consul at Vevey

In 1904, Dwight's friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a member of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked Secretary of State John Hay to appoint Dwight as U.S. Consul at Geneva. Dwight, by now living in England, accepted the position but tried unsuccessfully to impose conditions on the terms of the appointment. The State Department withdrew the nomination.

Some months later, Lodge again asked Hay to appoint Dwight as Consul, this time at the much smaller American Consulate at Vevey, Switzerland. Hay agreed, and by 1905, Dwight had taken over the post in Vevey.[19]

Personal life

Club memberships

Dwight was a member of several prominent men's clubs and historical organizations, including the Cosmos Club,[20] the American Antiquarian Society,[21] the Massachusetts Historical Society,[22] the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, the Tavern Club, and the St. Botolph Club. In 1884, he was made an honorary member of the Harvard College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa Alpha.[23]

Friendship with Henry Adams

Sometime around October 1881, Dwight, then librarian of the State Department, became acquainted with American historian Henry Adams, who was researching his landmark publication, The History of the United States of America (1801 to 1817).[24] Adams worked with thousands of pages of original documents housed in the State Department archives and came to rely on Dwight, who was meticulous, hard working, and knew the State Department collection inside and out.

Sometime around 1885, Dwight began moonlighting as a personal and literary assistant to Henry Adams.[25] Though the exact nature of his duties are unclear, they almost certainly included proofreading and editorial work on Adams’s History of the United States.

During the summer of 1885, Dwight lived in Adams's house at 1607 H Street, facing Lafayette Square. Dwight managed the house and its staff while Adams and his wife were on vacation in Virginia. Adams viewed Dwight as a friend rather than caretaker; for example, Adams encouraged him to make use of his wine cellar during the couple's absence.[26] After Adams's wife died in December 1885, Dwight moved in with Adams to help him run the household and, as Dwight described in a letter to a friend, to "support his bereavement."[27] He continued his work at the State Department while living in Adams's home for the next three years.

In March 1888, Adams and Dwight traveled together to Cuba by way of Florida, where they visited friends of Adams before sailing to Cuba for a visit of two weeks. In a letter to a friend, Adams called Dwight his "companion". In Havana, the two men attended a bull fight, a carnavale mascarade, and the opera, but ultimately found the city to be too noisy and, in Adam's opinion, a "gay ruin".[28]

Shortly after their return from Cuba, Dwight resigned from his position at the State Department Library and within a few months began working for the Adams family as their archivist in the "Stone Library" located on the Adams homestead in Quincy, Massachusetts. The Stone Library is now part of the Adams National Historical Park and houses the personal and family papers of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams Sr., Henry Adams, and Brooks Adams.

During Dwight's years working in Quincy, Adams became increasingly concerned about Dwight's mental health, as documented in dozens of letters from Adams to friends and family.[29] In 1890, he wrote to Dwight: “I am very anxious to hear that you are feeling right. I cannot believe that the trouble is beyond easy and quick treatment. These clouds vanish as quickly as they come, and some day you will wake up right. Most men and women have had the experience.”[30]

By mid-1891, anticipating both the conclusion of Dwight's duties in Quincy and the possibility that Dwight might be named Librarian of the Boston Public Library, Adams encouraged Dwight to consider leaving the employ of his family and accept the Library job if it were offered to him. The letters of Adams to his friends during these years contain many references to Dwight's mental health and Adams’s worries about him, so that was almost certainly another reason Adams encouraged Dwight to leave:

By all means [Adams writing to Dwight], accept the Librarian-ship if it is offered to you. I do not know how far you have got along with the Quincy [Adams] library; but I suppose by this time that is sufficiently in order; the papers arranged, and the indexes carried far enough to be finished in reasonable time. After these things are once organised, the work of carrying them on requires no great care or labor. A year of attention ought to exhaust the whole thing, as far as it requires your close labor. I take for granted that this is long ago done, and that you have really no more to do at Quincy, and rather need a bigger field and better position. If I were you, I should certainly take it, as I told you long ago, when we first discussed the subject of your leaving the [State] Department.[31]

Early in 1892, Adams and his brother Charles Francis Adams Jr. decided that the work Dwight was doing for them on the Adams family political papers would not continue past the summer.[32]

Adams would remain friendly with Dwight and his wife Sally until their deaths. He visited the Dwights in Switzerland in 1902.

Homosexuality

After moving to Boston to serve the Adams family, Dwight took up residence in a gentleman's rooming house at 10 Charles Street where his lover, the writer and dramatist Thomas Russell Sullivan, also lived. The two men were not reticent about their relationship. They entertained together, were members of the same clubs, and went out in society as a male couple. They socialized together, for example, over private dinners with Isabella Stewart Gardner and her husband John Lowell Gardner at Boston’s Somerset Club.[33][34]

Dwight corresponded quite openly with Isabella Stewart Gardner about his impulses and affairs, writing in one letter to her:

You would be amused could you know how in my secret thoughts of late I have been chiefly engaged in trying to penetrate my own disguise to find the real Dwight, for it is really ridiculous that I should all unconsciously have played a part so well as to deceive so many intelligent and respectable people. I dare not think of the time when they will discover their mistake.[35]

In 1892, while Dwight was traveling to meet Gardner in Europe, Sullivan wrote to her about the sadness he felt during Dwight’s absence:

