Between Friends  The photographic evidence is utterly
convincing: Men hugged, nuzzled, embraced, held hands, entwined
legs, sat in each other's laps, gazed into each other's eyes.
Men loved one another blissfully, unashamedly, and they weren't
afraid to go into a photographer's studio and document that
love. But even apparently straightforward photos make
notoriously slippery proof, and these pictures of "men together"
from photography's first seven decades (1840-1918) are
slipperier than most. Are these emblems of the homoerotic
longing smoldering behind the steely facade of modern
masculinity or merely souvenirs of a time before that facade
became so firmly fixed? Do they represent sexual desire or
sincere devotion?  To queer social historians, the very
existence of these antique images of affectionate men is
tantalizing, both because they survive in such profusion (often
in the hands of gay collectors) and because the exact nature of
the intimacies they depict is essentially unknowable. This
combination of