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Rating: 
Summary: Harvard History
Review: A wonderful, readable history. Author Shand-Tucci combines scholarship with a breezy style, and an amusing array of anecdotes to highlight his thesis. Amidst better-known alums appear some fascinating figures, like Fred Loring ("Two College Friends") and Shirley Everton Johnson ("The Cult of the Purple Rose"), who show us that even if there weren't any gay alliances back in the school's busy 19th century, the Harvard boys found a way.
Rating: 
Summary: Musty Closets
Review: As a uncloseted Harvard graduate, I found this book entertaining in a gossipy, derivative, speculative fashion. Certainly, the author is well-read and writes with the flair of a genuine Harvard aesthete, who is also capable of getting down with William Burroughs.If a Harvard man was a bachelor, and had a couple of verifiably "gay" friends, Mr. Shand-Tucci speculates that he was gay as well. Maybe yes, maybe no, but the proof is not in the pudding. Speculation makes for great gossip but unreliable history. Of
course, since many of the men discussed were closeted, we have no idea whether they had sex with other men. A good example is
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had a college crush on another student,
but, to our knowledge, never had physical relations with a man.
Of course, as Melville and Abraham Lincoln attest, bachelors often slept together in the 19th Century as a matter of course. To be fair, Mr. Shandi-Tucci admits that he is not writing history or bound by facts. He makes no attempt to be objective. The focus is also wide-ranging and by no means limited to Harvard. The two leading figures, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde,
only visited Harvard. The book is also very repetitive as figures appear and re-appear with the same details as before. Most of the material is, moreover, based on secondary sources,
such as biographies of such figures at Newton Arvin, Truman Capote's lover and a professor at Smith, not Harvard. The author, who has written a tour guide to Harvard, rambles around the Yard, Boston, New York, Provincetown, and various other places discussing personalities who had only the remotest connection with Fair Harvard. Indeed, the book reads like a cruizing guide to Harvard-connected bachelors, including professors, poets, musicians, athletes and millionaires. A perennial question is: what does this story or person have to do with Harvard? Certainly, the book is not a history of gay relationshps at Harvard, or how they changed over the generations. Much of the material on Boston bohemia sounds like it is recycled from the author's other writings. Many of the figures, however, are fascinating, such as Frank O'Hara, Leonard Bernstein, and F.O. Mathiessen. In fact, the truth about male-to-male relationships at Harvard
in the past is clearly lost in the musty closets of Harvard Yard. Mr. Shand-Tucci writes well, and maybe this is the best we will
ever get on a topic whose subjects, before Stonewall, with few exceptions, dared not speak its name.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Nuggets to be Found
Review: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture is, perhaps, an unfortunate sub-title for the otherwise interesting The Crimson Letter by Douglas Shand-Tucci as it does not quite live up to this rather grandiose idea of shaping american culture. The book, though, is still a fascinating stroll through the past hundred years of Harvard history. It starts a little slowly with the author setting up two archetypes but gathers steam as the twentienth century takes flight. The author does wander around the topic at times as the personality presented connections to Harvard are stretched or evidence of his homosexuality is tenuously produced but he keeps the narrative flowing in and among the varied characters populating this history. A rewarding read for the anyone who sticks with it.
Rating:
Summary: A splendid concordance
Review: Historian Shand-Tucci goes the distance with a deeply fascinating account of gay men studying and falling in love at Harvard University over the past 130 years. Page after page will surprise even those readers familiar with the men he's put under the microscope, and there are, as well, a number of character studies which show that Shand-Tucci has at least the gifts of a novelist. The torments of the closet make up the first half of the book, and the defiance of coming out gives piquancy and solidarity to the second half. Shand-Tucci seems to have thought hard about the cultural significance of many characters dismissed as minor elsewhere, and this is probably the first book to think of the achievements of Rene Ricard and Steve Jonas as being on a par with those of Philip Johnson and Lincokn Kirstein; but then again he's imaginative and in history, sometimes, that's a plus. I don't know he felt it necessary to add a dash of spite to his portrait of contemporary activist Charley Shively, this last touch kind of spoils the flavor of an otherwise terrific book for me.
Rating:
Summary: A splendid concordance
Review: Historian Shand-Tucci goes the distance with a deeply fascinating account of gay men studying and falling in love at Harvard University over the past 130 years. Page after page will surprise even those readers familiar with the men he's put under the microscope, and there are, as well, a number of character studies which show that Shand-Tucci has at least the gifts of a novelist. The torments of the closet make up the first half of the book, and the defiance of coming out gives piquancy and solidarity to the second half. Shand-Tucci seems to have thought hard about the cultural significance of many characters dismissed as minor elsewhere, and this is probably the first book to think of the achievements of Rene Ricard and Steve Jonas as being on a par with those of Philip Johnson and Lincokn Kirstein; but then again he's imaginative and in history, sometimes, that's a plus. I don't know he felt it necessary to add a dash of spite to his portrait of contemporary activist Charley Shively, this last touch kind of spoils the flavor of an otherwise terrific book for me.
Rating: 
Summary: ludicrous male self-reflection
Review: It never ceases to amaze me how males generalize male issues. Are there any woman who has ever written a book on homosexuality the implications of which solely refers to women? Male vanity is beyond ridiculous. This little masculinist book is interesting however, not from the intended male, but human standpoint. American society, notoriously women-hating and male-dominated, has been deeply influenced and shaped by males who have sex with men and prefer male homosexual and homosocial - i.e women-free - environments. Anyone surprised?
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