I mourn for T.F.D. who has departed this house and sails for your shores in two days... Sturgis Bigelow, M.D., has come in with hypnotic influence and carries me off to dine with him to-night with the resident literati and tutti Frutti... Don’t keep our librarian away too long.[36]

Dwight and Sullivan were also frequently guests at W. Sturgis Bigelow's male-only nudist colony on remote Tuckernuck Island, though membership was not strictly limited to homosexuals.[37]

In 1892, Dwight bought 121 male nude photographs by Guglielmo Plüschow and Wilhelm von Gloeden in Munich and bought more in London later that summer. In a letter to his friend Charles Warren Stoddard, Dwight bragged that he had gotten the photographs through U.S. Customs without being detected, thus preventing "confiscation and imprisonment". "When you see my spoils you will comprehend my dangers", he wrote to Stoddard.[38]

In January 1896, while on his honeymoon, he visited von Plüschow’s studio in Rome. He was such a good customer that von Plüschow permitted Dwight to use the studio to take his own photographs of the models Dwight most appreciated:

Pluschow himself was not visible but I was given all the opportunities to see his collection, without, apparently, any expectation of [a] sale, by his German assistant. ... While we were talking who should come in but a very handsome, black haired & mustachioed Italian, quite stout built, broad shouldered, perhaps 24 years old, who seemed anxious to be noticed & very much in command of the place; & presently I learned that he was Vincenzo Goldi (sic) the subject of so many of our pictures. He posed for those in sitting posture on the wall, with a fillet round his head & with Edoard, the more beautiful youth, in an infinite number of others. I told him that I knew him from the soles of his feet to the top of his head & he immediately became most talkative, showing me all his favorite attitudes. We established such friendly relations that I have now the privilege of making photos myself in the Pluschow studio & of his models.[39]

In another letter to her, Dwight described the breakup of an unidentified love affair, writing "...the period has come to that little romance in which I was so foolish as to indulge. You were right in your prediction. I seem to come out of it somewhat battered perhaps, & somewhat benumbed but quite patient & resigned."[40]

The Boston historian Douglass Shand-Tucci concluded that Dwight's homosexuality was one of the reasons for his hasty departure from the Boston Public Library.[41]

Marriage to Sally Loring

In November 1895, at the age of 49, Dwight married Sally Pickman Loring (1859–1913), the daughter of Congressman George Bailey Loring of Salem. The marriage followed a very brief courtship and was a surprise to Dwight's circle of friends, given his open homosexuality and the fact that Dwight had no known previous platonic or romantic involvement with women. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's wife Anna Cabot Mills Davis advised Sally not to marry Dwight after the engagement was announced because Dwight's reputation as a homosexual.[42] Dwight's lover Sullivan likened it to a death, writing in his journal: "To-night I dined quietly at Miss Sally Loring's with Dwight. They are to be married very soon, and pass a year in Europe. So, in this whirl of life, Love and Death go hand in hand."[43]

During the early years of their marriage, the couple lived in what was then known as "the Bradbury Estate" at Kendal Green in Weston.[44]

Their son Lawrence Dwight (1896–1918) was born a year later in Boston, on November 6, 1896. Lawrence spent most of his youth in Vevey, Switzerland, where his father was U.S. Consul. He graduated August 30, 1917, from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. He was to have graduated from the Academy a year later in the spring of 1918, but his class finished a year early due to World War I. Lawrence died six months later of pneumonia in Brest, France, without having seen battle. He held the rank of Second Lieutenant at the time of his death and is buried in the Suresnes American Cemetery and Memorial in France.

Death

Dwight died on February 3, 1917, at the age of 70. At the time, he was living at 48 Beacon Street on Boston's Beacon Hill. His health had been failing for several years, though he stayed in touch with friends by phone and letter, especially Isabella Stewart Gardner.[45] Dwight's obituary in The Boston Globe made no mention of his wife or son, even though Sally had been a prominent member of Boston society for many years before her marriage to him.[46]

He is buried alongside his wife in the Harmony Grove Cemetery in Salem, Massachusetts.

Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918) was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. presidents. As a young Harvard graduate, he served as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to the United Kingdom. The posting influenced the younger man through the experience of wartime diplomacy, and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill. After the American Civil War, he became a political journalist who entertained America's foremost intellectuals at his homes in Washington and Boston.

During his lifetime, he was best known for The History of the United States of America 1801–1817, a nine-volume work, praised for its literary style, command of the documentary evidence, and deep (family) knowledge of the period and its major figures. His posthumously published memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to be named by the Modern Library as the best English-language nonfiction book of the 20th century.[1]

Early life

He was born in Boston on February 16, 1838, into one of the country's most prominent families. His parents were Charles Francis Adams Sr. (1807–1886) and Abigail Brooks (1808–1889).[2] Both his paternal grandfather, John Quincy Adams, and great-grandfather, John Adams, one of the most prominent among the Founding Fathers, had been U.S. Presidents. His maternal grandfather, Peter Chardon Brooks, was one of Massachusetts' most successful and wealthiest merchants. Another great-grandfather, Nathaniel Gorham, signed the Constitution.

Harvard graduation photo: 1858

After his graduation from Harvard University in 1858,[3] he embarked on a grand tour of Europe, during which he also attended lectures in civil law at the University of Berlin.

In his 50s, he was initiated into the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity as an honorary member at the 1893 Columbian Exposition by Harris J. Ryan, a judge for the exhibit on electrical engineering. Through that organization, he was a member of the Irving Literary Society.

