This is the first book to provide an account of how emotional and sexual relationships between men have been depicted in English literature from the Renaissance to the modern period. Paul Hammond reveals the literary resources which writers used to express love between men in the face of legal and social constraints, exploring their strategies for contemplating male beauty, and even the significant silences through which forbidden desires were implied.

He devotes considerable attention to major writers such as Marlowe and Shakespeare, Tennyson and Wilde, Forster and Lawrence, and highlights the homoerotic element in the poetry of Wilfred Owen: but he also introduces less familiar texts which cast light on the homosexual culture of their periods.

Based on detailed research but lucidly presented, this book is designed for students of literature and for anyone who wishes to explore an imaginative and diverse literary tradition which has often been misrepresented or suppressed.