Queer Street

Physical displays of affection between opponents are most intense in the most violent sports, such as American football and boxing. Queer Street: The Curious Connections Between Boxing and the Homoerotic is a history of the combat sport we now call boxing, focussing on the double-helix like interconnection between government restrictions on male-male violence and homoerotic relations. By examining the development of these two impulses from ancient times to the present and across cultures from the Pacific Islands to England, we see that they are both part of man's nature, and may in fact be closely linked. The love-hate triangle among Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas and his father, the Marquess of Queensberry, serves as a fulcrum on which the violent terms of engagement between boxers that preceded the Queensberry Rules--and prosecution of gays merely for "gross indecency"--are compared to the world that came after them. Love and death are the two great themes of world literature; that they may flow from the same spring within the male psyche is the question Queer Street seeks to answer.