During the Civil War

Adams returned home from Europe in the midst of the heated presidential election of 1860. He tried his hand again at law, taking employment with Judge Horace Gray's Boston firm, but this was short-lived.[4]

His father, Charles Francis Adams Sr., was also seeking re-election to the US House of Representatives.[4] After his successful re-election, Charles Francis asked Henry to be his private secretary, continuing a father-son pattern set by John and John Quincy and suggesting that Charles Francis had chosen Henry as the political scion of that generation of the family. Henry shouldered the responsibility reluctantly and with much self-doubt. "[I] had little to do", he reflected later, "and knew not how to do it rightly."[5]

During this time, Adams was the anonymous Washington correspondent for Charles Hale's Boston Daily Advertiser.

London (1861–68)

On March 19, 1861, Abraham Lincoln appointed Charles Francis Adams Sr. United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Henry accompanied his father to London as his private secretary. He also became the anonymous London correspondent for The New York Times. The two Adamses were kept very busy, monitoring Confederate diplomatic intrigues and trying to obstruct the construction of Confederate commerce raiders by British shipyards (see Alabama Claims). Henry's writings for the Times argued that Americans should be patient with the British. While in Britain, Adams was befriended by many noted men, including Charles Lyell, Francis T. Palgrave, Richard Monckton Milnes, James Milnes Gaskell, and Charles Milnes Gaskell. He worked to introduce the young Henry James to English society, with the help of his closest and lifelong friend Charles Milnes Gaskell and his wife Lady Catherine (nee Wallop).[6]

While in Britain, Henry read and was taken with the works of John Stuart Mill. For Adams, Mill's Considerations on Representative Government showed the necessity of an enlightened, moral, and intelligent elite to provide leadership to a government elected by the masses and subject to demagoguery, ignorance, and corruption. Henry wrote to his brother Charles that Mill demonstrated to him that "democracy is still capable of rewarding a conscientious servant."[7] His years in London led Adams to conclude that he could best provide that knowledgeable and conscientious leadership by working as a correspondent and journalist.

Return to America

Henry Adams seated at his desk in his rented house at 1607 H Street in Washington, D.C., writing, 1883

In 1868, Adams returned to the United States and settled in Washington, DC, where he began working as a journalist. Adams saw himself as a traditionalist longing for the democratic ideal of the 17th and 18th centuries. Accordingly, he was keen on exposing political corruption in his journalism.

Harvard professor

In 1870, Adams was appointed professor of medieval history at Harvard, a position he held until his early retirement in 1877 at 39.[3] As an academic historian, Adams is considered to have been the first (in 1874–1876) to conduct historical seminar work in the United States. Among his students was Henry Cabot Lodge, who worked closely with Adams as a graduate student.

Adams was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1875.[8]

Author

Adams's The History of the United States of America (1801 to 1817) (9 vols., 1889–1891) is a highly detailed history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations with a focus on diplomacy.[9] Wide praise was given for its literary merit, especially the opening five chapters of volume 1, describing the nation in 1800. These chapters have also been criticized; Noble Cunningham states flatly, "Adams misjudged the state of the nation in 1800." In striving for literary effect, Cunningham argues, Adams ignored the dynamism and sophistication of the new nation.[9] Such arguments aside, historians have long recognized it as a major and permanent monument of American historiography. It has been called "a neglected masterpiece" by Garry Wills,[10] and "a history yet to be replaced" by the great historian C. Vann Woodward.

In the 1880s, Adams wrote two novels, starting with Democracy, which was published anonymously in 1880 and immediately became popular in literary circles in England and Europe as well as in America. (Only after Adams's death did his publisher reveal his authorship.) His other novel, published under the nom de plume of Frances Snow Compton, was Esther, whose heroine was believed to be modeled after his wife.[11]

During the late 1860s and early 1870s, Adams edited, with the assistance of his brother Charles Francis Adams, the major American intellectual-literary journal, The North American Review. During his tenure it published a number of articles exposing corrupt malpractices in finance, corporations and government, anticipating the work of the "muckrakers" by a generation. The brothers collected several of their most important essays in Chapters Of Erie (1871). This experience marked the public commencement of Henry Adams' critical observation of, and radical disenchantment with, the operations and ascendancy of corporations and centralized finance in the economic, social and political life of America. Summarizing the observations of a lifetime, he wrote to his brother Brooks on September 20, 1910 (vol. 6, pp. 369-370, Letters, ed. Levenson et al.): "Our system of protection [of industry and commerce]... is fatal to our principles.... Railways, trusts, banking-system, manufactures, capital and labor, all rest on the principle of monopoly ... The suggestion that these great corporate organisms, which now perform all the vital functions of our social life, should behave themselves decently, gives away our contention that they have no right to exist. Nor am I prepared to admit that more decency can be attained through a legislature made up of similar people exercising similar illegal powers.... From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud.... The conviction of having reached this point where we have no choice but to go on in our own rot, drove me out of all share in public affairs twenty years ago.. Every one who has assumed such a share since then has only muddled and made the matter worse."

In 1884, Adams was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.[12] In 1892, he received the degree LL.D., from Western Reserve University.[3] In 1894, Adams was elected president of the American Historical Association. His address, entitled "The Tendency of History," was delivered in absentia. The essay predicted the development of a scientific approach to history, but was somewhat ambiguous as to what this achievement might mean.

