ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship has emphasized homosexualities rather than simply the term homosexual. It is startling to note that, although coming from a very specific point of view, one of the pioneering studies by an American, Greek Love, anticipated this by at least thirty years. Walter Henry Breen (also known under his pseudonym J. Z. Eglinton) was the most important theorist of man-boy love to appear since the German figures (Benedict Friedlaender, Hans Blüher, the Der Eigene circle, Gustav Wyneken, and John Henry Mackay) in the first third of the twentieth century. Although retrograde (at least as compared with Mackay) in explicitly looking back to a Greek model, Breen independently affirmed, as they had, the distinction between what he termed “Greek love” (pederasty, or intergenerational homosexual relationships) and “androphile homosexuality” (eroticism between adult males). Although he himself argued that androphile homosexuality had usurped the “true” tradition of homosexuality which belonged to Greek love, viewed in a critical perspective this renewed insight opened the way in the United States for an understanding of homosexual behavior as a protean rather than a unitary phenomenon. In addition, he applied critical and historical research skills he had honed in his other areas of expertise to the exploration of the whole span of nearly 3,000 years of the recorded history of homosexuality. In an era—the 1950s and 1960s—when most writers favorable to homosexual behavior were either celebratory (Garde/Leoni) or wrote from a descriptive, sociological perspective (Stearn, Cory/Sagarin), Breen made a notable academic contribution to uncovering the history of homosexuality, and in the short-lived scholarly journal he conducted, encouraged others to do so too.
