"Dear Friends" is the first book to demonstrate how common it was for 19th-century American men to commemorate intimate friendships with a visit to the local photographer; indeed, a look back today at these old portraits of anonymous men suggests how very affectionate those friendships could be.

Reproducing more than one hundred never-before-published vintage photographs dating from shortly after the introduction of photography in the United States to the end of World War 1, this groundbreaking book provides evidence of a kind of physical intimacy between men that challenges the conventional view of the Victorian era as more inhibited than our own.

David Deitcher's provocative text combines historical research, social observation, pictorial analysis, and personal refelection to explore the nature of same-sex affection between men during the period and the meaning of its ambiguous legacy for people today.

We now understand that the Victorians had a surprisingly broad-minded attitude toward intimate friendships; men and women were in many ways encouraged to establish intense, even passionate, bonds with members of their own sex. These ties could be romantic in ways that we would identify as sexual but that Victorians, in their state of pre-Freudian innocence, would not. A considerable range of same-sex relationships between men was acknowleged and sanctioned, effectively shielding forms of physical contact that gradually would be identified and stigmatized as perverse, if not criminal - thus setting the stage for the end of these fluid, romantic friendships and their photographic legacy.

Addressing the persistent ambiguity of those portraits from his perspective as a gay man, Deitcher reflects on the desire they elicit amoung individuals who know of their existence and care about their fate. The vast majority of the vernacular photographs ib this book are anonymous cultural cast-offs, having been dispersed following the deaths of the sitters to resurface at flea markets, photograph fairs, and modest antique shops.

Enthusiastic collectors - most of them gay - have resuced these enigmatic objects from oblivion. Dear Friends investigates the social conditions that made these photographs possible and examines both their abandonment and subsequent retrieval by those who cherish them as rare historical visual evidence of love between men.