During the 1890s, Adams exercised a profound and fruitful influence over the thought and writings of his younger brother Brooks. Brooks' essay, "The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma," an offshoot of their decades long conversations and correspondence, was published years later.

Adams was an accomplished poet and in later life a friend of young poets—notably George Cabot Lodge and Trumbull Stickney—but published nothing in his lifetime. His important poems "Buddha and Brahma" and "Prayers to the Virgin and the Dynamo" are included (respectively) in the Library of America's Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Anthologies, and a half dozen sonnets, a Troubadour translation, and one lyric are scattered through the letters. It is an open question whether the Massachusetts Historical Society or other archives preserve more.

Henry Adams seated with dog on steps of piazza, c. 1883

In 1904, Adams privately published a copy of his "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres", a pastiche of history, travel, and poetry that celebrated the unity of medieval society, especially as represented in the great cathedrals of France. Originally meant as a diversion for his nieces and "nieces-in-wish", it was publicly released in 1913 at the request of Ralph Adams Cram, an important American architect, and published with support of the American Institute of Architects.

He published The Education of Henry Adams in 1907, in a small private edition for selected friends. Only following Adams's death was The Education made available to the general public, in an edition issued by the Massachusetts Historical Society. It ranked first on the Modern Library's 1998 list of 100 Best Nonfiction Books and was named the best book of the 20th century by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative organization that promotes classical education.[13] It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919.

Some center-right intellectuals view the book critically. Conservative journalist Fred Siegel considered the worldview expressed therein to be rooted in resentment of America's middle class. "Henry Adams," wrote Siegel, "grounded the intellectual's alienation from American life in the resentment that superior men feel when they are insufficiently appreciated in America's common-man culture."[14] Others view Adams's critique of the commercialism, corruption and pecuniolatry of American mercantile culture as central.

Personal life

Relations

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Adams family tree

Siblings

John Quincy Adams II (1833–1894) was a graduate of Harvard (1853), practiced law, and was a Democratic member for several terms of the Massachusetts general court. In 1872, he was nominated for vice president by the Democratic faction that refused to support the nomination of Horace Greeley.

Charles Francis Adams Jr. (1835–1915) fought with the Union in the Civil War, receiving in 1865 the brevet of brigadier general in the regular army. He became an authority on railway management as the author of Railroads, Their Origin and Problems (1878), and as president of the Union Pacific Railroad from 1884 to 1890. He collaborated with Henry on the editing of The North Atlantic Review and other projects.

Brooks Adams (1848–1927) practiced law and became a writer. His books include The Gold Standard (1894), The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), America's Economic Supremacy (1900), The New Empire (1902), The Theory of Social Revolutions (1914), and The Emancipation of Massachusetts (1919). Henry's influence on and involvement with his youngest brother's thought and writing was profound and enduring.

Louisa Catherine Adams Kuhn Her brother describes her death in 1870 from tetanus following a carriage accident in Bagni di Lucca in his Chaos Chapter of The Education of Henry Adams. She is buried in Florence's 'English' Cemetery.

Social life and friendships

Adams was a member of an exclusive circle, a group of friends called the "Five of Hearts" that consisted of Henry, his wife Clover, geologist and mountaineer Clarence King, John Hay (assistant to Lincoln and later Secretary of State), and Hay's wife Clara.

One of Adams's frequent travel companions was the artist John La Farge, with whom he journeyed to Japan and the South Seas.

From 1885 until 1888, Theodore Frelinghuysen Dwight (1846–1917), the State Department's chief librarian, lived with Adams at his home at 1603 H Street in Washington, D.C., where he served as Adams's literary assistant, personal secretary, and household manager. Dwight would go on to serve as archivist of the Adams family archives in Quincy, Massachusetts; director of the Boston Public Library; and U.S. Consul at Vevey, Switzerland.

Marriage to Marian "Clover" Hooper

On June 27, 1872, Adams married Clover Hooper in Beverly, Massachusetts. They spent their honeymoon in Europe, much of it with Charles Milnes Gaskell at Wenlock Abbey, Shropshire.[15] While there, exemplifying the New England civic conscience she and Henry shared, Clover wrote "England is charming for a few families but hopeless for most ... Thank the Lord that the American eagle flaps and screams over us." Upon their return, Adams went back to his position at Harvard, and their home at 91 Marlborough Street, Boston, became a gathering place for a lively circle of intellectuals.[16] In 1877, his wife and he moved to Washington, DC, where their home on Lafayette Square, across from the White House, again became a dazzling and witty center of social life. He worked as a journalist and continued working as a historian.

Adams Memorial modeled 1886–1891, cast 1969 Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Her suicide

On Sunday morning, December 6, 1885, after a late breakfast at their home, 1607 H Street on Lafayette Square, Clover Hooper Adams went to her room. Henry, troubled by a toothache, had planned to see his dentist. While departing his home, he was met by a woman calling to see his wife. Adams went upstairs to her room to ask if she would receive the visitor and found his wife lying on a rug before the fire; an opened vial of potassium cyanide, which Clover had frequently used in processing photographs, lay nearby. Adams carried his wife to a sofa, then ran for a doctor. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Charles E. Hagner pronounced Clover dead.[17]

Much speculation and numerous theories have been given concerning the causes of Clover Adams's suicide. Her death has been attributed to depression over her father's death,[18] as well as a family history of mental depression and suicide[citation needed]. Posthumous speculation has been made more difficult by Henry Adams's destruction of most of Clover's letters and photos following her death.[19] His autobiography maintains a profound silence about his wife after her suicide. Adams's grief was profound and enduring. The event was life-shattering for Adams and profoundly altered the course of his life.

