Printing a Queer Identity

Abstract

In 1902, the social reformer and early queer rights activist Edward Carpenter published Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship, a compendium of literature that collected works from across history and cultures. Each entry was selected because of its contributions to understanding “homogenic love”—Carpenter’s term that he had earlier described as “that intense, that penetrating, and at times overmastering” attachment between two persons of the same sex. Carpenter collected these printed traces to confirm the legitimacy of same-sex desire and affection. Together these affirmative discourses formed the rhetorical foundation of his campaign to first promote the rights of those with same-sex desires, and later of what he termed the “Intermediate Sex,” a transitional type of person derived from sexological studies of transgender people. Drawing on original archival research about the work including an examination of Carpenter’s notebook, as well as correspondence between Carpenter and his publishers, this chapter describes the unique contributions of this long-neglected work to the rhetoric of a nascent queer identity. This chapter situates the work among contemporaneous homosexual emancipation efforts to stress the role print and discourse played in shaping the construction of knowledge about same-sex desires and gender nonconforming identities for Carpenter and his contemporaries. It further draws on queer historical studies, including Halberstam’s queer theory of “perverse presentism,” to claim that this work belongs to a broader Anglo-American tradition of queer discourses about sexuality that afforded the rhetorical construction of both a queer identity and critical advocacy around queer rights in the early twentieth century.