| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck. By John W. M. Hallock. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. x, 226 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-229-16800-X. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-299-16804-2.)

This book examines, though for some it will not convincingly explain, a curious fact: despite his nineteenth-century eminence, Fitz-Greene Halleck is little remembered today. Not restrained by the fact that the very word "homosexual" was not in American usage (actually it had not even been coined) before Halleck died in 1867, John W. M. Hallock, a distant relative of his book's subject, considers Halleck "America's earliest homosexual poet." Arguing that the "homophobia" of Halleck's contemporary critics did him in, Hallock believes that his book recounts a "remarkably modern" struggle. 1

While Hallock rejects an essentialist label, to him homosexuality is largely biological and transhistorical; only reception and expression change. A constructionist's claim of no homosexuality (or homophobia) before the late nineteenth century, Hallock retorts, "would be a hard sell to those colonists executed for bedding other men." Hallock slights the fact that those colonists were, of course, punished for actions, not identities, as were others who had sex outside marriage. . . .

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