Henry, his brother, Charles Francis Adams, Clover's brother Edward, and her sister Ellen, with her husband Ephraim Gurney, were the attendees at a brief funeral service held on December 9, 1885, at the house on Lafayette Square. Interment services followed at Rock Creek Cemetery, but the actual burial was postponed until December 11, 1885, because of the inclement weather.[20] A few weeks later, Adams ordered a modest headstone as a temporary marker.[21] Later he commissioned a monument for her tomb from his friend, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who created a masterpiece for her memorial.

Relationship with Elizabeth Sherman Cameron

Portrait of Elizabeth Sherman Cameron (1900) by Anders Zorn

Henry Adams first met Elizabeth Cameron in January 1881 at a reception in the drawing room of the house of John and Clara Hay.[22] Elizabeth was considered to be one of the most beautiful and intelligent women in the Washington area. Elizabeth had grown up as Lizzie Sherman, the daughter of Judge Charles Sherman of Ohio, the niece of Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman in Hayes's cabinet, and the niece of General William Tecumseh Sherman. Her family had pressured Lizzie into a loveless marriage with Senator J. Donald Cameron, brokering a prenuptial agreement that provided her with the income from $160,000 worth of securities, a very large amount in 1878, equivalent to about $4 million in 2021.[23] The arranged marriage on May 9, 1878, united the reluctant 20-year-old beauty with a 44-year-old widower with six children. Eliza, his eldest, who had served as her father's hostess, was now displaced by a stepmother the same age. The children never accepted her. The marriage was further strained by the Senator's coarseness and indifference and his fondness for bourbon and the world of political corruption he inhabited, which is reflected in Adams's novel Democracy.

Henry Adams initiated a correspondence with Lizzie on May 19, 1883, when she and her husband departed for Europe. That letter reflected his unhappiness with her departure and his longing for her return.[24] It was the first of hundreds to follow for the next 35 years, recording a passionate yet unconsummated relationship. On December 7, 1884, one year before Clover's suicide, Henry Adams wrote to Lizzie, "I shall dedicate my next poem to you. I shall have you carved over the arch of my stone doorway. I shall publish your volume of extracts with your portrait on the title page. None of these methods can fully express the extent to which I am yours."[25]

Adams's wife, Clover, who had written a weekly letter to her father throughout her marriage except for the brief hiatus during her breakdown along the Nile, never mentioned concerns or suspicions about Henry's relationship with Lizzie. Nothing in the letters of her family or circle of friends indicates her distrust or unhappiness with her husband in this matter. Indeed, after her death, Henry found a letter from Clover to her sister Ellen which had not been posted. The survival of this letter was assured by its contents which read, "If I had one single point of character or goodness, I would stand on that and grow back to life. Henry is more patient and loving than words can express—God might envy him—he bears and hopes and despairs hour after hour—Henry is beyond all words tenderer and better than all of you even."[26]

On Christmas Day 1885, Adams sent one of Clover's favorite pieces of jewelry to Cameron, requesting that she "sometimes wear it, to remind you of her."[27]

Later life

Just before the end of 1885, Adams moved into his newly-completed mansion next door at 1603 H Street, which was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, an old friend of Adams and one of the most prominent architects of his day.[27] (The house was razed in 1927 and the Hay-Adams Hotel was built on the site.)[28]

Following his wife's death, Adams took up a restless life as a globetrotter, traveling extensively, spending summers in Paris and winters in Washington, D.C., where he commissioned the Adams Memorial designed by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and architect Stanford White for her grave site in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C..

Death and burial

In 1912, Adams suffered a stroke, perhaps brought on by news of the sinking of the Titanic, for which he had purchased tickets to return to the U.S. from Europe. After the stroke, his scholarly output diminished, but he continued to travel, write letters, and host dignitaries and friends at his Washington, D.C., home.

In the first volume of her autobiography, Eleanor Roosevelt offers this vignette of Adams in old age:

"Occasionally we received one of the much-coveted invitations to lunch or dine at his house... My first picture of this supposedly stern, rather biting Mr. Adams is of an old gentleman in a victoria outside of our house on N Street. [His secretary] Aileen Tone and I were having tea inside, but Mr. Adams never paid calls. He did, however, request that the children of the house come out and join him in the victoria; ... and they brought their Scottie dog and sat and chatted and played all over the vehicle. No one was ever able thereafter to persuade me that Mr. Adams was quite the cynic he was supposed to be. One day after lunch with him, my husband [the future President] mentioned something which at the time was causing him deep concern in the Government, and Mr. Adams looked at him rather fiercely and said: 'Young man, I have lived in this house many years and seen the occupants of that White House across the square come and go, and nothing that you minor officials or the occupant of that house can do will affect the history of the world for long!' ... Henry Adams loved to shock his hearers, and I think he knew that those who were worth their salt would understand him and pick out of the knowledge which flowed from his lips the things which might be useful, and discard the cynicism as an old man's defense against his own urge to be [still] an active factor in the work of the world."

