ABSTRACT
These tactics and vocabularies of evasion, along with the stringent legal sanctions available to punish male homosexuality (which had begun to be applied systematically after about 1780)" suggest a landscape of simple repression. Yet I want to suggest instead that this climate also provided, paradoxically, a series of opportunities for those who felt attracted by the possibilities of same-sex desire. In particular, it allowed such men to develop their own particular understandings of passionate friendship which licensed what would otherwise have been an impossible and 'morbid' intimacy? As an illustration, I want to take the example of a group of men who met regularly in Bolton at the end of the nineteenth century to discuss the poetry of Walt Whitman.8 Using the letters and diaries left by the Bolton Whitman fellowship, I want to show how a fascination with homosexual desire, understood and represented as ineffable, existed at certain moments in their lives and how they were both attracted and repelled by its fascination. In addition I suggest that passionate attachments between them could develop without their being rendered erotic (and therefore corrupt and unhealthy), through the substitution of inexpressible, spiritual communion tor 'unspeakable' physical possibilities.
