![]() He writes poetry and literary criticism and has a special interest in homoromanticism in ancient Greece. John Addington is a respected member of London’s intellectual class. What results is an imagining of the events that led to Symonds and Ellis’s scholarship, grounded in what is known of the social and political climate of the time. ![]() Crewe doesn’t seek to state all the facts about the authors’ lives and motivations, but in crafting his historical fiction, he drew heavily from the men’s biographies and changed their names just slightly. The year was 1897, and while the book faced skepticism and scandal at the time, it planted the seeds for a movement to depathologize and decriminalize gay sex. ![]() Many decades before Alfred Kinsey brought attention to the natural range of human sexuality, and eighty years prior to the psychiatric community decategorizing homosexuality as a mental disorder, two British academics John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis published a medical textbook, Sexual Inversion, that presented homosexual men as well-adjusted, healthy, and unjustly persecuted individuals. The subject of Tom Crewe’s début novel will likely be obscure to many readers, beyond those, like myself, who are gay history geeks. ![]()
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