Victorian men holding hands

A few months ago, at a central-Nebraska thrift store, I bought a number of extraordinary and beautiful tintypes, including several photographs of male couples holding hands. Their gestures are tender, their looks sincere, and the poignancy is only amplified by my own surprise at such open exchanges between nineteenth century men. Looking for an explanation, I ran across this essay by Richard Rodriguez.

Online NewsHour: Essay: Dear Friends - April 4, 2001: "RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Who are these men? Are they brothers, or as we say 'only friends,' or are they indeed lovers? They stare at us from the distance of the 19th century. Their hands are entwined, their eyes meet the camera's flash unblinking.

A most affecting and unsettling exhibition called 'Dear Friends' is on view this spring at the International Center of Photography in New York. Here are over 100 photographs of 19th century American men together. Few of these men do we know now by name. Most of these photographs were cast off by time, rescued by collectors from flea circuses and antique photo fairs.

At the simplest level, these tintypes and daguerreotypes sadly remind us how fragile friendship is, how time undoes the hand's clasp. But the sexual meaning of these images must trouble us, reminding us how much we do not understand about the human heart. As a homosexual man, especially in those years when my emotion was less easily described in public, I learned the habit of reading between the lines, deciphering glances or gestures' possible meaning. Sometimes I was right in my conclusions. Sometimes people told me I was being too literal. I dare anyone-- homosexual or heterosexual-- to tell me exactly what these photographs mean.

Armed with words like 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual,' and because we have read Freud, we moderns might see these 19th century men as possible victims of their innocence. But what of the opposite? Could the 19th century have been sexually more tolerant and easier, precisely because it was a century that hadn't read Freud and did not have an easy grammar to distinguish homosexuality from heterosexuality? Even if we are looking at blood brothers here, it would be rare today to find brothers so physically demonstrative.

In 19th century America, men lived and worked in a more sexually segregated country than our own. We know, too, that the industrial age separated the family from places of work. But these men who found themselves often without the company of women, what did they understand about their feelings for one another? These two, innocent of our leering: They went to the trouble and endured the formality of going to a photographer's studio. Without flinching, they held this pose. Below one photograph of two miners from Patterson, New Jersey, is the note of self- consciousness: 'Best regards to all the folks, but don't show this to anyone.'

Other photographs seem parodies of Victorian domesticity, expressive of what we would call today 'camp.' More striking are group shots-- cowboys dancing with one another with no hint of embarrassment. Or how there can be playful exceptions to a group's formality, and how no one seems to take any notice or offense.

When photography was invented in the 1840s, the naive assumption was that the camera was a scientific tool. What we moderns know better is that photography is as ambiguous as it is telling. But what we moderns naively assume is that love is an emotion that can be scientifically mapped. What the 19th century knew better than we is that the human heart is often shadowed by ambiguity. We moderns cannot stand ambiguity where sex and love are involved.

Beginning with the First World War, our government excluded homosexuals from the armed forces. Such a prohibition would have been impossible 50 years earlier during the American Civil War. These soldiers from 19th century America's terrible war, black and white, they are more tender with one another in front of a camera than later generations of American warriors could dare be. In truth, and whatever the era, conflict, hatred, and human violence is always easier for humans to understand than love.

Scenes of battlefield carnage horrify us, but do not puzzle us. When we see the opposite-- men holding hands or men with their arms around one another or men sitting on one another's lap-- we, especially we moderns who think we know all about love, do not know what to think. I'm Richard Rodriguez."