Did they or did they not... Here is an article defending men close relationships in the 19th century...
link:
https://www.theatlantic.com/nationa...-of-same-sex-love-in-the-19th-century/262117/
Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Sarah Orne Jewett all had passionate same-sex friendships. (Adapted from Wikimedia Commons images)
Snip Walt Whitman run for cover... Symonds write a gay manifesto later in life...
"In your conception of Comradeship," wrote British literary critic
John Addington Symonds, "do you contemplate the possible intrusion of those semi-sexual emotions and actions which no doubt do occur between men?"
Norton points to Whitman's 1860
"Calamus" poems as a sort of coming-out letter, filled with lines like these:
The one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast -- And that night I was happy.
After reading such passages, Symonds (
who later wrote about his own sexual experiences with men) must have been disappointed by Whitman's reply. "That the calamus part has even allow'd the possibility of such construction as mention'd is terrible," Whitman responded, insisting that Symonds was making "morbid inferences -- wh' are disavow'd by me & seem damnable."
Snip... The article goes into 19th friendship...
It's hard to imagine any modern poet writing about lying in another man's arms and then calling homosexuality "damnable." But the kind of same-sex intimacy Whitman described -- and enjoyed in real life -- was accepted at the time as a natural part of heterosexuality. When editors did censor Whitman's work, they left the "Calamus" poems intact and instead cut his descriptions of male-female passion. ("Love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching," Whitman wrote, describing a bride and groom on their wedding night. "Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice.")
Snip..
"Certainly, in his poetry, Whitman tries to be omnisexual," says David S. Reynolds, a CUNY graduate professor who specializes in 19th century American culture and has written several books on Whitman. "He even wants to exude a kind of sexuality toward the physical earth and the ocean." But it was more than that, as Reynolds explains. "Showing passion and affection was a more common part of the daily experience than it is today. America was a young nation, a new nation, and there was a sense of brotherhood."
Snip... brotherly love... hummm (not) ... note 1842 is Lincoln's big breakdown year... Speed leave him....
That brotherly love certainly existed between Abraham Lincoln and his friend Joshua Speed. The two men slept together in the same bed for four years, and Speed wrote to Lincoln in 1842, "You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting -- I will never cease, while I know how to do any thing."
Snip...
So what changed between the days of the Boston marriage and the era of Gertrude Stein? For one thing, there was Oscar Wilde's trial. In 1895, Wilde was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to two years in prison. Wilde did his best to defend same-sex love in the courtroom: "It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo." But the newspapers focused instead on the salacious details, including Wilde's rumored visits to male prostitutes. After that, poetry about men sleeping together in the moonlight was never quite the same.
I want to point out science had not given a good word to use to describe same sex relationships until like 1880's....