"History at its best: informative, insightful, at times downright titillating."-Kirkus Reviews

In Love Stories, Jonathan Ned Katz presents stories of men's intimacies with men during the nineteenth century-men like Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman-drawing flesh-and-blood portraits of intimate friendships and the ways in which men struggled to name, define, and defend their sexual feelings for one another. In a world before "gay" and "straight" referred to sexuality, these men created new ways to name and conceive of their relationships, and Katz dives into history to offer us a clearer picture than ever before of how they navigated the uncharted territory of male-male desire.