On March 27, 1918, Adams died in Washington, D.C., at age 80. He was interred beside his wife in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.[29]

Views

Anglo-Saxonism

Considered a prominent Anglo-Saxonist of particularly the nineteenth-century, Adams has been portrayed by modern historians as anxious about the immigration of the era into the United States, particularly from Eastern Europe.[30] More starkly put, Adams also wrote of his belief that "the dark races are gaining on us".[31] He considered the U.S. Constitution itself as belonging to the Anglo-Saxon "race", and as an expression of "Germanic freedom".[32] He went so far as to criticize fellow scholars for not being absolute enough in their Anglo-Saxonism, such as William Stubbs, whom he criticized for downplaying the significance, as he saw it, of "Germanic law" or hundred law in its contribution to English common law.[33]

Adams was nevertheless highly critical of the English. He referred to them as a "besotted race" from whom nothing good could come and "wanted nothing so much as to wipe England off the earth."[34]

Antisemitism

Adams's attitude towards Jews has been described as one of loathing. John Hay said that when Adams "saw Vesuvius reddening ... [he] searched for a Jew stoking the fire."[35]

Adams wrote: "I detest [the Jews], and everything connected with them, and I live only and solely with the hope of seeing their demise, with all their accursed Judaism. I want to see all the lenders at interest taken out and executed."[36] To one friend, he wrote: "Bombard New York. I know no place that would be more improved by it. The chief population is Jew, and the rest is German Jew."[37]

His letters were "peppered with a variety of antisemitic remarks", according to historian Robert Michael, as in the following citations from historian Edward Saveth:

"We are in the hands of the Jews", Adams lamented. "They can do what they please with our values." He advised against investment except in the form of gold locked in a safe deposit box. "There you have no risk but the burglar. In any other form you have the burglar, the Jew, the Czar, the socialist, and, above all, the total irremediable, radical rottenness of our whole social, industrial, financial and political system."[38]

Edward Chalfant's definitive three-volume biography of Adams includes an exhaustive, well-documented examination of Adams's "antisemitism" in its second volume, Improvement of the World.[39] He shows that most of the time when Adams says "Jews" he means "financiers." This accords with the historical English usage referenced by the second definition under the Oxford English Dictionary entry, a usage that was common in Adams's time and social milieu. It also accords with Adams's frequent laments that "the eighteenth-century fabric of a priori, or moral, principles" had been replaced with "a bankers' world" and that the "banking mind was obnoxious".[40]

Adams esteemed individual Jewish personages. In the "Dilettantism" chapter of The Education of Henry Adams he wrote of historian Francis Palgrave that "the reason of his superiority lay in his name, which was Cohen, and his mind which was Cohen also". (Palgrave, the son of a Jewish stockbroker, had changed his name from Cohen upon marriage.) In the "Political Morality" chapter of the same volume he praises the Jewish statesman Benjamin Disraeli over the Gentiles Palmerston, Russell and Gladstone, writing: "Complex these gentlemen were not. Disraeli alone might, by contrast, be called complex."[41]

Historical entropy

Main article: Entropy and life

In 1910, Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a "theory of history" based on the second law of thermodynamics and the principle of entropy.[42][43] This, essentially, states that all energy dissipates, order becomes disorder, and the earth will eventually become uninhabitable. In short, he applied the physics of dynamical systems of Rudolf Clausius, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William Thomson to the modeling of human history.

In his 1909 manuscript The Rule of Phase Applied to History, Adams attempted to use Maxwell's demon as a historical metaphor, though he seems to have misunderstood and misapplied the principle.[44] Adams interpreted history as a process moving towards "equilibrium", but he saw militaristic nations (he felt Germany pre-eminent in this class) as tending to reverse this process, a "Maxwell's Demon of history."

Adams made many attempts to respond to the criticism of his formulation from his scientific colleagues, but the work remained incomplete at Adams's death in 1918. It was published posthumously.[45]

Robert E. Lee

Adams said, "I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world."[46]

The Virgin Mary

In Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, Adams argues that the previous nineteen hundred years of civilization dating from the birth of Christ had been dominated by the feminine, fertile image of the Blessed Virgin, and that the industrial "dynamo" was a masculine, destructive force which would upend history.[47]

Writings by Adams

1876. Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law (with Henry Cabot Lodge, Ernest Young and J.L. Laughlin)

1879. Life of Albert Gallatin

1879. The Writings of Albert Gallatin (as editor, three volumes)

1880. Democracy: An American Novel

1882. John Randolph

1884. Esther: A Novel (facsimile ed., 1938, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, ISBN 978-0-8201-1187-2)

1889–1891. History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (nine volumes)

1891. Historical Essays

1893. Tahiti: Memoirs of Arii Taimai e Marama of Eimee ... Last Queen of Tahiti (facsimile of the 1901 Paris ed., 1947 Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, ISBN 978-0-8201-1213-8)

1904. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres

1911. The Life of George Cabot Lodge (facsimile ed. 1978, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, ISBN 978-0-8201-1316-6)

1918. The Education of Henry Adams

1919. The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma

1930–1938. Letters (Edited by W.C. Ford, two volumes)

1982. The Letters of Henry Adams, Volumes 1–3: 1858–1892 (Edited by J.C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels and Charles Vandersee)

1988. The Letters of Henry Adams, Volumes 4–6: 1892–1918 (Edited by J.C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels and Charles Vandersee)

