Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

There is a critical concept that I'm a little obsessed with about love triangles in general.

So there's this queer theorist named Eve Kozowski Sedgwick, who was a really big deal in the 80s and 90s, did a lot of pioneering queer theory.

And she had this concept of the homosocial triangle.

And by this, she meant an intense bond between two men who have incredibly strong feelings for each other, such that if one of them was a girl, they'd already be a couple.

So in other words, let's take that concept and make it comprehensible.

In other words, when you notice a love triangle where two boys are lusting after the same girl, Jacob and Edward in the Twilight series, the Frankenstein creature and Victor, his creator, lusting after the cousin, Art and Patrick lusting after Zendaya and Challengers.

Eve Kozlowski-Sedgwick would say that actually the girl is just a container through which the boys navigate the relationship they have with each other.

So truly, the person the boys are lusting after is the other boy, not the girl.

He was also a PhD student at Berkeley when he passed away at 32, but he had never published any of his writing.

people had seen his writing, including, you know, the great Eve Sedgwick, who is one of the co-founders of queer theory.

And she knew what a brilliant writer he was.

And they had been talking about publishing before he passed away, but it just didn't happen.

She calls the 1872 letter a love letter, and she believes it clearly indicates Bram's homosexuality.

She refers to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on turn-of-the-century English male homosocial desire, in which references to Whitman functioned as badges of homosexual recognition, as Sedgwick puts it.

She points to Bram's repeated references to his secretiveness and openness in the letter as indicative of the difficulty with which Bram breaks his silence, but also the importance and the pleasure with which he does so as well, which is something that you both commented on as well.

She also finds it significant that Bram considers himself to belong to a kind in concluding his letter by thanking Whitman for all the love and sympathy you have given me in common with my kind.