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Brickell, C. (2012). Manly affections: The photographs of Robert Gant, 1885-1915. Dunedin: Genre Books. ISBN 0473208784.
Since the 1960s a whole school of historians have been working to uncover the lives of ordinary women and men. Social historians have as their Holy Grail knowing how people really lived. In their quest they have uncovered letters and diaries and news reports, conducted life history interviews, and examined the paraphernalia of everyday life from the recent and more distant past. It has been hard but exhilarating work, made all the more enjoyable by its very difficulty; every small discovery has been a great step forward.
For gay and lesbian history the discoveries have been less voluminous than for other lives. People who were marginalised, vilified - in the case of men, criminalised - were not inclined to preserve material that might land them in trouble with the powers that be. Their families were not inclined to pass down their stories, even if they were privy to them. Nonetheless, it is not as if there was nothing to find, and in the past forty years or so historians have trawled court records and newspapers, have talked to gay people and their friends, and have started to reveal a richer history than many had expected to find.
In New Zealand, historian Chris Brickell has made a remarkable discovery, and in Manly Affections he mines it to reveal the life of one gay man and his friends; and to throw light on the world in which they lived. The man is Robert Gant, a photographer, and Brickell has unearthed two photo albums containing 465 photographs. They date from the late 1880s and...