Selah Cornwell Tallman, Undertaker,

Son of John K. and Mary Cornwell Tallman, was born at Scipio, Cayuga County, New York, December 20, 1855. Educated in the public schools of Auburn and Auburn High School, he also studied shorthand and type writing and in 1878 went with C. Aultman & Co., manufacturers of agricultural machinery, Canton, Ohio, where he was employed for about a year and a half, when he went to Syracuse as private secretary to William A. Sweet, and from there to Auburn, with Sheldon & Co., axle manufacturers, where he remained for two years. He was them appointed official stenographer of the County and Surrogate's Courts, and for fourteen years served in that capacity, and as extra reporter in the United States and Supreme Court of New York State. He also sold the Remington and Smith-Premier typewriters, and carried on an extensive portrait-copying establishment, in partnership with W. I. Bennett, under the name S. C. Tallman & Co. At the death of his father, J. K. Tallman, in May, 1893, took up the undertaking department of his extensive livery, coach, and undertaking business, in partnership with his brother, under the firm name of H. A. & S. C. Tallman. At the death of his brother, Humphrey A. Tallman, in April, 1898, purchased his interest in the business. He is now conducting this business, under his own name, at 17, 19, 21, 23, and 25 Dill Street, as well as at 20 Water Street, employing from twenty to twenty-five men and over forty horses. He was married in 1878 to Tillie C. Bradford, of Cincinnati, Ohio, and has two sons students in Cornell University, J. Bradford Tallman and Carol Cornwell Tallman. He is a Director of the Business Men's Association, member of the Royal Arcanum, Historical Society, City Club, Syracuse Automobile Club, and honorary member of the Syracuse Undertaker's Association, also member of the New York State Undertaker's Association,. He is an officer of the Auburn Automobile Club.

Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'.[1]

While scant usage referring to male homosexuality dates to the late 19th century, that meaning became increasingly common by the mid-20th century.[2] In modern English, gay has come to be used as an adjective, and as a noun, referring to the community, practices and cultures associated with homosexuality. In the 1960s, gay became the word favored by homosexual men to describe their sexual orientation.[3] By the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century, the word gay was recommended by major LGBT groups and style guides to describe people attracted to members of the same sex,[4][5] although it is more commonly used to refer specifically to men.[6]

At about the same time, a new, pejorative use became prevalent in some parts of the world. Among younger speakers, the word has a meaning ranging from derision (e.g., equivalent to 'rubbish' or 'stupid') to a light-hearted mockery or ridicule (e.g., equivalent to 'weak', 'unmanly', or 'lame'). The extent to which these usages still retain connotations of homosexuality has been debated and harshly criticized.[7][8][needs update]

History

Overview

Cartoon from Punch magazine in 1857 illustrating the use of "gay" as a colloquial euphemism for being a prostitute.[9] One woman says to the other (who looks glum), "How long have you been gay?" The poster on the wall is for La Traviata, an opera about a courtesan.

The word gay arrived in English during the 12th century from Old French gai, most likely deriving ultimately from a Germanic source.[2]

In English, the word's primary meaning was "joyful", "carefree", "bright and showy", and the word was very commonly used with this meaning in speech and literature. For example, the optimistic 1890s are still often referred to as the Gay Nineties. The title of the 1938 French ballet Gaîté Parisienne ("Parisian Gaiety"), which became the 1941 Warner Brothers movie, The Gay Parisian,[10] also illustrates this connotation. It was apparently not until the 20th century that the word began to be used to mean specifically "homosexual", although it had earlier acquired sexual connotations.[2]

The derived abstract noun gaiety remains largely free of sexual connotations and has, in the past, been used in the names of places of entertainment, such as the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin.

Sexualization

Usage statistics from English books, according to Google Ngram Viewer.

The word may have started to acquire associations of immorality as early as the 14th century, but had certainly acquired them by the 17th.[2] By the late 17th century, it had acquired the specific meaning of "addicted to pleasures and dissipations",[11] an extension of its primary meaning of "carefree" implying "uninhibited by moral constraints". A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer, and a gay house a brothel.[12][2] An example is a letter read to a London court in 1885 during the prosecution of brothel madam and procuress Mary Jeffries that had been written by a girl while enslaved inside of a French brothel:

"I write to tell you it is a gay house...Some captains came in the other night, and the mistress wanted us to sleep with them."[13]

The use of gay to mean "homosexual" was often an extension of its application to prostitution: a gay boy was a young man or boy serving male clients.[14]

Similarly, a gay cat was a young male apprenticed to an older hobo and commonly exchanging sex and other services for protection and tutelage.[2] The application to homosexuality was also an extension of the word's sexualized connotation of "carefree and uninhibited", which implied a willingness to disregard conventional or respectable sexual mores. Such usage, documented as early as the 1920s, was likely present before the 20th century,[2] although it was initially more commonly used to imply heterosexually unconstrained lifestyles, as in the once-common phrase "gay Lothario",[15] or in the title of the book and film The Gay Falcon (1941), which concerns a womanizing detective whose first name is "Gay". Similarly, Fred Gilbert and G. H. MacDermott's music hall song of the 1880s, "Charlie Dilke Upset the Milk" – "Master Dilke upset the milk, when taking it home to Chelsea; the papers say that Charlie's gay, rather a wilful wag!" – referred to Sir Charles Dilke's alleged heterosexual impropriety.[16] Giving testimony in court in 1889, the prostitute John Saul stated: "I occasionally do odd-jobs for different gay people."[17]

Well into the mid 20th century a middle-aged bachelor could be described as "gay", indicating that he was unattached and therefore free, without any implication of homosexuality. This usage could apply to women too. The British comic strip Jane, first published in the 1930s, described the adventures of Jane Gay. Far from implying homosexuality, it referred to her free-wheeling lifestyle with plenty of boyfriends (while also punning on Lady Jane Grey).

