Madman in the Closet: "Homosexual Panic" in Nineteenth Century New England

This analysis uses trial records from the 1860s to explore a same-sex male relationship that devolved into panic and murder. The paper's goal is to better understand how, during the middle of the nineteenth century, men who had sexual feeling for other men were forced into spaces that were qualitatively different than our current understanding of "the closet." The paper concludes that what we now call "coming out" was not an option during this era. In telling the story of how Samuel Andrews killed his best friend, Cornelius Holmes, this paper shows that the categories ordinarily presented as symmetrical binary oppositions in contemporary times-homo/heterosexual, closeted/out-did not work for Andrews and Holmes, and probably did not and could not have worked for others living under similar conditions.