Take the Young Stranger by the Hand: Same-Sex Relations and the YMCA

The early history of a peculiarly American institution--the YMCA--here serves as a paradigm of late 19th- and early 20th-century American culture at large, at least as far as sexuality and Protestantism are concerned. Scholar Gustav-Wrathhall's history of the pre-WWII Y confirms what Jonathan Dollimore and others have demonstrated--that the homosocial and homosexual are unstable categories that are constantly being redefined and are inextricable from definitions of the heterosexual. From the beginning, the author reports, passion and piety at the Y were closely linked. Passion came in the form of intense male friendships that may or may not have included an erotic component; piety was expressed in Christian brotherhood. Soon, he contends, such close relations became suspect, and the Y hierarchy attempted to develop new, less intimate models for masculine relations and for masculine identity itself, which, he contends, ironically fostered the image (and documented the reality) of the Y as an easily accessible site for male-to-male sexual ""cruising."" Originally written as a doctoral dissertation, the book retains some of its Ph.D.-like feel but is thankfully free of the academic terminology that mars so much work in the field of gender and sexuality. (Nov.)