A passage from Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr & Miss Skeene (1922) is possibly the first traceable published use of the word to refer to a homosexual relationship. According to Linda Wagner-Martin (Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and her Family, 1995) the portrait "featured the sly repetition of the word gay, used with sexual intent for one of the first times in linguistic history," and Edmund Wilson (1951, quoted by James Mellow in Charmed Circle, 1974) agreed.[18] For example:

They were ... gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, ... they were quite regularly gay.

— Gertrude Stein, 1922

The word continued to be used with the dominant meaning of "carefree", as evidenced by the title of The Gay Divorcee (1934), a musical film about a heterosexual couple.

Bringing Up Baby (1938) was the first film to use the word gay in an apparent reference to homosexuality. In a scene in which Cary Grant's character's clothes have been sent to the cleaners, he is forced to wear a woman's feather-trimmed robe. When another character asks about his robe, he responds, "Because I just went gay all of a sudden!" Since this was a mainstream film at a time, when the use of the word to refer to cross-dressing (and, by extension, homosexuality) would still be unfamiliar to most film-goers, the line can also be interpreted to mean, "I just decided to do something frivolous."[19]

In 1950, the earliest reference found to date for the word gay as a self-described name for homosexuals came from Alfred A. Gross, executive secretary for the George W. Henry Foundation, who said in the June 1950 issue of SIR magazine: "I have yet to meet a happy homosexual. They have a way of describing themselves as gay but the term is a misnomer. Those who are habitues of the bars frequented by others of the kind, are about the saddest people I’ve ever seen."[20]

Shift to specifically homosexual

By the mid-20th century, gay was well established in reference to hedonistic and uninhibited lifestyles[11] and its antonym straight, which had long had connotations of seriousness, respectability, and conventionality, had now acquired specific connotations of heterosexuality.[21] In the case of gay, other connotations of frivolousness and showiness in dress ("gay apparel") led to association with camp and effeminacy. This association no doubt helped the gradual narrowing in scope of the term towards its current dominant meaning, which was at first confined to subcultures. Gay was the preferred term since other terms, such as queer, were felt to be derogatory.[22] Homosexual is perceived as excessively clinical,[23][24][25] since the sexual orientation now commonly referred to as "homosexuality" was at that time a mental illness diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

In mid-20th century Britain, where male homosexuality was illegal until the Sexual Offences Act 1967, to openly identify someone as homosexual was considered very offensive and an accusation of serious criminal activity. Additionally, none of the words describing any aspect of homosexuality were considered suitable for polite society. Consequently, a number of euphemisms were used to hint at suspected homosexuality. Examples include "sporty" girls and "artistic" boys,[26] all with the stress deliberately on the otherwise completely innocent adjective.

The 1960s marked the transition in the predominant meaning of the word gay from that of "carefree" to the current "homosexual". In the British comedy-drama film Light Up the Sky! (1960), directed by Lewis Gilbert, about the antics of a British Army searchlight squad during World War II, there is a scene in the mess hut where the character played by Benny Hill proposes an after-dinner toast. He begins, "I'd like to propose..." at which point a fellow diner interjects "Who to?", implying a proposal of marriage. The Benny Hill character responds, "Not to you for start, you ain't my type". He then adds in mock doubt, "Oh, I don't know, you're rather gay on the quiet."

By 1963, a new sense of the word gay was known well enough to be used by Albert Ellis in his book The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Man-Hunting. Similarly, Hubert Selby Jr. in his 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, could write that a character "took pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and esthetically superior to those (especially women) who weren't gay...."[27] Later examples of the original meaning of the word being used in popular culture include the theme song to the 1960–1966 animated TV series The Flintstones, wherein viewers are assured that they will "have a gay old time." Similarly, the 1966 Herman's Hermits song "No Milk Today", which became a Top 10 hit in the UK and a Top 40 hit in the U.S., included the lyric "No milk today, it was not always so; The company was gay, we'd turn night into day."[28]

In June 1967, the headline of the review of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album in the British daily newspaper The Times stated, "The Beatles revive hopes of progress in pop music with their gay new LP".[29] The same year, The Kinks recorded "David Watts", which is about a schoolmate of Ray Davies, but is named after a homosexual concert promoter they knew, with the ambiguous line "he is so gay and fancy-free" attesting to the word's double meaning at that time.[30] As late as 1970, the first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show has the demonstrably straight Mary Richards' neighbor Phyllis breezily declaiming that Mary is still "young and gay", but in an episode about two years later, Phyllis is told that her brother is "gay", which is immediately understood to mean that he is homosexual.

Homosexuality

Main article: Homosexuality

Sexual orientation

Gender symbols (4 colors).svg

Sexual orientations

AsexualBisexualHeterosexualHomosexual

Related terms

Androphilia and gynephiliaBi-curiousGray asexuality DemisexualityNon-heterosexualPansexualityQueerQueer heterosexuality

Research

Biological Birth orderEpigeneticNeuroscientificPrenatal hormonesDemographicsEnvironmentHuman female sexualityHuman male sexualityKinsey scaleKlein GridQueer studiesSexologyTimeline of sexual orientation and medicine

Animals

Animal sexual behaviorNon-reproductive sexual behavior in animalsHomosexual behavior in animals list