Visualizing Homoeroticism: The Photographs of Robert Gant, 1887-1892

Abstract

How did 19th-century men understand and represent their same-sex desires in a time and place where homosexuality was publicly unnamable? In partial answer to this question, this article focuses on two photograph albums assembled by Robert Gant in New Zealand during the 1880s. It explores the themes implicit in these albums, and suggests that men like Gant could piece together homoerotic subjectivities by creating and collating visual materials. Gant's pictures, like those of his overseas contemporaries, evoked multiple meanings and encouraged sexually unorthodox readings of masculinity, bodies, clothing and expressions. Early photography, then, provided a complex site within which an unnamable sexuality could take shape.