Wilson Collection: John Addington Symonds

(Print of John Addington Symonds, published 1895)

John Addington Symonds

For nineteen years John Addington Symonds unsuccessfully pressed Walt Whitman to give an explicit definition of “the dear love comrades.”[1]

The Englishman authored A Problem in Greek Ethics (published 1883), an important early defense of homosexuality.[2] In A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891) he urged homosexual law reform and used the phrase “homosexual instincts.”[3] It was the first English-language in-print use of the word “homosexual.”[4]

Symonds was an esteemed scholar of Renaissance Italy. He revealed that Michelangelo's grand-nephew feminized the pronouns in the painter's love poems. The censorship occurred because, according to the grand nephew's margin-note, the verses originally expressed “amor...virile” (masculine love).[5]

References 1. Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), 341, 351 2. Ibid., 343. 3. Vanessa Baird, The No-Nonsense Guide to Sexual Diversity (Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, Ltd. 2007), 26, accessed October 19, 2012, http://books.google.com/books?id=jJr8Yt54TeAC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=%22homosexual+instincts%22+problem+in+modern+ethics&source=bl&ots=gBENA8VsJE&sig=-PvV3zO3SX-8ae8lx1JKNXu-p6Y&hl=en&sa=X&ei=el7vT7muFuqS6wHgyqSfBg&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=instincts&f=false. 4. Ibid. 5. Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (Washington: Cassell, 1997), 143.