Title page from Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania, 1870 edition

Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania (1870) has been called “America’s first gay novel.”[1] In the book, during a train ride Joseph Asten's eyes settle on a stranger, passenger Philip Held. Feeling his stare, Philip looks back. The narrative states that “[t]he usual reply to such a gaze is an unconscious defiance . . . but the look which seems to answer, 'We are men, let us know each other!' is, alas! too rare in this world.”[2]

In time, yielding to “manly love . . . as tender and true as the love of woman,” they kiss.[3] Yet, Joseph finds a potential bride, leaving Philip “vicariously happy, warmed in [his] lonely sphere by the far radiation of [Joseph's] nuptial bliss.”[4]

Sources

1. Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1998), 70, http://books.google.com/books?id=iWHu1rDFMcIC&q=gay+novel#v=snippet&q=gay%20novel&f=false.

2. Bayard Taylor, Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1870), 91.

3. Taylor, 217

4. Taylor, 361.