ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how dog love and same-sex love are indeed intertwined in various twentieth-century literary works from Michael Field to Rebecca Brown and from J. R. Ackerley to Dan Rhodes. Dog love, moreover, has the potential of continuing and furthering the work of queer studies that interrogates the binaries that arise from inflexible gender and sexual identity categories. One of the major repercussions of pet love is that it reorients companionship and kinship away from the normative strictures of heterosexual coupling and the traditional family. Despite the allegorisation of gay and lesbian lives, then, in all the texts the chapter discusses the envisaged canine-human alliances offer a radically open alternative to common social partnerings. In the turn-of-the-century poetry of the lesbian couple who wrote under the pseudonym of Michael Field, the intensity and purity of their love for their dog allegorises the innocence, even sacredness of their love for each other.
