'It's, on the whole, I think,' Henry James wrote to Edmund Gosse, 'a queer place to plant the standard of duty.' The letter is dated 7 January 1893, 29 years before the OED's earliest instance of queer used in relation to homosexuality, and it's clear that James wants the word's older meaning: 'strange, out of the ordinary'. But it's also clear that something else is going on. James is discussing what he calls the 'marvellous outpourings' of John Addington Symonds - two years later, thinking of Symonds in connection with the trial of Oscar Wilde, James calls them 'fond outpourings' - which constitute a privately printed pamphlet on love between men. 'The exhibition is infinitely remarkable,' James says. 'It's a queer place to plant the standard of duty, but he does it with extraordinary gallantry. If he has, or gathers, a band of the emulous, we may look for some capital sport.' James goes on to wish Symonds had more humour - 'it really is the saving salt' - but acknowledges, with a little humour of his own, that 'the great reformers never have it.'

LRB 18 March 2004 | PDF Download