ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how a pathologized and sexualized conception of imaginary companions within the late nineteenth century “Child Study” movement was countered by a prevalent and lasting counter-discourse on queer childhood undertaken within gay male writing from 1889 to 1918. In the work of John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde, Siegfried Sassoon, E. M. Forster, and H. N. Dickinson, we find imaginary friends functioning not as harbingers of a deviant future, but as salutary facilitators of queer maturation—a shadow tradition within gay writing, in which imaginary companions are pointedly and repeatedly constructed in counterpoint to homophobic conceptions of normal childhood development.
