Wilson Collection: John Addington Symonds

(Frontis portrait of John Addington Symonds from volume one (of a two volume set) of John Addington Symonds: A Biography: Compiled from His Papers and Correspondence by Horatio F. Brown; London: John C. Nimmo, 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.